I considered some eye-catching modern headlines for this one.
Popcorn: you’re making it wrong. This is a classic formulation that produces both anger and curiosity. It’s confrontational and contemptuous, but you think hey, once I learn the secret, I can smirk at other people who don’t know the true way.
We talked to popcorn experts. Here’s why they say you should smear butter on your chest. This style has become the norm, and appeals to people who regard themselves as the sort of people who respect the experts. They trust the popcorn science.
The FDA has banned this poison from popcorn: here’s what we know. Then you discover there’s some 1964 rule that forbids using DDT on corn.
Gut doctor begs: stop doing this with popcorn (Picture of a doctor pointing at a cadaver with its chest blown out from the inside)
Sorry. The closest I can come is this:
If you stop eating popcorn on a regular basis, an unexpected thing happens: it becomes unappetizing. It ceases to be something you consider as “food”. It’s stuff you’d put in a box of plates to keep them from chipping.
But, you say, I make absolutely delightful popcorn with butter and salt! I don’t doubt it. Everything is better with butter and salt. You could say that popcorn is just a delivery mechanism for butter and salt. Golden, rich butter, seeping into the tiny caverns of the detonated kernel, salt falling like snow on Christmas Eve –
Hold on, be right back; I really want some popcorn now.
James Lileks, “Experts say these are the most overrated headlines; number 4 is scary”, LILEKS (James), 2026-07-06.
October 8, 2026
October 5, 2026
“The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a post about the need for middle class couples to budget excessive amounts of money before starting a family:
It’s not about the money.
Money has an effect, yes, but it’s a part of something bigger.
Women are genetically programmed to mate up. Not down. And not even across. Up. If she doesn’t regard a man as superior to her, she generally doesn’t want to have his babies.
What this means is that there is an extremely simple control dial on fertility.
More male power and status = more babies.
More female power and status = less babies.Yes, it really is that simple.
Why? Because every species has a mating ritual, and can only breed if they can carry it out. That’s why you can breed rats and chickens in cages, but not pandas. Different mating ritual.
And a critical element of the human mating ritual is “male impresses female”.
Not charms. Not bribes. Definitely not respects.
Impresses.
So, if you take power, wealth, and status away from men, and give it to women, you are just plain reaching for the controls and turning down the fertility dial.
If you let men keep power, wealth and status — you don’t have to give it to them because they’re the ones who create it — fertility goes up.
The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis.
This idea might horrify you. You might have been taught all your life that everyone is equal, or must be, and anything else is unfair.
Well, have you looked around you at universe? Unfairness is baked into the life cycle of every living organism, not mention the food chain. Evolutionary processes don’t care about fairness. They care what works.
Perhaps someday, we will be able to code DNA as easily as we code C++, and can decide what we want our instincts to be. But until that day, we are faced with a choice.
1. Stop using the political, legal, and mass media processes to force female equality, if not outright female supremacy, on the first world.
Or
2. Die out and be replaced by third world retards, who will stay on this planet fighting wars with increasingly rusty AK47s and then spears, until the next asteroid comes along.
October 4, 2026
Mark Carney’s … complicated … relationship with America
On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan wonders what is going on in Mark Carney’s world whenever the United States comes up. At times, you would assume he hates the US, yet the vast majority of his personal wealth is invested there. His family members live there. It’s a paradox:
AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
I’m starting to think Mark Carney has a passionate, personal hatred of America.
And I don’t mean Donald Trump. Plenty of people hate Donald Trump. I mean America itself, or at least the enormous role America has played in Canada’s economy for generations. Because the longer I listen to Carney talk about where he wants Canada to go, the more I wonder whether Trump caused this economic divorce at all … or whether he was simply the spectacular act of infidelity Carney needed to finally file the papers.
Maybe hate is too strong. Maybe geopolitical jealousy has stages too: irritation, resentment, righteous indignation and finally whatever stage comes after, “I’d love to go out sometime, but unfortunately I’ll be washing my hair indefinitely”. Whatever stage Carney has reached, I’m increasingly convinced this is about considerably more than Donald Trump.
Because we can document Carney publicly talking about a changing world order more than fifteen years ago. How long he had been developing those ideas before putting them into speeches, I have no idea. We don’t need to invent an origin story. The public record is interesting enough.
I can’t prove Carney hates America. Maybe he loves it. Maybe there’s a Louisville Slugger sticking out of a Davos swag bag somewhere between six conference lanyards, a King Charles commemorative tea towel and a couple of those luxury Normandy butter cups that apparently require their own travel arrangements. But if Mark Carney loves America, somebody should probably tell America the relationship is still on.
He certainly never seemed troubled by American money. His disclosed investments included hundreds of companies, many of them American. And I don’t begrudge him that. If American companies offered a good return, invest away. What makes it interesting is that while his money was quite comfortable in America, Carney had already spent years publicly describing a world becoming considerably less centred on American economic power. Donald Trump didn’t inspire that. He came crashing through the front door years later, apparently oblivious to the fact that Carney had already furnished the room.
Canadians have since been handed a wonderfully tidy explanation for everything happening now. Trump returned. Trump threatened tariffs. Trump called Canada the 51st state. Trump made governor jokes. CBC, our publicly funded national broadcaster, and a Canadian media industry operating alongside various government support programs amplified every provocation until everybody knew exactly which Trumpism could send Canada through the ceiling.
He said “51st state”. Canada erupted, so he said it again. Trump noticed. The media noticed. And I have a very hard time believing Liberal strategists somehow failed to notice the political value of an issue resonating that powerfully with Canadians.
But heaven forbid an opposition MP or ordinary Canadian asks to see where our money went. Suddenly negotiations, contracts and records disappear behind confidentiality, redactions and “national security”. Apparently telling Canadians what our own government is doing requires security clearance, but advertising precisely which Trump taunts are working required something closer to a neon sign: YES, DONALD. RIGHT THERE. THAT BUTTON!
Why not circle the red button, write DO NOT PRESS across it and explain exactly what happens when he does? Because if humanity has established anything about a big red button labelled DO NOT PRESS, it’s that nobody has ever wanted to press that bastard more.
October 3, 2026
Altered Carbon: Immortality Breaks Humans
Feral Historian
Published 29 May 2026Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon builds on a simple premise, what if everyone’s consciousness was digitally transferable, regardless of class or wealth. The world he depicts has an undercurrent of dread permeating everything and hints at some even more terrifying possibilities.
00:00 Intro
03:10 Not Human Anymore
06:25 Social Disconnect
11:07 Make it Personal
15:15 The Netflix Adaptation
(more…)
October 2, 2026
Generational incomprehension
On Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes expresses the frustration a lot of Gen X/Generation Jones folks have felt in their dealings with Millennial and Gen Z co-workers, supervisors, and managers:
Experience tells me that I need to add an eye-catching graphic to every non-video post, but finding appropriate images is sometimes difficult. I hope GenX Anecdotes won’t mind me using yet another meme instead of something more sober and appropriate to her point.
One of the things people tell you when you are young about getting old is how quickly it sneaks up on you.
What they don’t tell you, is that it’s not linear or obvious. It’s not like you have a specific moment where you think “OK. NOW I am middle aged”. It doesn’t work like that. You remain “you”.
You might change your outlook over time. You might get wiser (hopefully) and more content with who you are. You might have more serious responsibilities. More experiences and memories to draw upon. But you’re still YOU.
For me, I don’t really feel like I’m that much “older” going about my day-to-day business doing my thing. I actually still feel quite young in myself in many ways.
It’s how the world greets you that’s different. And that’s when little things will remind you. It gives you a kind of shocking “jolt”.
Being around younger people is what really brings it home. And I don’t mean kids or young teens. I mean young adults. Or even adults in their 30s who tell you they feel “old”.
I am in my mid 50s.
When someone in their late 20s or 30s tells me what year they were born it blows my mind.
When they were born in a year that I clearly remember, feels like last month to me, and when I was well into adulthood, that’s when it really hits home.
Also, it’s how younger people view you and act around you.
In my last job, most people were in their 20s and 30s.
I won’t lie. Some of them treated me like garbage. Like I didn’t exist.
I was a bit of a “cute” novelty to them. Like “aaawww bless her”.
I had the misfortune of being “trained” in one of my part-time jobs I had when my daughter was in junior school, by a 20 something. The job was a local convenient place holder during school hours.
What she was showing me was very “basic” and tedious. But if I questioned anything about it like “why can’t we just do this instead? Surely that would make more sense?”
She looked at me, not like someone who had 30 plus years experience working in different industries who might have a point. But someone “old” and passed it, who didn’t understand.
Like a silly backwards old woman who had no idea.
The amount of times I would say “Yeah. I DO get it. I am just wondering why it’s done this way? It seems a bit impractical?”
She looked at me blankly. Like I was asking her why water is wet …
I learned to just shut up and do the bloody tedious thing in the convoluted, dumb way. Because … because … that’s how it’s done.
Then I knew all those 20/30 year olds just saw me as an annoying old relic who “didn’t understand” how things worked.
I was there about a year before moving house.
I couldn’t wait to leave.
One of the HR women hauled me in at one point to give me an “appraisal”. There I was with a 20 something asking me if I was “happy at work” and going through other annoying questions on her ipad.
She obviously was irritated that I wasn’t taking the whole fake charade “seriously” enough. She wanted me to give her bullshit standard answers that she could tick a box to.
But I kept saying things that weren’t “tick box” worthy.
And that just signified further to her that “I didn’t understand” what was going on.
Oh I understood.
I just didn’t want to play along.
And just to emphasise how insane this whole scenario felt.
She still lived with her Mum and Dad and had soft toys on her desk.
That’s what getting “old” feels like.
September 28, 2026
“… if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison discusses the need for ceremonies or rites to signify the end of childhood and the entry into adult life … things that have almost completely disappeared in western culture over the last few decades:
I think modern society made a mistake when it assumed that getting rid of sacred rites would make people purely rational.
It didn’t.
Human beings still need thresholds, tests, stories, symbols and some clear sense that childhood has ended and adulthood has begun. We may no longer send young people into the wilderness for an initiation ordeal, but the psychological need to prove yourself, belong somewhere and become someone has not disappeared.
Traditional initiation rites were often harsh, sometimes brutally so, but they carried a clear message: your childhood identity is finished. You are now expected to accept duty, restraint, courage and responsibility.
Modern society is much less clear about that transition.
You can become legally adult at 18 while remaining psychologically dependent for years. There is often no agreed moment when society says: you are responsible now. Stop waiting to be rescued. Carry your own weight. Become useful to other people.
The danger is that the need for initiation does not disappear just because formal rituals disappear.
Young people invent substitutes.
Sometimes that becomes fraternity hazing, gangs, reckless behaviour, extreme risk-taking or ideological movements that offer belonging, enemies, heroes, rituals and moral certainty. Popular culture does something similar in a safer form. Star Wars, superhero stories, horror films and countless other myths repeat the ancient pattern: leave safety, enter chaos, face the monster, sacrifice something, return changed.
We keep telling these stories because they describe something real about human development.
The part I find most useful is that modern adulthood probably has to become more voluntary.
Nobody is going to drag most of us through a ceremonial rite and announce that childhood is over.
We have to do it ourselves.
Take responsibility before you feel completely ready. Accept obligations. Learn to tolerate discomfort. Become financially and emotionally useful. Care for somebody besides yourself. Face failure without retreating into nihilism. Test your beliefs against reality. Give up childish expectations that life should always be fair, comfortable or safe.
That is initiation stripped of superstition.
You enter difficulty voluntarily and come out carrying more responsibility than you carried before.
A mature society should probably find better ways of teaching that lesson, because if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own.
And some of those substitutes will be far worse than the rituals we thought we had outgrown.
September 27, 2026
Gynogerontocracy in the Anglosphere
As the working world in the Anglosphere becomes ever more feminized and gynocentric, as companies disproportionally hire women over men, the working dynamics of most jobs has also shifted dramatically:
There’s many things to be exhausted about as a millennial or zoomer man, and I find that one of them really is gynogerontocracy. Everywhere you go, a profoundly alienating woman, often an older woman, is in charge, where she probably either shouldn’t be, or would be better executing tasks and responsibilities for a male executive.
In the private sphere, the corporate jobs go to girlbosses, whose neuroticism is channeled into unrealistic and dysfunctional adherence to rules, policies and procedures. There is no trust or discretion to do your own job, at the same time as management they don’t want you to ask them about anything. Every minor policy breach turns into an email, turns a passive aggressive “documented conversation” and “coaching”, as they talk down to you as a mother scolds their children.
When I think about my professional life, the only times I was ever promoted for my hard work and efforts, was under White or Asian male leadership, and that’s because they by and large are the only people who value demonstrable merit and ability. Women don’t. They value policies and procedures, they value inclusivity, and they become petty little tyrants when they’re in charge. The only female manager I’ve ever had who wasn’t like that was a 24 year old zoomer who played with a Needough in her office and posted weird alien cat gifs in the corporate chat app. She was fine, and understood my lack of enthusiasm. The rest of them act like they’re running the navy when the consensus is now that this is functionally adult female daycare.
As a generational experience and trait, I find that men and boys are collectively exhausted and resent women being in charge for what has been their entire living experience. I find myself asking how much longer this can go on.
September 26, 2026
Social media seems to be antithetical to the ability to concentrate
I took over doing the cooking in our household a couple of years ago, so I’ve been paying more attention to cooking channels on YouTube and recipe-oriented blogs than I did before. Substack‘s algorithm suggested that I might enjoy reading this post by Romilla Arber, making the case that “Mirepoix is the antithesis of Instagram, as it values what cannot be seen in the final result over what is superficial and false”:
Photo from Stirring Thoughts
This article is about mirepoix, soffritto, social media, and the secret to a happy life. A lot to cover, but as I often say, everything is interconnected.
I dislike social media, in particular Instagram. I left X many months ago, as did my business. We use Facebook for local connection and, obviously, Substack, which currently I view differently. Instagram is ridiculous. It is a waste of time to be on it, and it is populated with so many lies and misrepresentations that it is difficult to work out what is fact and what is not.
I recently read a Substack article called “Meet All The Middle Aged Women Who Don’t Exist” by Robin Levine Shobin. It exposes the accounts on Instagram supposedly belonging to women in their fifties and sixties who look fabulous but who actually do not exist: an army of AI wellness women, manufactured to make women like me feel we need what they have.
The other tranche of accounts I have noticed multiplying on Instagram, like a terrifying science-fiction virus, are those owned by “successful” entrepreneurs. Most of these are fake, and are being used to sell overpriced masterclasses and mentorships to people who lack confidence and need money. The more our brains see of the same thing, the more likely we are to believe it. This used to be called brainwashing. There is probably another techie term for it now.
These accounts don’t surprise me. But they represent one of the reasons why Instagram is a monumental waste of time.
This feeling was further compounded today when I spent a few minutes watching a video made by someone, the central thesis of which was to make the most of the precious time we have on this planet, and to value those simple experiences that we take for granted at the time. The whole premise of Instagram is to make us envious of others, the way they look and the lives they have, and by consequence not to value the lives we live. It involves endlessly scrolling through videos and images, wasting precious time.
I have also noticed that if I spend time scrolling through short-form content, I find it harder to concentrate on something that requires longer attention, like reading a book. Sad, but true. I am now retraining my brain to concentrate on reading uninterrupted for longer periods. I was surprised at how tough this would be.
This sorry state of affairs brings me to soffritto and mirepoix: the same thing really, the former being Italian and the latter French. Both are the art of chopping aromatic vegetables finely and frying them slowly, in olive oil if you are Italian and butter if you are French. These aromatic vegetables are usually onion, celery and carrot, and the ratio varies country to country. The magic is in the simplicity. They are the flavour foundation for many stocks, sauces, soups and stews all over the world. Other countries may substitute white onion for spring onion, or carrot for peppers, but the point of the process remains the same: to create beauty through time and effort.
Mirepoix is the antithesis of Instagram, as it values what cannot be seen in the final result over what is superficial and false. The preparation of the vegetables takes care and time, and it is the investment in this preparation, the foundational substance, that creates the beauty and taste of the final dish. Instagram is about superficiality. What is not obvious is worthless.
Given how late I started doing serious cooking, I doubt that I even knew what mirepoix was two years ago … but I’ve pretty much always thought of Instagram as a total waste of time among all the various social media sites people use.
Devon Eriksen stakes out the anti-Feminist position
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, science fiction author Devon Eriksen discusses the “worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman”:
The worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman is to convince her she’s as good as any man.
This torture is lifelong, unendurable, and once you set up the initial conditions, the pain becomes self-inflicted.
You see, women are genetically programmed for two things. First, to raise children. Second, to select a man who is superior to her to bear those children for.
Not equal.
Certainly not lesser.
Superior.
There is no point in arguing about this. It is obviously true to anyone who looks around himself without blinders made of wishful thinking.
There is no point in becoming angry at me or anyone else about this. It is true whether I wish it to be or not, and whether you wish it to be or not.
There is no point in trying to talk women out of this. It is not a part of their culture or education. It is not an individual character flaw in them. It is part of their genetic recipe.
Therefore, if you convince a woman she is equal to most men, she will only be willing to bear children to a small percentage of exceptional men.
If you convince her that she is the equal of any man, she will be unwilling to start a family with anyone.
And she will remain genetically programmed to do so.
When I was a child, and again when I was a young man, in high school and college, I noticed that the older adults who staffed the education system seemed to think “girls’ self-esteem” was our most precious resource, perhaps because it’s good for stable nuclear fusion containment, or as a growth medium for cancer-curing fruit trees.
Well, I sure hope they’re making good progress on that nuclear fusion thing, because it sure is hard on the women they grow up into.
Perhaps they thought having a high self-esteem is the same as feeling good.
Perhaps they thought half of humanity’s potential Newtons, Einsteins, and Da Vincis were hidden among the ranks of the fair sex, waiting to be unlocked by “Project Self Esteem”, and no, I did not make that name up.
Perhaps they were retarded.
They did, after all, work for the government.
Self-esteem is not being happy. Self-esteem is not even feeling good. Self-esteem is how awesome you think you are.
And if you think you’re awesome, when you’re mediocre, then you’re miserable, because everyone around you treats you a whole lot worse than you think you deserve.
High self-esteem is great for young men. It makes them take risks. And to thrive men need to take risks, and achieve things, for many reasons, one of which is that women only mate up.
High self-esteem is not so good for young women. It doesn’t get them anything they wouldn’t have already had. It just makes them less happy with it.
Sure, there’s such a thing as self-esteem too low, but if a woman can look you in the eye, instead of in the shoes, when she talks to you, she’s pretty much good to go.
Anything more than that is superfluous at best, and at worst … well, eyeball the video for a moment and you’ll see what I mean.
But the misery isn’t just personal.
This is the fertility crisis in a nutshell. We, Western civilization, have spent the past five or six decades telling little boys that they are worthless sacks of protoplasm, and telling little girls that the sun shines out of their collective girl parts.
And look what’s happened.
The fertility crisis is stupidly simple. When you elevate the status of women by giving them a greater share of respect, and of society’s wealth, which is created by men, they refuse to have children.
You can reverse this by allowing men to keep the wealth they create, instead of giving it to women.
Then they will give it to women themselves, but the women will look up to them, and there will be children again.
During the Trump administration so far, 94% of new job went to women. This is not natural or organic. This doesn’t happen on its own. This is not happening because women are “crushing it”.
Women are the same women they have always been, risk averse, clustered around average intelligence, prone to wait for others to lead.
This is not an accident. This is spin on the ball. Women vote. And pandering is an easy way to get those votes.
But give a moderately pretty one a single email job at a Silicon Valley startup, and pretty soon she thinks that the father of her children should be a “post-economic” jet-setter with the body of a professional athlete who ticks all the boxes her therapist thinks are important.
And she thinks she can pick him off a shelf at age 35.
This is a vote, conscious or not, willing or not, for the extinction of humanity.
Throughout the genetic history of humanity, approximately 80% of women had children, as opposed to 37% of men. Those numbers don’t lie. Most men either weren’t exceptional enough to breed, or died trying to become exceptional enough to breed.
Women just had to not be in the bottom quintile. Not to be horrible, or horribly unlucky.
This bears out what we already know.
And this is why Western civilization told women they were the weaker sex, the dumber sex, the more fragile sex. Why Eve was said to made to serve Adam.
Because this preserved civilization and the species.
Women were actually happier that way, because women don’t want to win. They want a winner.
But even if it didn’t, what choice would we have?
The only nations and tribes in the world which are still breeding are the ones where women are still of low status. And if you try to replace Westerners with them, try to make them into Westerners, not only will you fail, but even if you succeed, they’ll stop breeding, too.
And we know now why there are no matriarchies. Its not because men have superior strength, and enslaved women with violence. It’s because matriarchies don’t breed.
Humans are an animal, like any other animal. Every animal has mating rituals, and if those rituals can’t be conducted, there will be no next generation. This is why some animals can be bred in zoos, and others cannot.
We know what’s wrong.
We just lack the political will to fix it.
Because it’s “not fair”.
Well, of course it’s not fair. But look around you. Look at the universe. Look at history.
Whatever made you expect that things would be fair?
Or, as someone posted in the replies to this:
September 25, 2026
When did employee humiliation become part of the mission?
I’ve been out of the working world for some time now, but I still remember the stomach-clenching realization that my employer was going to be “doing some fun activities” at an upcoming company event/meeting/recognitions/celebrations It was always just like the meme about the extrovert “persuading” the introvert to come out:
I’m told it’s even worse in the non-productive sector of the economy, as Fortissax explains:
If you’ve only worked trades, or unskilled labour your whole life you’d be inclined to thinking that humiliation rituals and childish games are unique to retail jobs like Walmart, where in morning huddles they make their minimum wage employees dance in place to celebrate how well their team did in last week’s sales, or survey results. I want you to know that in Very Serious Jobs™️ like NGOs, government, finance, and banking, white collar salary workers who work for some of the biggest and oldest corporations in Canada have to play stupid little games, and all the men have to fake enthusiasm for getting to know employees they don’t give a shit about outside of work, mostly to appease women in their 30s and 40s. They all have annual or bi-annual celebrations they’ll call “balls” or “galas” where the corporation spends an exorbitant amount of money on a semi formal event and a three and a half star deal, usually at some mid-high tier hotel. They do this so they can justify low balling you and not raising your salary. The women in particular are completely mesmerized as they dress up to relive prom night one more time, every year, where they can win fake little awards for being good little cogs scoring their arbitrary KPIs and survey goals, getting to strut up onto a stage in a dress and claim up a plastic trophy or framed certificate to be mounted on a wall, a gold star for whose it and who cares metric that nobody knows or gives a fuck about. You can make six figures or just under it and you’re still subject to participatory humiliation rituals.
September 24, 2026
Small rift in time brings 2021 dramarama to 2026
I still occasionally see people going about their business wearing WuFlu masks. I try not to overtly point and laugh, because I’m still pretending to be polite and civilized. Obviously, people should be free to wear or not wear whatever they like so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. A bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts has apparently been requiring masks for all their patrons since the pandemic but recently decided to ease up the restriction for one night per week, making the masks optional for one day per week. As you might imagine, this move hasn’t gone down well with their customers:
Image via Not the Bee
Crybullying is a way of controlling other people. Predators and psychopaths pose: They deliberately put on sad face or hurt face when they want suckers to lower their guard so they can get what they want.
If you’ve been online today, you’ve probably seen discussion of the mindblowing Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts that recently decided to start having weekly mask-optional nights, after many years of requiring KN-95 masks or better from patrons. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this, let me just say that no, you haven’t accidentally clicked on an article from 2021. This is happening now.
After the Last Ditch Bar posted their new mask rules on social media, they were immediately buried in rage-inflected comments from people who were in absolute agony over the way the place was just absolutely murdering them.
Sample comment: “You have shattered what I believed your values to be, and you should be ashamed to use the word radical to describe your venue in the same post where you’re announcing a decision to deliberately spread disabling diseases, that we know disproportionately impact marginalized populations, one night each week.”
Did you know that Covid-19 is medically much worse if you’re a politically radical lesbian? Second sample comment: “This is such a stab in the heart to those of us who have no choice but to protect our health. Esp when l0ng c0vid disproportionally affects queer folk.” That’s an interesting observation.
All of the bar’s efforts to calm the storm made it worse, and a community forum hosted by trained facilitators crashed and burned. I’m not going to describe that event or summarize it, because you should read every incredible detail yourself. Here’s the link again, in an archived form that gets you around the paywall and probably requires you to scroll down a bit to get through some blank space at the top. As a preview, though, one of the facilitators was white, which devastated the terrified attendees and made them feel that they were in extreme danger.
The mandatory mask-wearing somehow became a totem of belonging to the patrons of the bar and after so long, they are now reacting very strongly to any attempt to dilute their shared community with non-mask-wearing heathens.
QotD: The perpetual progressive underdogs
To the autist, each car must be inspected in detail, with full attention … and while the autistic’s attention is laser-focused on one particular parked car – “1998 Ford Taurus, midnight blue, left front tire is a little low, right taillight out, bumper sticker near muffler”, etc. — he fails to notice the moving car that hits him.
As opposed to the non-autistic, who is capable of “abstracting” that situation into a realistic threat assessment. He can’t even give you a ballpark guess of how many parked cars are in the lot, much less any details about any of them, because he has abstracted them out: “a bunch of parked cars” = no threat, so his attention is free to roam around looking for moving cars.
I instinctively want to argue against this, because it appears to me that Leftists are nothing but abstraction. They don’t see individuals; they see huge identity groups. That’s why they see an anti-feminist woman or a conservative homosexual or whatever as not really X. It makes sense to them, somehow, to say that Amy Coney Barrett isn’t really a woman, Clarence Thomas isn’t really black, and so on.
[…]
The non-autistic sees [a child’s drawing of a train as] a rectangle, two wheels, some lines underneath, and thinks “train,” because he’s boiled it down to the essentials — a train is a wheeled vehicle that moves on tracks. That’s good enough to cover pretty much all “train” situations; we can add or subtract details as needed to get to this or that particular train (e.g. electric vs. steam), or a wheeled vehicle which moves on tracks that’s not a train (e.g. a rollercoaster).
So, applied to people: I see a black man walking towards me on the street and I have one set of assumptions in my head. First I see just “person”; then I realize it’s a man; then I realize it’s a black man; then I realize it’s an elderly black man; then I realize it’s Clarence Thomas. All the while I’m dialing in both my perceptions and my behavior — I’m not at much physical risk from an elderly man, and I’m at nearly zero risk from Clarence Thomas, specifically, so I modify my behavior. When I was still just at the “black male” stage of the recognition process, I behaved very differently.
If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the autistic would do something like the reverse. He wouldn’t be able to make any judgments until he’d fully inspected the individual man in front of him at close range and verified that yes, this is Clarence Thomas. And then the confusion kicks in, because he — the autistic — has memorized the rule “black man = Liberal” and here’s Clarence Thomas. Error 404.
Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.
September 22, 2026
QotD: Organized activities for children versus informal play
I didn’t ask why. I wish I had, because I’m sincerely curious — these were busy, active kids, actually in the process of racing around the playground with their buddies while the adults chatted, so it’s not as though they needed organized sports to keep them from merging with the couch cushions — but at the time it seemed rude and pushy so I changed the subject. Now, obviously not everyone is like this mom: some people, including Tim Carney, really do love sports and delight in sharing that love. But the truth is, people are obsessed with signing their kids up for stuff. Carney calls it the Travel Team Trap, and it’s probably most evident in youth sports culture, but it shows up everywhere. Your kid likes to write? Find a creative writing class! Having fun with chess? Quick, hire a tutor! My local rec center even offers courses in Dungeons & Dragons, taught by a real live professional nerd, because apparently eating Doritos in your mom’s basement while your friends mock you for touching the Sphere of Annihilation isn’t good enough any more.
And it’s a vicious cycle, because all these official activities crowd out informal play. If the artsy kids in your neighborhood are taking a musical theater class half an hour away, there’s no one to join your kids in pulling out the dress-ups and staging a drama of their own. If everyone is off at soccer practice, you can’t meet up at the park to kick the ball around. Sorry, Zerubbabel can’t come over and play Legos this week, he’s got his STEM Makers class on Wednesday and then Thursday afternoon is junior robotics team … Soon even the families who want a more relaxed, unprogrammed life are signing their kids up for things because it’s the only way they’ll ever see their friends.
There’s nothing wrong with formal instruction in its place, especially for things where technique really matters: the world needs basketball coaches and piano teachers, too. And sometimes it’s just fun! A big stage with lights and music and real costumes scratches an itch that Mom’s old prom dress and a dinosaur mask (“Velociraptorella”, currently in previews off-off-off-Broadway) just can’t touch. But when we regard these things as potentially interesting and entertaining, rather than absolutely vital to our children’s well-being, we can make sane tradeoffs about them. A day-trip to the awesome museum in a neighboring city is also potentially interesting and entertaining, but nobody thinks you’re a bad mom if you spend the weekend doing something else.
And what’s more, the push for legible achievement over experience, without regard for what’s good for your family — or even, apparently, whether your kids like it — robs them of the opportunity to motivate and direct their own lives. Basketball practice three times a week surely does more for your jump shot than a pickup game at the local park, but in the long term the ability to take ownership of your time, make and keep plans with your friends, sort out interpersonal disagreements, etc. are going to be a lot more useful. (And, sorry, I’m still stuck on this D&D thing: the threat of your friends losing interest and wandering off to play foosball instead is a much greater incentive to become a good DM than anything you could learn in a class.)
But it’s not actually surprising that people parent like this, because it’s how they grew up: today’s moms and dads are yesterday’s Organization Kids.1 Their image of the good life is tallying up achievement points on some great celestial board. And no wonder they’re desperate to tally up points for their kids, too: they think their futures depend on it! In fact, every time I bring this up, someone tells me that Harvard is full of kids whose parents drove themselves crazy coordinating travel sports schedules and private school dropoffs and chess tutors — all of which is true, and some of which is probably even causal. (Nobody appreciates achievement points tallied up on a great celestial board like a college admissions office.) But a lot of it is also because that’s how smart, conscientious, upper-middle-class parents are expected to raise their kids, and the best way to get into Harvard is to be the offspring of smart, conscientious, upper-middle-class people. (It also helps if they’re neither white nor Asian.)
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-10-14.
- I hadn’t reread the article since I was in college, but revisiting it now it’s an amazing artifact. “No one is political, no one protests.” Things change!
September 18, 2026
“The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us”
On Substack Notes, John Carter points out the vast chasm between the capabilities of western nations and their timid aspirations for the future:
LeMO Erster Weltkrieg – Kriegsverlauf – Frühjahrsoffensive 1918
Photo from dhm.deWestern civilization is terrified of itself. The destructive power of our militaries is unparalleled in history. We can devastate continents in minutes. We can annihilate entire populations. We can reduce cities to rubble.
But we don’t.
The same is true of our industrial capability. We can erase mountains, redirect rivers, carve tunnels deep into bedrock, reshape entire landscapes as we please.
But we don’t.
The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us. Meanwhile, the unintended consequences of unrestricted development — air pollution, water pollution, soil erosion, habitat destruction, even the sheer rampant ugliness of so much of postwar industry — has left us leery of just doing things.
In the postwar era we began binding ourselves ever more tightly with laws. International law to restrict the use of military force; environmental laws, labour laws, indigenous rights laws, and so on to govern the use of our industrial capacity. We did this for good reason. No one wants nuclear war, or even a repeat of World War Two. No one wants another Three Mile Island, another Chernobyl. With great power comes great responsibility, and no civilization has ever been more powerful.
But the result has been to paralyze us.
Our militaries watch helplessly as supplicants invade us with begging bowls held up as their battle standards, prohibited from shooting the unarmed boats by governments bound by international treaties to respect the human rights of anyone who claims to be seeking asylum. Meanwhile we find that it is almost impossible to build anything. High-speed rail, bridges, highways, housing — all of it is slowed to an imperceptible crawl by a regulatory overburden designed to do precisely that. Gulliver held down by Lilliputian strings of his own design, his flesh swarming with hungry ants.
The emerging political coalition of the right is largely comprised of those factions who have grown impatient with this artificial paralysis of the will. Why shouldn’t we use our military to assert ourselves abroad, and defend our borders at home? Why shouldn’t we turn loose the incredible power of modern, heavily automated, high-tech industry to build wonders on a scale never before known? Why shouldn’t we conquer space? Why shouldn’t we use biomedical science to make ourselves beautiful, brilliant, healthy and fit? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be powerful? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be strong? We shouldn’t we reach for greatness?
The opposition consists of all those factions who are horrified by this, terrified of the strength of Western civilization, intent on slowing it, stopping its engine, dismantling the machine, and salting the biocultural soil from which it grew. Third worldists, climatists, AI safetyists, pacifists, open-borders activists, misinformation censors, DEI ideologues, international human rights NGOs, all of these cooperate to throw sand in the gears, to sabotage the West, to subordinate it and ultimately to destroy it.
One disruptive kid can ruin class for all the others
I remember talking to the teacher who taught the special needs kids at my middle school … Mr. Gibson was the only black teacher in the school and he was far more qualified than any of the others. It also helped that he had the patience of a saint: I doubt any other teacher there could last more than a day with the kids he looked after. At some point in the decades since I was in school, the powers-that-be decided that integrating all the children together was the right decision. By any sensible reckoning, it has been the worst thing they could have done, both for the special needs children and all the other children, as GenX Anecdotes relates on Substack Notes:
GenX Anecdotes didn’t include this in her post, but I thought it to be appropriate, in a way.
Having worked in schools and hearing my daughter’s experiences, it just can’t be the case that a tiny minority of extremely disruptive kids ruin the learning for all the others. Yet I have seen time and time again how one or two disruptive kids with severe behavioural issues can derail a whole lesson.
The dogged insistence that all the kids must be thrown together regardless of capabilities and behaviour is insane to me.
I have seen the amount of time, effort and extra staff required to deal with just ONE kid who clearly needs “round-the-clock” close supervision.
I have often thought those kids should not be in a “normal” class or school. They need to be somewhere else where they can get specialist support. And I don’t care how many times you shout “inclusivity” at me. Those kids would be better off somewhere else too.
I have watched kids who, during lunchtime, will smash up a whole table of kids’ lunches and try and run out of the school gates; kids continually shouting in lessons; bully and “hit” other kids repeatedly; demand all the other kids play games exactly as THEY want them to be played; derail a whole lesson and be continually brought out of the classroom, but only to be brought back in again!
Then I see the adults pander to the disruptive ones time and time again and expect all the other kids to suck it up and put up with their bullshit. All under the guise of some “neurodivergent” excuse. If their “neurodivergence” continually negatively impacts everyone around them, then they need to be removed from everyone else. Sorry. It’s not everybody else’s responsibility to put up with it.
Time and time again, the needs of a minority of kids prioritise the needs of many.
I remember when I worked in one junior school, attending a training day for teachers and support staff, which was conducted by the school head teacher.
When I raised this issue, he just went over to his laptop and brought up that “equity” meme of the three people standing on boxes looking over a wall onto the big screen and said THIS is why.
He didn’t like the fact that I had brought this up, especially since some of the teachers agreed with me. He very quickly shut me down, and his whole tone was this kind of patronising and smug “you don’t understand at all do you?” Like he was having to explain basics to me. There were a thousand things I wanted to say about it, but I didn’t.
What really got me was how all those teachers who had agreed with me looked at the meme and were nodding! They were impressed by it and acted like they hadn’t seen it before. It was beyond infuriating. I SO wanted to get up and go over to the laptop and find the other “equity in reality” meme, which is far closer to the truth.
But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to derail the whole thing and be the only “disrupter” in the room.
It was close to lunchtime, and it was already running over, and everyone was clearly eager to get out of there, so I didn’t want to turn it into an ideological battle of wits. In hindsight, I wish I did.
But I wasn’t brought up to be that person. And yet, ironically, here we are. Raising a generation of people who WOULD totally hold everyone up and much worse.
I left that job soon after that. It wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things related to this. I watched daily as things that I thought could actually be quite easily made better with some practical adjustments were continually and self-evidently made worse for EVERYBODY because of an adherence to this arrogant and utterly insane ideological bullshit.
It drove me nuts.
