Autumn Christian @teachrobotslove
I love video games. I met my husband because he hired me to QA for a Sims game. I was a game designer for companies like Zynga and EA. I was a writer on State of Decay 2.
And I still have never loved games like I’ve seen the way men love games. I was surrounded by men who would eagerly work on min-max spreadsheets during their lunch break. One designer had a cabinet full of games that he would replay over and over again to study the levels. They’d go home from making games to play more games.
Honestly, it’s a big reason I quit game design. I didn’t have that obsessive, compulsive desire to play games in a way that superseded everything else in my life. Lots of women play videogames. I’ve never seen one consumed by them as their life falls apart around them.
Autumn is right. Even women who love video games don’t become obsessed with them the way men do. I know why, and I think it reveals a tremendously important difference between male-typical and female-typical psychology.
Men. Want. Power.
Men want to be able to do things. To shape the world. To impose their will on reality. To win.
Video games are a fast, reliable superstimulus for that urge. With only a handful of exceptions, the good ones are designed to both excite the desire for agency and power, and to satisfy it.
If you doubt me, ask yourself why many men fixate harder on video games than they do on pornography. It’s very telling that this is even possible.
Women don’t work that way. I could go off on a long tear about why, but the evolutionary-biology reasons are so obvious that I don’t think I need to. If it’s not obvious, ask an LLM “why do men seek power and agency the way women seek love and social validation”. You’ll get an earful.
Of course this also explains the well-known phenomenon of women getting the ick when men play video games.
It’s not just that men doing this are chasing a goal women don’t really understand or identify with. To them, a game-obsessed man is dropping out of the real-world contest, wasting the traits and energy that would otherwise make him attractive on a pursuit that is both literally and figuratively sterile.
I don’t have a fix for the problems this mismatch creates, nor am I judging either men or women about this — instincts are what instincts are and I don’t waste any time arguing with the law of gravity either.
But understanding what’s going on increases the chances that we can make choices that aren’t doomed to fail.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-07.
August 8, 2026
QotD: Why more men than women love videogames
August 7, 2026
QotD: A provisional taxonomy of “stupid smart guys”
The low IQ: I know some of y’all don’t like [Julian] Jaynes [author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind], but one of the big reasons I like Jaynes is that he really brings home just how much of our behavior is unconscious. Including quite complex behavior, including stuff that we have to believe is the product of deep thought — he cites the “three B’s” his physicist friend told him about. Those are Bed, Bathroom, and Bus, which is where big important ideas seem to just come to them unbidden. You may not agree with where Jaynes goes with that, but we all have experienced something similar.
If we assume this is a universal mental process, I suggest, then saying someone has a low-normal IQ does not mean he’s always going to do stupid things. He has those three-B flashes too. It might take a while for him to cotton to something that seems obvious, but cotton he will, in three-B fashion.
Moreover, Jaynes is good on the complexity of unconscious tasks. The mechanical parts of driving, once learned, are completely unconscious. Try teaching someone to drive and you’ll see it right away. You’ll find yourself literally side-seat driving — your foot pushing down on an imaginary brake, unconsciously. And you never really forget those unconscious patterns, either. You may not have ridden a bike in 30 years, but you could go out and do it right now. Same way with swimming, or the manual of arms — if you’ve been through Basic, a guy with the proper tone of voice can have you twirling around like a marionette, even if you got out of uniform decades ago.
The actual low IQ guys might be the most dangerous cogs in the machine.
The Dunning-Krugerrand. That’s Larry Correia’s phrase, and it’s great. This is the person who believes he’s way smarter and more competent than he actually is. Which on the one hand, they all do. But on the other hand, there are levels above D-K, so please hold fire for now.
The Artiste. It’s been my great … fortune, actually, to have been around a lot of Media people in my youth. I dated a gal who did production work for one of the big tv news programs in a fairly large city, so I saw the video side of it, at least, from close range. The on-camera bobbleheads are all Ron Burgundy, of course, but the production people are usually quite bright … but in a very odd way. They have what I came to think of as “the artist’s eye”. They naturally see everything in terms of camera angles and visual presentation, and training develops this to a very high degree.
This leads to wildly divergent takes on things. You or I see the police approaching a stopped car with their guns drawn, or firemen pulling up in front of a burning building, and we think something like “Damn, crime is out of control!” or “I hope everyone’s ok.” News people — video people, at least — think “What a shot!” They frame the visuals first, then start processing the propositional content … if they ever do. The longer they work in “news”, the more the propositional content — “the cops are arresting a bad guy”; “there are real people in real danger in that burning building” — drops away.
Same thing, I imagine, with the folks on the verbal end. They have a novelist’s sense of pace, structure, and so on. Is what they’re writing true? Of course not! At one point about 30 years ago they felt the need to justify this, and created a whole new category of writing: “creative nonfiction“, aka lies, aka “the news”. The “creative nonfiction” people will tell you, in Wiki’s words, that it “uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives”. Emphasis mine, because like the cameraman who ends up exclusively focusing on the shot and never thinks about the life behind the shot, so the writer of “creative nonfiction” gets caught up in the creative part, and just kinda forgets the “nonfiction” part.
Medicalization. Not a category of people, but a technique. We say smart people tend to be spergy, and stupid smart people tend to be really spergy, but that’s mistaking effect for cause. They’re not very good at reading people, and have no social savvy, but that’s because they don’t practice — because they don’t need to practice. They medicalize their deficiencies. Instead of acknowledging a weakness in their game, they attribute it to a pathology.
Severian, “The Stupid Smart Guy”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-13.
August 6, 2026
The Goddess That Failed by Janice Fiamengo
On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo shares the foreword to her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself:
Feminism poses a threat to everything good in western culture, perhaps especially to women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint.
I was an adherent of feminism before I became a critic. I have felt its euphoric exultation and its self-flattering conviction of moral purity. Later, I recognized its hubris and moral hollowness.
I am familiar with feminism’s core texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Anne Franks, having studied them and believed in them for years. I understand the psychology and the history of the movement because I lived inside it for many years.
Unlike others who have criticized feminism’s excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.
Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.
From the first occasions when I began to speak and write about feminism in 2012 and 2013, I encountered the same response from feminists: “What you are describing is not real feminism” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists”, and so on.
I am regularly accused of hating myself, of hating other women, and/or of seeking male approval. I am accused, by those who have never studied feminism, of not understanding feminism.
It’s true that not all feminists are as fervid as an Andrea Dworkin or a Sally Miller Gearhart. They do not all fantasize, as Gearhart did (to much congratulation and gushing praise), about how much better life would be if the number of males could be reduced to 10% of the human population. They do not rhapsodize, as Mary Daly did, about a decontamination of the earth through such a reduction. They do not make jokes about killing men as a public service, as Mona Eltahawy did.
But it’s also true that such vicious women, and the many others who have lent their malign energies to the movement, have never been disavowed by other feminist leaders. In fact, feminists’ lack of shame before bloodthirsty feminist pronouncements is remarkably consistent.
True, there are many varieties of feminism, not all of them agreeing on every point: radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, post-colonial feminism, intersectional feminism, eco-feminism, animal rights feminism, abolitionist feminism, trans-inclusive feminism, feminism for sex-based rights, maternal feminism, and even (most bizarrely) conservative or reactionary feminism. Some extend their compassion to victim groups other than women, such as trans women, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, or the environment.
Such distinctions do not concern me because none makes a real difference.
None escapes the victim mentality: the belief that the history of humanity up until the present moment has been a history of (privileged, white) men oppressing women and other innocent victims; and that because of their alleged greater suffering and moral innocence, particular care and attention must be paid to women and to their unique capacity for empathy and social justice.
No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category.
Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims.
August 1, 2026
Why UK crime victims’ families always sound so similar talking to the media
On Substack Notes, John Carter linked to an article about the British Home Office’s “nudge unit” who, among other things, coax and cajole the families of murder victims to avoid any hint that they blame the perpetrators for the loss of their loved ones:
This is incredible. I always wondered how family liaison officers from RICU or the CRS reliably got the families of victims murdered by political or racial terrorists to provide such anodyne, don’t look back in anger public statements. I figured in most cases it would be concern trolling, with legal threats held in reserve.
This lays the technique bare, using interviews conducted both with victim’s families and former police officers. Liaison officers serve as anesthetic patches that get slapped on the open wounds of the migration war. They apply therapeutic techniques to calm and reassure the families, establishing dependent relationships and using the trust they build to guide them away from saying anything inflammatory when the time comes to speak to the public. If families become noncompliant in this respect, they’re threatened with causing a mistrial should they speak too openly about their feelings.
That isn’t all RICU does, of course. “Communications” includes a huge propaganda arm, which uses every tool at its disposal, including battalions of fake social media profiles. You have to wonder how much of the culture war of the last decade or more was pure hallucination.
The article in question is by David Shipley for the Pimlico Journal:
RICU, the Home Office’s Research Information and Communications Unit, is often the subject of much attention online, particularly around its role in the consistently bland calls for “unity” after horrific acts of violence. Many people online suggest that either the Unit itself, or the “specially trained officers” (Victim Liaison Officers or Family Liaison Officers) must threaten victims and their families to ensure their compliance with approved messaging. This always struck me as unlikely — widespread coercion would surely have leaked by now. There was also good reason to be sceptical of the efficacy of behavioural science applications to government. And yet public statements by those victims and their families are remarkably consistent.
So I was delighted when, a couple of months ago, Pimlico Journal asked me to investigate RICU and victim liaison properly. In order to do so, I studied historic statements, publications and coverage of RICU and spoke with victims’ families, some of whom are named in this piece and former police officers, none of whom are named, with knowledge of the Victim and Family Liaison units. What I discovered is fascinating and far more insidious than the imagined coercion. This article provides an overview of RICU’s history, goals and methodology, followed by details from those interviews. I hope it sheds some light on this murky area of the state’s “communications management”.
RICU was established in 2007 “under the Prevent strand of [the UK government’s] CONTEST strategy” with its stated goal being to “understand and counter terrorist and extremist ideologies to reduce the risk to the UK, its citizens and its interests overseas”. Giving evidence to MPs in 2009, Charles Farr, a former SIS officer, and head of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, who set RICU up in 2007, said the unit is “responsible for advising the rest of government [and] officialdom, from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief constable in Yorkshire, about how they wish to characterise the threat we face and describe the response that we are making and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated groups — generally not from people in this country; usually from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around the world”.
The unit embraced convenient lies from the start. Part of their strategy was to send advice to “local authorities, people working on community cohesion projects, local police, neighbourhood policing teams” and “the Chief Constable” that they should not “talk about Islamic terrorism, not because in certain circumstances that is an inaccurate description but because the language admits of a number of interpretations which are not always helpful to us“.
RICU was also always concerned with the whole of British society — while Farr said the unit decided to “start” with Muslim communities, he told MPs that he did “not want to give the impression that RICU’s sole purpose is to communicate with Muslim communities in this country. It is not.” So by 2009 a unit existed which had “about 35 people” working for it, “and a bit of the private sector in there to advise us on aspects of communications”, which was telling every arm of the state, along with much of civil society, that they should lie about the nature of the threats the country faced, to serve the state’s perceived interests. It was also already building wide and deep relationships within many parts of the state, including policing.
What has it become, in the 17 years since Charles Farr gave his evidence?
In 2011, when the government reviewed Prevent, it found that RICU’s communications sometimes “erred in seeking to make language acceptable to some in Muslim communities, at the expense of candour”. The unit was described as having “a central role in developing counter-ideological or counter-narrative work”, although its track record was described as “mixed”. It was directed to take “more care … to identify credible partners to develop powerful and specific narratives across a range of communications channels, especially on the internet“. Despite these criticisms, the state chose to “retain RICU, largely in its current form”, but with the expectation that it would produce “much sharper and more professional counter-narrative products” — there was also a commitment to “continue to work with social media enterprises” in the battle against “propagandists and radicalisers” including those whose “propaganda work” might be illegal under “race and religious hatred legislation”. The shift is notable — Farr’s commitment that RICU would work across the whole of British society is clearly underway, with Islamic terrorism and radicalisation no longer the main focus.
More recently, RICU has long been the subject of much discussion on social media, and of occasional interest in the mainstream press. It’s often accused of being behind the anodyne calls for unity and calm issued by public bodies, victims and their families after the latest “Yookay” Event in which a migrant has done something appallingly violent. Not unrelatedly, it is generally the right who are more vocal in their criticism of RICU, and it is regularly suggested that they threaten families into sticking to the regime-approved line.
July 29, 2026
The American Deep State’s biggest experimental laboratory
On Substack, John Carter links to the latest of kulak’s fascinating-and-unsettling Anarchonomicon posts with this introduction:
Kulak’s thesis here is that English Canada generally, and Toronto specifically, is ground zero for a lot of the more insane gay race communism trends because America has been using Canada as a testing ground for psychological operations since the 1950s.
That sounds kind of nuts but he makes a plausible case. Since Canada is technically a foreign country, intelligence agencies don’t face the same limitations they do at home. Since Canada is almost culturally identical to the US, what works in Canada will generally work domestically (and all the GAE psyops are ultimately aimed at America’s domestic tax cattle).
Kulak also brings the receipts here, showing how things like MeToo and GamerGate seem to have been prefigured by similar movements in Canada a couple years before.
One thing he misses is land acknowledgements, which began spreading in Canada in 2013 or so, and have since started appearing at American and Australian universities. I don’t know for sure that they started in Canada, all I can say is that it was Canada where I first noticed them, and where they have become ubiquitous.
Multiculturalism is another Canadian export, developed here in the 60s and rapidly introduced all over the Western world. The prime ministers who introduced it were American puppets, and the ideology itself has a very broadly American “nation of immigrants” feel to it.
Anyhow, you motherfuckers, two can play this game.
On the land acknowledgements, the first time I encountered it was at my son’s university graduation ceremony, but his university had a big First Nations specialization so it didn’t seem too outlandish at the time. Since then, of course, pretty much every event in urban Canada seems to feature a land acknowledgement and they don’t appear to be optional any more.
Anyway, on to kulak’s post on “The Battle for the Mind of North America”:
The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey
Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up … several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.
The “Rape” refers to Rapeseed, the primary ingredient in Canola Oil, the unhealthy seed-oil. (they named it “Canada Oil” because “Rape Oil” might make people hesitate)
But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.
and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:
America.
Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans … no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about its own populace.
For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.
It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, legalized sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, demilitarized Canadian education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training) … and oh ya a new flag.
The Canadian flag, adopted in 1964 … which the very year should be a “red flag”. Is in fact, an American flag. It is the symbol of America’s diplomatic and espionage victories over the British Empire and its final conquest of Canada.
Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did) … was ripped out in the course of a decade … quite intentionally and by design.
Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.
To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart … I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.)
And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable … the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.
The mottoes on the posters: “Obey/ the Law/ Follow/ Duty”, “One God/ One King/ One Flag/ One Fleet”, “Love God and Honour the King”
This was immediately ripped out by State Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.
How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the three institutions of Church, Militia Armoury, and the old-style High School ruthlessly enforcing standards … More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country … How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?
How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of its population’s very eyes … without resistance and without protest?
Well that’s the problem that was solved here.
Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.
Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society” … These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).
However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.
Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.
“Monument to Multiculturalism”. Toronto. Erected 1985. (The “Monument” can be interpreted two ways … the man and doves working together to build a unified world … or the man is unwittingly cooperating in his own caging and enslavement)
Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.
Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.
July 27, 2026
Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs
The tag in my chosen headline means roughly “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, which anyone who has read anything about the Trojan War can understand. A huge problem for modern translators of works like The Iliad and The Odyssey is that there’s a double layer of cultural change built in before you start: the Mycenaean Greek culture of the Bronze Age — the setting of the Trojan War — is significantly different from the Greek culture of the classic era — when the oral tales were first written down (and attributed to Homer).
Classic Greek culture is often misunderstood by modern audiences through the most prominent survivals of that time: especially Greek philosophy, as the philosophers we think of as most representative of Athenian and the wider Greek culture were actually a fairly small and relatively powerless subculture at odds with the mainstream of their times.
All that said, going from a translation to an on-screen interpretation requires a lot of picking and choosing of elements to highlight and others to leave unrepresented or actively suppressed. In the most recent film of Odysseus and his extended return journey from Troy to Ithaca, director Christopher Nolan chose to portray Odysseus as a modern man in ways that may suit today’s audiences, but don’t accurately portray the Homeric interpretation or the times in which it is set:
Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.
In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.
But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.
During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.
This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.
This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?
Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.
Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film The Northman asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But The Northman was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.
Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.
In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.
The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.
Biosphere 2
Sama Hoole on a now-obscure experiment in the early 1990s which didn’t produce the expected results at all:
Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world’s press.
Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.
It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.
Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life’s work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.
So he called it a health programme.
The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat’s milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.
The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.
Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.
The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.
Walford’s verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.
He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.
He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.
Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.
Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.
The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.
And he updated:
I left something out of that one.
Biosphere 2 had a working farm, and the farm had pigs, chickens and goats. Only one of those three was still alive when the door opened, and the reason why is the most useful thing the entire two years produced.
Biosphere 2 had livestock, and the crew ate the pigs first.
Zazu and Quincy were Ossabaw dwarf pigs. In the first year one of them produced a litter of seven, which inside a sealed glass building where every calorie was counted should have been the best news anybody had.
They killed them anyway.
The chickens went too. Mrs Fruitcake and the rest, slaughtered because they were eating more than they were laying.
Neither animal was killed for meat. They were killed for competing.
A pig and a chicken have one stomach, and it wants exactly what a human wants: grain, roots, beans, anything starchy or dense. Inside Biosphere 2 there was no outside, no feed lorry, no surplus. Every mouthful a pig took came off the plate of one of eight visibly starving people. The crew did the arithmetic and reached for the knife.
Now notice which animals survived the cull.
The goats. Milky Way, Stardust and Vision, three African pygmy goats, milked daily for the full two years. And in the crew’s own scientific write-up, published in Advances in Space Research in 1995, they recorded that the goats were the most productive domestic animals in the entire system.
The most productive thing in a building where the humans lost a fifth of their body weight was the ruminant.
It is the four stomachs. A goat is a fermentation vat on legs. She runs on stalks, leaves and crop residue, the fibrous rubbish that comes off any farm and that no human gut can process, and turns it into milk. She was never taking food off the crew. She was manufacturing food out of what the crew threw away.
So that sealed box did test the great modern argument, the one about feeding crops to animals being a waste of land and calories.
It found the argument correct for pigs and chickens.
It found it wrong for the animal that eats grass.
Biosphere 2 gets quoted endlessly as proof we should grow plants and drop the livestock. Eight people with the most productive farmland on earth ran that experiment properly, went hungry for two years, and kept exactly one kind of animal alive throughout, because she was the only one paying rent.
They killed the pigs to feed the people and kept the goat to feed the people.
QotD: The art of management
A nanosecond’s reflection will tell you that the techniques needed to manage computer programmers, movie actors, and the boom-town roughnecks that inspired Conan the Barbarian are going to be very different. What if we restrict our analysis to just one category, say the computer programmers?2 Well, consider another similarly restrictive category: children. The great limitation of parenting books is, as every parent of more than one child knows, that children are extremely different from one another. One child may need strict discipline, while another actually needs to be encouraged to take rules less seriously; one needs to be reassured constantly and showered with love, while another needs to have firm boundaries. The techniques that work brilliantly with one child will not work unmodified with another. If the goal is the Aristotelian mean, then some need to be nudged to one side, and others in the opposite direction.
If that’s the way it is with kids, imagine how much more so this all applies to adults, who in addition to having different innate personalities and temperaments and aptitudes also carry with them extensive life histories, experiences, and scar tissue. Any generic advice, any “management turpentine”, needs to be heavily customized to the personalities and the dynamics of a particular team. But the catch is that mastering the ability to apply this sort of generic management advice in a particular situation is pretty much just the same thing as mastering management itself.
To a very great degree, management just is the art of taking a set of discordant personalities and welding them into a harmonious whole. A great manager sizes up his or her team, sees the ambitious go-getter, the resentful and self-defeating genius, the timid and awkward newbie with leadership potential, the lazy slob who secretly glues them all together — sees not just these categories but sees the individuals and the unique ways they subvert these archetypes, and instantly and intuitively knows how to fuse them into a machine for achieving a common purpose. Or as Hilaire Belloc once put it:
There is one element in the [management of men] which is all-important, and the possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or “eye” in a sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined — the faculty of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole — you have the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is among men.
But why does he say that this particular talent is not to be acquired? Go back to Johnson’s line about the management turpentine and read it again, but this time note how deftly the magic trick is performed. Do you see it? Hey presto, there are only two options as to what a book on painting could be about — “Form and Structure and Meaning,” or where to buy turpentine. This is important, because left to your own devices you might prefer a third possibility: namely a book about how to make great art. But as soon as you say it, it becomes clear why that option needs to be hidden from view — no such book has ever existed, no such book can exist, you can’t learn to make great art from a book.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-28.
- Fewer and fewer every day though. A United States military friend recently pointed out to me that the high ratio of senior Russian officers killed in Ukraine and Syria speaks well of their military culture, because it means that even their general officers make a custom of occasionally leading from the front (there’s a long history of this in the Russian armed forces). He then reflected bitterly that an American general being killed was simply unthinkable, since to a man they sit in air-conditioned offices and command their troops over satellite link.
- Johnson’s book is marketed towards those managing computer programmers, which is interesting since she worked on the operations side of the house and as far was I know has never been in charge of a crew of engineers.
July 21, 2026
QotD: Why Tiktok?
This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you’d stare at the longest with a “heating tool” that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms […]
For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn’t give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).
It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those “content creators” are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms’ owners and executives. They may be more “engaging” than your friends, but they’re also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.
What’s a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is “AI creators”. An “AI creator” is like a “creator” in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a “creator”, it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform’s shareholders and executives. It’s the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people […]
But there’s a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms’ single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so “sticky”. The platforms don’t “hack your dopamine loops” – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can’t even agree on what board-game you’re going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it’s time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?
So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.
But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends’ unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.
Cory Doctorow, “Tiktokification shall set us free”, Pluralistic, 2026-04-17.
July 16, 2026
This is why so many of the kids are not “alright”
An interesting discussion at the social media site formerly known as Twitter, as Devon Eriksen responds to a comment from Stephen Fleming:
But don’t you understand?
There was a way. There was always a way.
We had it within our grasp, because we had already grasped it. The childhoods that you and your daughter had were available because you and your daughter had them.
All that the Boomers, and their parents, the eldest of the post WW2 generations, had to do was …
Nothing.
Just live in the paradise that their ancestors won for them, and make the minimum, the bare minimum, of effort that would have been required to actually sustain it.
That’s all.
Just keep things the way they were.
But they couldn’t handle that. Their fathers and grandfathers, the heroes that won WW2, made them jealous.
They wanted to be heroes, too.
So, for the sake of their own egos, they had to become Social Justice Warriors. They had to be Champions of Progress and Change.
They had to see the world they inherited as a pile of problems to be solved, rather than a pile of solutions to be cherished and preserved.
So they could feel like they were doing something important.
Almost all of the elder generations, even the ones who call themselves conservative and vote republican, are, in truth, socialist liberal progressives. Because they looked at paradise, and wanted to fix it instead of protect it.
That’s why the “republican” option was Reagan, the gun-ban guy, the social-welfare guy, the kiss-up-to-the-commies guy, the amnesty-for-foreign-invaders guy.
Reagan, the Hollywood liberal, the Obama of the 80s, instead of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.
Teens can’t have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don’t care about civilization, but will work cheap.
Teens can’t have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.
Teens can’t have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.
Teens can’t have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.
Teens can’t have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.
Teens can’t have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.
Teens can’t even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.
Teens can’t have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.
And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles …
Except.
Except the elders don’t understand that any of this of this is happening.
They haven’t had a child in the household since 1997. They haven’t looked for an entry-level job since 1973. They haven’t gone on a date since 1981. They haven’t been laid off … ever.
They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.
It’s affecting the youngest generations first and worst. While the elders sit on their cruise ship, surveying the short with binoculars, wondering who all these ragged distressed looking people standing on the shore are.
And why they are holding signs that say “HELP”, “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT”, and “YOU STOLE THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE”.
Then they shrug, conclude that these must be the whiny losers, and everyone further inland is probably just fine, and everything is fine, because they fixed everything and they are all heroes, and the Summer of Love was the end of the Problematic Era of History and the beginning of the Great Enlightenment.
And when I am 74 years old, and the elders are all safely tucked into their cemetery plots, I will be torn apart by an angry mob for having white hair, and therefore being “one of them”.
And the mob will not care that I didn’t get to cast a vote until 1992, for the Man Who Predicted All Of This.
He called it the “giant sucking sound”.
Which is apt because it’s why everything sucks now.
July 13, 2026
QotD: They took away recess – and then wondered why boys struggled
But children do not learn best by being treated like machines.
And boys, especially, often do not thrive when movement, noise, spontaneity, and unstructured play are stripped from the school day.
One of the revealing things about modern education is how casually it has pushed recess aside. What was once understood as a normal and necessary part of childhood is now often treated as expendable — a frill, a reward, or a distraction from the “real work” of school. But the research points in the opposite direction. Recent reviews continue to find that recess is associated with academic and cognitive benefits, behavioral and emotional benefits, physical benefits, and social benefits. The strongest modern claim is not that recess is a magic cure for every school problem, but that it helps children function better and does so without harming academic achievement.
That matters for all children.
But it matters in a special way for boys.
Not because girls do not need recess. They do. But many boys are more movement-driven, more physically expressive, and more likely to regulate themselves through action. A school culture built around prolonged stillness can turn normal boyhood into a problem to be managed. Then, when boys struggle under those conditions, the system acts as though the flaw lies in the boy rather than in the environment. Recent research continues to find sex differences in recess physical activity, with boys on average being more physically active during recess than girls.
Tom Golden, “They Took Away Recess – And Then Wondered Why Boys Struggled”, Men Are Good, 2026-04-06.
July 4, 2026
“The fact that [Canadians] cannot define our values should concern every one of us”
While our American neighbours are busy celebrating their 250th anniversary, Canadians are still left wondering why we can’t seem to define what our own values are except in opposition to those of the United States. Eva Chipiuk discusses this briefly here:
In writing my book, Reconnect to Canada, the most difficult part was not recounting our history or explaining our political and legal systems. It was answering a simple question:
What does it mean to be Canadian?
Over the last few years, I have asked that question repeatedly.
It was clear that something fundamental had shifted, but I could never quite articulate what it was.
The responses to that question were revealing, and most telling was that there was no common answer at all.
Some said hockey. Some said healthcare. Others said diversity or simply that Canadians are “nice”.
The fact that we cannot define our values should concern every one of us.
Then I came across this article, and it put things into perspective:
Socialism, in its depraved but effective way, appeals to people’s worst instincts and impulses. It presents the world as a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers. It pits groups of people against each other based on arbitrary measures. For the narrow-minded, it makes sense.
It embodies most of the seven deadly sins.
Pride: Socialists have zero humility because they reject the fallibility of humanity. They can micromanage an entire society. They can create a centralized, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control utopia. They know all and know best.
Envy: Taking one’s property because they have too much to give to others who have less is not noble; it is theft. Stealing with state-sanctioned approval is unjust. The sheer resentment that some have more, better, or bigger material possessions is the driving force of socialist ideology.
Wrath: Socialist doctrine fuels anger, rage, violence, and a desire for vengeance against the so-called oppressors. Instead of mimicking the successful, the people turn their ire toward them.
Sloth: Because socialism is about passing the buck and the blame, it excuses idleness and promotes laziness. It allows one to shirk personal duties and retards personal growth.
The uncomfortable truth is that Canada increasingly reflects these traits, yet we refuse to acknowledge it.
We insist we are compassionate while shaming and disparaging those who hold different opinions.
We claim to value equality while encouraging envy.
We preach inclusion while dividing Canadians into competing groups.
We speak of unity while constantly finding new reasons to divide ourselves.
We demand accountability from everyone except the government.
We expect government to solve problems that citizens, families, communities, and free people once solved themselves.
Worst of all, we have become experts at pretending none of this is happening.
We congratulate ourselves on being tolerant, generous, and virtuous while our institutions fail, productivity declines, public debt explodes, trust evaporates, and Canadians become more divided than they have been in decades.
That is not something to celebrate.
It is something to confront.
If Canadians can no longer articulate what it means to be Canadian, perhaps it is because we have abandoned the principles that once defined us: freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, accountability, respect for the rule of law, and service to one another rather than dependence on the state.
You do not need to take my word for it.
Just open your eyes. Look around!
A country does not lose its identity overnight. It loses it one abandoned principle at a time.
A nation without shared values eventually becomes little more than a collection of people living within arbitrary borders.
So if we are going to celebrate Canada today, let us celebrate the principles that made this country worth celebrating in the first place and commit ourselves to restoring them where they have been lost.
July 1, 2026
QotD: An imaginary obituary for a nation
Today, the world marked the passing of Canada, younger than most, older than some. Canada, on her best days was a beacon in the world for freedom, justice, inclusion, poutine and hockey. Canada gave the world the telephone, the lightbulb, the pacemaker, insulin and was the first nation to successfully complete a double lung transplant.
For the better part of her history, Canada was a trusted ally, a safe harbour for those fleeing persecution, a voice for the voiceless and an example for other nations. People from around the world flocked to her shores to bring the best of where they came from together with others contribute to building a nation that was unlike any other in the world.
But the last few years of her life did seem to be defined by a nearly psychopathic desire to get in her own way. Anointed by God with a natural bounty that, if mined and managed responsibly could have made her one the fairest and wealthiest nations in the history of the world. And yet that natural bounty remained largely locked away.
Canadians had built one of the fairest and most equal societies on the planet, and yet they seemed hell-bent on focussing on the minutia and sometimes the mirages that appeared to divide them.
The 21st century was poised to be the Canadian century, but through much fault of their own, Canadians squandered that opportunity, and today we bid farewell to a nation that had greatness within its grasp, but decided instead to become smaller, to become lesser, to marginalize itself and by extension, made the world a less wonderful place.
Canada: for many on the outside looking in, gone far too soon. Ironically, the assessment of the Canadian legacy by so many who, through the happy accident of birthright, or another privileged pathway to citizenship is markedly different: she overstayed her welcome.
Ben Mulroney, “Canada’s chance to find itself again”, National Post, 2025-11-10.
June 26, 2026
To address social media toxicity, you have to change the algorithm
If you’ve been on social media platforms at all, you’ll have encountered aggressively obnoxious behaviour, possibly rising to actual abuse. Some people revel in it, putting on their “online tough guy” personas, but others (the majority) are disturbed and repelled by it. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up is to keep you engaged and inciting anger is one of the best ways to boost engagement.
Slide from cyberghostvpn.com
Andrej Karpathy is the man who taught Tesla’s cars to see the road and drive themselves. Before that, he was one of the founding researchers at OpenAI. In the world of artificial intelligence, he’s royalty.
A few days ago, he posted a simple, excited message. He’d been using Claude, an AI assistant, and it was blowing his mind. “It works like a real teammate”, he wrote. He was genuinely thrilled.
The replies tore him apart.
Strangers called him a shill. People who’d never built anything mocked him. The pile-on grew and grew and grew.
Then Karpathy went quiet for a moment. And when he came back, he didn’t defend his original post. He said something bigger.
“After 20 years on this platform, X has never been this toxic. The algorithm actively pushes rage, insults, and pile-ons because they get engagement. That’s why even I post and visit less now.”
Twenty years. This man watched Twitter grow from a tiny blog tool into the global town square. He survived every era of the platform. And now, for the first time, he was saying: I don’t want to be here anymore.
Elon Musk read those words and replied within minutes.
“We need a complete overhaul of the algorithm.”
Not a patch. Not “we’ll look into it”. A complete overhaul.
Think about what that means. Right now, the machine that decides what you see on X has one job: keep you engaged. And the fastest way to keep you engaged is to make you angry. Outrage gets clicks. Insults get replies. Pile-ons get retweets. The algorithm learned this on its own, and now it feeds you rage all day long because rage works.
The result: the smartest, most interesting people slowly stop posting. Why would they? Every time they share an idea, a mob shows up. So they go quiet. And what fills the void is screaming.
Musk just said he wants to tear that entire machine out and build a new one from scratch. One where the most useful, most interesting, most original posts rise to the top. Where sharing a genuine thought doesn’t get you punished.
One of the greatest minds in AI came home excited, like a kid showing off a new discovery. X beat him down for it.
That’s exactly the disease Elon is now trying to cut out.
If he actually does it, you’ll feel it in your timeline before anyone announces it.
June 23, 2026
Modern children as human hothouse plants, needing constant care and protection
At Becoming Noble, Johann Kurtz discusses how parents today treat their children in ways they largely never experienced, failing to provide them with enough freedom to allow them to develop personal autonomy as most western children have done for generations:
Giving children the freedom they need to develop agency is now a luxury good. The number of neighborhoods in which it is normal for children to leave the house and roam all day has collapsed. This collapse has come for a variety of reasons relating to security, trust, law, norms, and infrastructure.
Allowing children the privilege of freedom depends on conditions that most families no longer have access to: safe streets — yes — but also neighbors who are known and trusted, and a settled local agreement about what children are and what they are for. These conditions have not vanished, but they have concentrated, and are now a guarded secret, found only in private, privileged, and intentional communities.
This is a curious inversion of an older pattern. For most of history the peasant’s son had the run of the village while the noble’s son was kept under tutors. Now it is the wealthy child who is sent out to enjoy the freedom and adventure of camps and screenless schools, while working and underclass children are kept indoors and screened up.
Photo from Becoming Noble
It is worth being clear about the factors which underlie this transition. Otherwise, parents seeking the nostalgic “free roaming” experience are directed to explanations which are emphasized because they are unproblematic and suggest that a broad solution is available if we just move policy in a sensible direction. This includes discussions of “walkable development” and a rejection of “helicopter parenting”.
This polite framing avoids the reality that the prudent decisions available to parents are mostly made for them by the place they can afford to live, the people they live among, and how radical they are willing to be.
Children develop “agency” — the self-belief that they can independently and effectively manipulate and shape the world in creative ways — through constant experimentation and positive reinforcement.
The “independent” aspect of this formula involves developing internal psychological permission to break from prosaic norms and routines. Developing this is helped by play outside the control of authorities and interacting with the real world in settings unmediated by parents.
The closed systems that now fill children’s hours provide some feeling of agency (open world games, sprawling social media platforms, private chat rooms) without its substance. A child scrolling or playing through the programmatic logic of games is making choices, but they are only the choices that limited systems can accommodate.
Closed-system childhoods teach that there are inviolable hidden structures underneath reality and that the smoothest and most rewarding experiences are to be found when you conform with them. Experiences from boxes teach you to think within boxes. And the vice available online can be as controlling as any parent.
A few years ago, I linked to an article that graphically illustrated how the generations of an English family near Sheffield had experienced continuously diminished “range” for the children to explore:
Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.
