Quotulatiousness

July 16, 2026

This is why so many of the kids are not “alright”

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

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

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For years, schools have acted as though more learning comes from more sitting, more compliance, more desk time, and more control.

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”

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

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

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

I present the following thought exercise to you: if some overeager, industrious journalist were to write an obituary for Canada, how would it read?

    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

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

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

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

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.

June 21, 2026

QotD: Wishful thinking

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The wish is often father to the belief, never more so when our interests are in play. But even without material interests, we are often so attached to our ideas or theories that wishful thinking easily overcomes evidence that casts, or at any rate ought to cast, doubt on them. No one is immune from wishful thinking, and therefore from special pleading. Not surprisingly, the latter is easier to spot in others than in oneself.

There is a déformation professionelle that is very common among practitioners of the human sciences, namely the tendency to treat the human beings who are the objects of their study as if they were no different in principle from sticks or stones or stars. A striking example of this tendency was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April this year, in an article titled “Stigma and the Toll of Addiction” by Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The first thing one might have looked for in an article by the director of the Institute was a certain modesty. After all, the Institute has been witness to a vast increase in the abuse of drugs, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, without having been able — notwithstanding claims to advance in the scientific understanding of addiction — to effect improvement in any significant way whatever. No mea culpa is required, but a tone of hectoring evangelism is not very seemly in the circumstances.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.

June 20, 2026

“Get off your high horse”

Filed under: Japan, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen responds to a post from a Japanese man who claims not to understand American racism:

“United States, Canadian and Japanese Flags on Seventh Avenue” by Jim, the Photographer is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

    NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga

    Honestly, racism is one of those things many Japanese people struggle to understand.

    If we see a white person, we think, “Oh, they’re white.”

    If we see a black person, we think, “Oh, they’re black.”

    If there were blue people, we’d probably think, “Oh, they’re blue.”

    And that’s about as far as it goes.

    If someone is nice, we think they’re nice.

    If someone is an asshole, we think they’re an asshole.

    If we like them, we like them.

    If we don’t, we don’t.

    We grow up being told not to cause trouble, not to fight, and to get along with the people around us.

    Maybe that’s why judging someone by their race feels so foreign to a lot of Japanese people.

    We’re usually too busy judging people by whether they’re good people or not.

This is what we, in America, call a “Luxury Belief System”.

That means something you can believe, and advertise your belief in, precisely because your privileges shelter you from the negative consequences of believing it.

You, @japan_nobunaga, live in a nation that is 99% Japanese, just like you.

You have plenty of time to evaluate gaikokujin as individuals. There are only a few of them around, and they probably aren’t going to stab you while you are trying to figure out the content of their character.

So you have the luxury of telling everyone “look at me, I am not a racist, I am an enlightened being who makes no judgments about wolves” … because you do not live near any wolves, and run no risk of being bitten.

In America, we have another saying … “Get off your high horse”.

This does not mean a literal horse.

But it is meant to make you think about how the daimyo‘s son, on his expensive thoroughbred stallion, does not understand why the peasants have muddy boots.

If you get down off the horse, and walk, you will understand why the farmer’s boots are muddy.

There were some dissenting comments to the original post:

I’ve heard similar stories of Japanese racism toward other East Asian peoples, never mind what they said (and probably still do say) about American black servicemen.

June 13, 2026

Hating on Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire

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

It shouldn’t be surprising that so many people are doing what they can to raise resentment against the very rich in general, and Elon Musk in particular. Stoking resentment of the better off has always been a viable short-term political play, and it’s not every day we see wealth of this scale:

Reddit meme

For all these dumbasses claiming if they had Elon’s money they’d end world hunger, cause world peace, educate everyone, or whatever, blah blah blah … No you wouldn’t. You’re full of shit and everyone knows it, because that’s not how the world works.

Throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. The entire history of government demonstrates that. Saying vapid nonsense just makes weak, unimaginative people with a childlike grasp on reality feel better about themselves for caring harder, while accomplishing nothing.

Meanwhile, the guy you hate revolutionized EVs and self driving cars, brought affordable reliable internet to every corner of the Earth, and is making the dream of colonizing space real. And the process of doing all that has given hundreds of thousands of people jobs.

While you posture about how you’d give everybody an imaginary unicorn, he’s done stuff that’s actually changed the world for the better.

And you don’t get it. You can’t get it. Because you’re just too fucking small.

And even the Globe and Mail, which used to consider itself the most respectable and influential newspaper in Canada goes for the “hate the rich” market:

But some people just can’t help themselves and ginning up the hate and envy is all they can do:

For the left, it’s important that you do more than view billionaires with skepticism. You have to actually hate them. You have to blame them for every ill that befalls you, and you must actively resent their wealth.

One way that the left accomplishes this is by framing their gains as somehow your losses.

Congressman Greg Cesar (D-TX) decided to try that on X Tuesday with this banger.

Now, it’s interesting that he talks about their wealth being three times what it was 15 years ago, but doesn’t account for what the rest of us are dealing with. Instead, he engages in an apples-and-oranges comparison.

For starters, the increase in net worth for billionaires has nothing at all to do with whether your life is three times better than it was back then. There are too many variables. Someone who was unemployed and homeless and got a job, built a life back up, and then started a successful business is a lot more than three times better off, right?

Plus, it doesn’t account for differences in the cost of living or anything else.

Instead, a better metric is whether the median household net worth in America has increased a similar amount. So, I went to Google, then got its AI to generate a graph for me showing what’s happened over that timeframe.

While that’s not three times, it is 2.5 times the median net worth 15 years ago, and since this caps at 2022, it may well have increased even more.

In other words, the net worth of ordinary Americans seems to be mostly keeping up with that of the billionaires.

Cesar’s question, though, is disengenuous because the cost of living has gone up about 53 percent over that timeframe. So while net worth has increased, so has the cost of living. Not enough to completely drain away the gains in net worth, but enough that people aren’t living three times better than they were.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?

It’s not enough that, on average, Americans are much richer than they were 15 years ago, and by about the same amount as the billionaires, because that won’t foster the necessary resentment the left needs to push through their policies. You have to resent their wealth, and that’s less likely if you realize you’ve gained as much as they have by percentages. You have to feel like their wealth has been taken from yours, otherwise you’re less likely to look at wealth redistribution as a good thing.

And wealth redistribution is what it’s always about.

Sing, Muse, of A Complicated Man: Why the Narrative Structure of The Odyssey is VITAL

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

MoAn Inc.
Published 2 Jan 2026
(more…)

June 12, 2026

QotD: George Bernard Shaw

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My own feelings about George Bernard Shaw are equivocal. He was a high-profile, publicity-seeking crank who espoused many bad causes, and in general preferred a bon mot or notoriety to the truth. He called Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister frauds, and to the end of his life did not believe in the germ theory of disease. He likened marriage to legalized prostitution and said many other destructive things to draw attention to himself. How far he believed in his worst pronouncements and expected anyone to be influenced by them is moot.

On the other hand, he was one of the few playwrights in English whose plays can still be performed for the pleasure of an audience a century later. One or two of them might even, without absurdity, be called great. He was undoubtedly very witty, and if he was unbearably opinionated, his prose was always vigorous and quite often elegant. I learned to write from him. Many of his bons mots are still nearly as funny as those of Oscar Wilde.

It was as a playwright — one whose fame stretched around the world — not as a thinker or guide to policy that he is commemorated in the name of the theatre [at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. His plays have been in print ever since they were written. His achievements in the theatre can hardly be denied. He is virtually the founder of the modern drama in English. I can extract at least 20 of his plays from the vaults of my mind.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Man and Underman at RADA”, City Journal, 2020-09-17.

June 7, 2026

Morality and humour

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen suggests that there’s a correlation between a person’s morality and their sense of humour (or lack thereof):

There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor.

Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.

The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which would normally trigger a defensive response, but when you realize it is actually harmless, the response that you experience as laughter or amusement is your brain’s way of derailing that inappropriate defense mechanism.

Because it isn’t appropriate to fight or run away from harmless things.

This mechanism become easy to see when you look at very simple or developing senses of humor. To a baby, unexpected + safe = comedy gold.

And my cat Dante’s favorite joke is “I BITE your toes! … but actually, I don’t bite them! I just lick them by surprise, watch you jump, then run away mewing and looking pleased with myself!”

Humor can become quite sophisticated, but I’ve never yet seen anything funny that couldn’t be understood this way.

But there’s a certain type of evil person who is evil precisely because they don’t interrupt defense mechanisms.

They fight harmless things. Even beneficial ones. And they give you long lectures about how the harmless or even the wonderful thing is ackshually super-problematic.

This is the visible symptom of a form of neurotic hypervigilance which can, and often does, progress to the point of simply lashing out, figuratively or even literally, at random parts of the environment, because the brain has constructed some narrative whereby it’s a threat.

The humor response is our natural way of not doing this.

June 5, 2026

The Lord of the Flies was just a novel

Filed under: Books, Health, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

We often use The Lord of the Flies as a shorthand way to illustrate the darkness in the hearts of men, and that, absent civilizations, men descend into a hellscape of violence, hatred, and all-against-all destructive competition. Yet the real-life case of a group of boys isolated for an extended time didn’t go at all the way the novel did:

More and more I’m learning that the nihilistic claptrap we were all told was genius was just Leftist demoralization propaganda.

Situations like this have occurred, and the children didn’t turn into little monsters. In fact they survived quite well.

In June 1965, six boys named, aged 13 to 16 “borrowed” a fisherman’s boat hoping to reach Fiji or New Zealand. After a storm damaged the sail and rudder, they drifted for eight days surviving on fish and rainwater collected in coconut shells, before washing up on the rocky uninhabited island of ‘Ata.

Rather than descending into chaos during their months there the boys created a mini society. They planted vegetables, collected and stored rainwater, and maintained a permanent fire. They even built a gymnasium with homemade weights, a badminton court, and chicken pens.

They divided daily chores using rosters, resolved conflicts with time-outs instead of fighting, began and ended each day with songs and prayers. One boy, Gilligan’s Isle style, constructed a guitar from driftwood and coconut shell to boost morale. When one of the children broke his leg falling off a cliff the others set it with sticks and leaves and took over his work. They ate fish, coconuts, eggs, wild taro, bananas, and later chickens they had discovered in an ancient volcanic crater.

They endured this for for fifteen months, and never once turned into murderous thugs. A far cry from what we were told would happen.

It wasn’t just William Golding manufacturing dark stories, of course:

QotD: Modern men and the need for male spaces

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

Many internet men have pointed out the dwindling of male spaces, while internet women cheer for their disappearance.

Internet men believe that some kind of man-space is essential. A place for men to be men, mentor other men, and tell younger men the secret wisdom to get their lives on track. That if only we had these spaces, everything would be great for men because we’d all know the secret wisdom that doesn’t actually exist.

Internet women believe that male spaces are dens of misogyny. Places where trollish men want to gather, away from the eyes and ears of right-thinking people, so they can poison other men with hate and bigotry.

Which is silly. Men don’t hate women because other men told them to. They see women being women, and that does the trick just fine. In fact, if a man is getting hourly blowjobs from every woman whose path he crosses, then some group of troll men try to tell him women suck, he’d be confused at how uninformed these men are when women are clearly awesome.

Women’s behavior is the number-one driver of misogyny. Not men telling other men women suck.

And that’s the point of male spaces. Not secret manly-man wisdom, not chattering about woman-hate. A space where men can just be. Without women there.

Women are … a certain way.

This is especially true of middle-class and richer women, and even a little more true of white women than other kinds. But true of all women to some extent.

Women have this way about them — everything they do, say, everything about how they behave — that just subtly communicates that they do not have a lot of experience with consequences. That they are just not that used to considering consequences seriously before doing something.

I’m usually hesitant to use political buzz-words in a non-ironic way, but I think the term “privileged” is pretty perfect for this situation.

A woman’s reality — her experience — is a world where consequences just aren’t quite as big of a deal for her as they are for others. She’s never really had to consider consequences with quite the same intensity.

It’s important to note that this isn’t some kind of overt, intentional flaunting as women stride around, consequence-free, thumbing their noses at us. Women don’t even know this is a thing. They’ll deny it fiercely if you tell them. They don’t feel privileged, and their feelings are always real. They’ll even tell you that you’re the privileged one, not them. Because that feels right to them.

It’s not something they do on purpose, and it’s not even that frontal and pronounced. It’s very subtle. Just this subtle way that women are. When they talk, act, make decisions.

This makes them very irritating. Even women find each other irritating.

Archwinger, “Male spaces are because women are irritating”, Archwinger’s Substack, 2026-02-25.

May 30, 2026

“Bullying”

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

I was bullied as a kid. I hated it. Most kids experience it, and either hate it or embrace it as “how things are done” (most likely both). This is basic human nature across all cultures. It’s how we learn how to conform, or appear to conform, to cultural expectations. In a pre-urban environment, the community could only handle so many non-conformists — that is: close to zero — so nipping it in the bud with the children was a pro-survival/pro-communitarian mechanism. In modern urban environments, bullying still happens because it’s part of human nature rather than being how children learn how to cope with social situations.

We’ve even migrated the notion of suppressing “bullying” to the military, as InfantryDort explains:

Any man who thinks bullying is ubiquitously inappropriate has the survival instincts of a deer gazing longingly at headlights.

For most of human history, communities had weak formal institutions. Public ridicule, shaming, and ostracism were used to enforce norms.

Examples:

> Villages mocking chronic thieves.
> Military units humiliating cowards.
> Tradesmen ridiculing apprentices who refused to learn.

The positive effect was often:

> Greater conformity to community standards.
> Faster correction of disruptive behavior.
> Stronger group cohesion.

It hardens individuals to harsh environments when properly applied. And enforces societal norms we want and dissuades the ones we don’t.

The lack of bullying is how people grow up to adulthood and say things like “I’m gonna kill you and your whole family” at some political protest. And have it come out of their mouth as normal as breathing.

Because nobody ever stood them down in their formative years.

You’re a JAG. You think every problem has a legal solution. It doesn’t. You don’t understand the way the world works outside of the one the law has carefully curated for you. Made possible by people who’ve been using strength to coerce others for all of human history.

Let me spank the kids while you do the dishes.

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