Quotulatiousness

September 22, 2026

The future of online free speech for Canadians

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

The Liberals in Ottawa prefer not to hear uppity citizens yapping about Liberal policies, and having a majority in the House of Commons means that there’s very little chance that they won’t be able to ram through a bill to curtail the ability of Canadians to speak freely online — that’s why I put a “warrant canary” in my daily Substack summary of blog posts. On X, John Carter has some advice that may be helpful to Canadians who don’t agree with the government:

Carney is essentially trying to implement Yookay style online speech controls. With his stolen majority government, there’s no way to stop him, and so no reason to expect that he won’t succeed.

Canadian nationalists therefore need to start being smart. Use coded language. Avoid overt “hate speech”. Don’t advocate violence. Use positive messaging, love of country rather than hatred of other. Make their job as difficult as possible.

This is nothing the right hasn’t seen before. The bad old days of Twitter censorship are not so far behind us. Britain and Europe already have very similar laws. That hasn’t stopped their nationalist communities. Censorship doesn’t change the underlying social conditions. At worst it prevents people from being too direct. Furthermore, by forcing dissidents to be clever, it exerts a selective pressure that raises the intellectual level of dissidents, while making the censors themselves increasingly ridiculous.

Censors themselves are usually very stupid people. Coded language tends to go right over their tiny heads. They don’t handle satire well. It’s also very easy to mock a regime like this by parroting its own vocabulary. Elbows up, everyone. Diversity is our greatest strength.

State capacity is another factor. How many censors do they actually have? How competent are they? (diversity is our greatest strength!) How many people can they actually enforce these laws on? Every time someone gets dragged into court the state is burning a significant quantity of time, energy, and attention. The cost-benefit of tasking bureaucrats, police officers, lawyers, and judges to punish random shitposts is math that doesn’t math very well. The entire strategy relies on making an example of a few to cow the many. If the many aren’t cowed, because for instance despite the censorship they can see with their own eyes what’s actually happening to their country on the street, all censorship does is piss people off and further undermine the legitimacy of a regime that would not be resorting to censorship in the first place if its legitimacy was beyond reproach.

This is bad. I’m not looking forward to it. But panic won’t help. Keep your wits about you, stay calm, be smart.

September 19, 2026

QotD: Islam and the rise of Western hegemony

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

Governments across the Islamic world began to adopt constitutions that directly contradicted what Muslims had always believed was the perfect and eternal law given to them by God. Simultaneously, they began to sign up to international bodies that, despite their claims to neutrality, were shot through with the ideological assumptions of the West. The most significant of these was the United Nations, which in December 1948 issued a definitive statement of its guiding principles: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This, which claimed in its preamble that acknowledgement of “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”, was in reality not at all as “universal” as it affected to be. Standing recognisably in a line of descent from the proclamations of the French Revolution, it served as well as a repudiation of some of the more foundational assumptions of Islamic theodicy.

The concept of human rights was an alien one to Islam. Muslims, traditionally, had not believed in natural law. There were only laws authored by God. The insistence of United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the rights of man” derived, not from the great inheritance of the Sunnah, but from the philosophes of the 18th century. Tellingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been signed — where else? — in Paris.

Western hegemony over the Islamic world, then, did not end with the collapse of direct rule over it by the European powers. Western values, Western assumptions, Western concepts of law, all of them packaged and marketed as “universal”, continued to exercise an overweening dominance in global affairs. If this was true for Muslims in lands that had sought to reconstitute themselves as nation states, then how much more so was it for Muslims who, in the decades that followed the Second World War, travelled to Europe, and settled there in growing numbers.

Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.

September 18, 2026

“The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us”

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Europe, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, John Carter points out the vast chasm between the capabilities of western nations and their timid aspirations for the future:

LeMO Erster Weltkrieg – Kriegsverlauf – Frühjahrsoffensive 1918
Photo from dhm.de

Western civilization is terrified of itself. The destructive power of our militaries is unparalleled in history. We can devastate continents in minutes. We can annihilate entire populations. We can reduce cities to rubble.

But we don’t.

The same is true of our industrial capability. We can erase mountains, redirect rivers, carve tunnels deep into bedrock, reshape entire landscapes as we please.

But we don’t.

The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us. Meanwhile, the unintended consequences of unrestricted development — air pollution, water pollution, soil erosion, habitat destruction, even the sheer rampant ugliness of so much of postwar industry — has left us leery of just doing things.

In the postwar era we began binding ourselves ever more tightly with laws. International law to restrict the use of military force; environmental laws, labour laws, indigenous rights laws, and so on to govern the use of our industrial capacity. We did this for good reason. No one wants nuclear war, or even a repeat of World War Two. No one wants another Three Mile Island, another Chernobyl. With great power comes great responsibility, and no civilization has ever been more powerful.

But the result has been to paralyze us.

Our militaries watch helplessly as supplicants invade us with begging bowls held up as their battle standards, prohibited from shooting the unarmed boats by governments bound by international treaties to respect the human rights of anyone who claims to be seeking asylum. Meanwhile we find that it is almost impossible to build anything. High-speed rail, bridges, highways, housing — all of it is slowed to an imperceptible crawl by a regulatory overburden designed to do precisely that. Gulliver held down by Lilliputian strings of his own design, his flesh swarming with hungry ants.

The emerging political coalition of the right is largely comprised of those factions who have grown impatient with this artificial paralysis of the will. Why shouldn’t we use our military to assert ourselves abroad, and defend our borders at home? Why shouldn’t we turn loose the incredible power of modern, heavily automated, high-tech industry to build wonders on a scale never before known? Why shouldn’t we conquer space? Why shouldn’t we use biomedical science to make ourselves beautiful, brilliant, healthy and fit? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be powerful? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be strong? We shouldn’t we reach for greatness?

The opposition consists of all those factions who are horrified by this, terrified of the strength of Western civilization, intent on slowing it, stopping its engine, dismantling the machine, and salting the biocultural soil from which it grew. Third worldists, climatists, AI safetyists, pacifists, open-borders activists, misinformation censors, DEI ideologues, international human rights NGOs, all of these cooperate to throw sand in the gears, to sabotage the West, to subordinate it and ultimately to destroy it.

September 10, 2026

Women’s dissatisfaction with modern life

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

On Substack Notes, Copernican linked to this article saying:

While revoking the 19th wouldn’t fix EVERYTHING, it’d probably be a step in the direction of reestablishing a structural social frame for a lot of women. The problem is that feminists want a system that works for the top 0.5% of women, while the historic systems have worked for 95% of women. We need systems that work for most people most of the time, not a small fraction of the population all the time.

For my (relatively few) non-American readers, “the 19th” refers to the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted the right to vote for women. Some cynics claim it was the fatal step leading to today’s political situation.

In the linked article, The Appalachian Gorilla wonders why women are so miserable:

There is a famous clip of Joe Budden and his crew watching a Bill Hicks joke with a woman. Bill hicks says he figures out how the fall of man from Eden happened. Adam said, “Look at this, Eve. We are one with nature, one with god and every time we fantasize about something, it becomes reality”. Eve looks at Adam and says, “Yeah, it’s just not enough, is it?” The guys laugh, and one of Joe Budden’s crew asks the woman why she wasn’t laughing, and she says, “I was just waiting for more”. Joe Budden immediately chimes in and says, “Yeah, that’s the point”. And everyone laughs.

Mitch Hedberg once made a joke that if you are ever lost in the woods, just build a house. You went from lost to being home.

Men will adapt to situations and eventually survive, making any situation the norm.

Women, though, can find themselves in the best situation possible and call it prison. I recently pointed out that I would kill to not have to go to work every day. I would kill to just spend time with my children. This isn’t a fantasy; I spent 6 months laid off with a 3-year-old and a 7-year-old, cooking, cleaning, fishing, reading bedtime stories, doing laundry, and loving life every day. There was a point where a hurricane hit the mountains here in PA, and we didn’t have power for 3 weeks back in the holler, and my sons and I spent the days fishing and the nights cooking and sitting by the fire staring at the stars.

Women are miserable, though, constantly. Not women in my life, just in general. Every protest, every demonstration, every meeting is full of women looking to enact vengeance on a man or some evil fabricated structure they built in their heads.

[…]

This is the thing. Why do women see these kids as work? Why do they see chores as work? I have seen women turn hygiene into work. I have seen them turn sex into work. This is an almost universal attitude. I say I get to be a dad. They say they have to be a mom. I say I get to cut my grass. They say I have to do the dishes. I enjoy doing the laundry and cooking meals. I get excited about food I make repeatedly. I get excited about hitting the grocery store and getting fresh eggs or stopping at a local spot to get them from a farm.

I have seen so many women turn sex into a chore or a reward or a way to punish their significant other. Let’s be honest about this too. Most women do 0 work in bed. They may claw your back or throw it back when on their knees, but most won’t ride to fruition. They want choked and hit and slapped. I have been asked to spit on them, or finishing on their face is a reward for them. They want swings built or contraptions to restrain them. Insane stuff to give the illusion of danger.

I cook my relationships because, well, I enjoy food, refuse to eat Kraft Mac and Cheese, have never had ramen noodles, and will not start eating them at 43. Food is supposed to be the most basic of love given from one person to another. It is the labor of love and skill translated to reality. Sustaining another human from your hands to their plate is a beautiful way to connect with others. Doing so for your children, or having them cook with you and watch them appreciate their own labor and ability, is beautiful. Seeing their skill level rise with each meal is amazing. Women act like teaching their children is a chore.

I must say that this is not all women, but it is most at this point in our society. I know there are fathers out here who are pieces of shit, but most I know are good men who have been railroaded by the system and have to work 5 jobs to pay child support to keep themselves afloat while dealing with the loss of identity, their children, and fighting the depression that goes with that.

I once asked a wiser man than myself, “Why do women continue a system that will destroy their sons?” He replied, “Because women don’t actually like children. They like babies.” Today, though, with what we are seeing with women making videos where they are admitting they want to harm their children or even joking about dropping their children off the steps or a balcony or into a dryer to support Lindsey Clancy, it makes all of us wonder if they actually even like babies.

The tragedy of the commons at sea

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When a valuable commodity isn’t directly owned by anyone, the incentives are for everyone to grab as much of the commodity as they can. Nobody will preserve it, because they wouldn’t get the benefit from it: it would be shared among all the other users. Fishing grounds outside coastal waters are valuable commodities that nobody owns:

Nobody owns the ocean floor off the Georges Bank, and so between 1960 and 1994 the New England cod population collapsed by roughly 70 percent while every fishing fleet on the Atlantic raced to pull up fish before a competitor did. This race is the entirely predictable consequence of absent ownership.

Garrett Hardin formalized the problem in 1968, but the mechanism is older than economics itself. When no individual owns a resource, no individual bears the full cost of depleting it. The cost gets distributed across everyone; the benefit goes straight to whoever acts first. You extract as much as you physically can before the next boat arrives. So does the next boat. The resource disappears, and everyone stands around pointing fingers at greed. The actual culprit is the property rights regime, or rather the absence of one.

State managers offer themselves as the solution: quotas, licensing boards, regulatory agencies. The Atlantic fisheries commission issued exactly these instruments. The cod is still not back. Bureaucrats lack the price signals, local knowledge, and personal stakes that make stewardship rational. A regulator who mismanages a fishery keeps his salary; an owner who does the same loses his capital.

Private ownership forces the owner to think in time. Iceland extended exclusive fishing rights to its own coastal fishermen in 1975, drove foreign trawlers out, and now holds one of the best-managed cod stocks in the North Atlantic. Property rights did what Brussels-style quota spreadsheets could not: they tied the fisherman’s future income to the health of the stock today.

Common ownership produces a sprint to zero.

August 29, 2026

Amnesty International

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

Frederick Alexander wonders “what the hell happened to Amnesty International”?

I’m firmly in middle age, and the signs are all there. I can’t have a lie-in any more; I just wake up early, feeling unrested, and have to mainline caffeine for the first hour before I can get anything done. My lower back aches constantly and now works like a barometer, the pain increasing with an approaching cold front. And I’m old enough to remember when Amnesty International was an admirable organisation that defended the oppressed – back when that word described people suffering in the real world rather than grievances the sociology department workshopped into existence. Such are some of the complaints of a middle-aged Englishman, but it’s the third that vexes me most today.

Amnesty really was something special once. It stood for dissidents and prisoners of conscience: the Chinese journalist tortured for saying something that embarrassed the CCP; writers like Václav Havel, imprisoned by communist Czechoslovakia before later becoming the country’s president. I loved The Secret Policeman’s Ball, the Amnesty benefit shows associated with John Cleese. My record collection was full of Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and the like, who helped carry the cause into stadiums around the world. Who could not admire an organisation devoted to freedom – that most contested of political ideals, and the one closest to my heart?

Today Amnesty International is a case study in everything that has gone wrong with our institutions.

Consider the latest episode, one entry in a long and growing list of absurdities. In July, Amnesty International UK published a list of organisations it said belonged to an “anti-rights ecosystem”, including Beira’s Place, the female-only support service for victims of sexual violence founded by JK Rowling. Other names among the 117 supposedly malign bodies were For Women Scotland and Sex Matters – whose great offence is essentially to insist that women exist as a biological category.

Compiling lists of ideological offenders is a bit … what’s the word? Totalitarian? Fascistic? The organisation that once existed to defend prisoners of conscience decided it would be a good idea to draw up a register of thought-criminals, a rape-crisis centre among them. I can’t imagine Tracy Chapman strumming a guitar for that. I don’t know what Peter Gabriel makes of it either. If either of them is still sane (I’m too afraid to check), they’ll likely frown on the direction of travel.

Rowling, who once worked for Amnesty back when it defended people with the “wrong” beliefs rather than compiling lists of them, threatened legal action and offered to help other organisations on the list do the same. Amnesty first expressed regret – the standard move while they work out how much trouble they’re in – and then issued an apology when they realised she was not mucking about, saying the briefing should never have been published.

Amnesty said, “We regret that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established internal review processes”, which is the institutional equivalent of “the dog ate the homework”. But I’ve worked in this kind of outfit. Things like this don’t go up by accident. This wasn’t a pocket tweet. Reports go through layer after layer of review before sign-off – after which everyone holds a little drinks party to congratulate themselves on a job well done, and someone gives a small speech while another has a bit of a cry.

August 16, 2026

In Ontario, bike lanes are not a “human right”, thank goodness

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

On his Substack, Brian Lilley celebrates two recent developments in Ontario that — unlike so many others in the last several years — align with common sense:

Last year I wrote about the horrible court decision put out by “Justice” Paul Schabas on bike lanes being a Charter right. I put “Justice” in quotations because as I described at the time, the decision was so horrible and so political that it wasn’t worthy of an Ontario court.

Today, the Court of Appeal of Ontario agreed with me. As I wrote in my Toronto Sun column, they didn’t just overturn the ridiculous decision by Schabas, they excoriated him and his ruling.

AI-generated image from Brian Lilley

I quoted different sections of the appeals court ruling in my column, and trust me it was tough to choose which parts to quote in such a brilliant decisions. Here, I want to quote from early in the ruling, paragraphs 3-5.

    [3] The application judge’s decision presents as a straightforward application of orthodox s. 7 principles. But the application of those principles, divorced from a broader understanding of the constitution of which they are a part, has led to a surprising outcome: the conclusion that routine legislation regulating road usage is unconstitutional.

    [4] Something has gone wrong.

    [5] The application judge erred in law in interpreting and applying s. 7. But his decision is wrong in a more profound sense, for it subverts a fundamental principle of our democratic constitutional order: a legislature cannot bind its successors. Legislatures in the Westminster tradition are free to undo legislation by amending or repealing it as they see fit. That is the nature of democratic lawmaking in our constitutional order. Of course, all laws are subject to the Charter, but this does not preclude the amendment or repeal of legislation the legislature was under no constitutional obligation to have passed in the first place. Amendment or repeal of legislation may breach the Charter only if the breach can be established independent of the prior state of the law.

There is so much to digest here, but I am glad to see judges — who come from different backgrounds and were appointed by both the Harper and Trudeau governments — agree on fundamental principles. That should be a given, we shouldn’t think about such things, but today, we can’t those fundamentals for granted.

The idea that one Parliament, or legislature, cannot bind the hands of another is fundamental to our system. If I pass a law saying that wearing blue on Tuesdays is illegal and the next Parliament passes a law saying that it isn’t, the more recent law takes precedent.

Yes, I used a ridiculous example on purpose, but just to prove a point. It’s sad that so many people, including those who report and comment on politics, aren’t familiar with this basic concept on the role of Parliament.

And the other reversal of an absurd policy:

Last month there was a tribunal ruling in Ontario that said people in the country illegally were still entitled to welfare. I wrote about it at the time and said it was a crazy ruling that the Ford government needed to deal with.

They promised to do so at the time and on Thursday announced that they had.

Friday morning I was forced to write about the ridiculous take by the Toronto Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” Nicholas Keung. It seems, based on his stories, that Keung has never met someone he doesn’t think should be in Canada.

I’ll say as the son of immigrants, who grew up in an area where kids with parents who had Canadian accents were the strange ones, most immigrants don’t back illegals getting welfare.

Still, this was the Star‘s headline on the story.

As I point out in my Sun column, Parsa is himself an immigrant having come from Iran with his family as a child.

But sure, the Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” smears him as racist.

Let me explain something to you. When a reporter says “experts” say and they only find experts from one side, that is them finding the people they agree with to say what they want said.

How Not to Be A Nazi – Death of Democracy 28 – Epilogue

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 Aug 2026

Nazi Germany destroyed democracy in weeks, launched a war that killed tens of millions, and carried racial persecution to industrialized mass murder. But after 1945, Germans and Europeans faced another question: how could they prevent it from ever happening again?

In this final, independently viewable epilogue to Death of Democracy, Spartacus examines how West Germany transformed the lessons of dictatorship and war into the Grundgesetz — a constitutional system built around human dignity, enforceable rights, federalism, judicial independence, social stability, and a democracy empowered to defend itself.

We trace how the Federal Republic combined lessons from Weimar, the United States, Britain, Austria, France, and other democratic traditions; how Konrad Adenauer’s generation tied Germany to a new European order; and how the same determination to restrain power and prevent another continental war eventually shaped the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty.

Finally, we ask how well those democratic fortifications are holding in 2026 — and return one last time to the diarists, victims, witnesses, supporters, and resisters whose voices guided us through Germany’s descent into dictatorship.

From the comments:

@spartacus-olsson
12 hours ago

Thank you for joining me on this adventure. I hope it has been eye-opening. If you watched to the very end, you will know that I’m soon launching a World War 2 Trivia board game – I’ve been super punny and named it World War IIrivia (2rivia with Roman numerals).

After so many years of studying this and sharing it in the darkest possible way, I felt it was time to look at the whole affair in a way that’s fun, social, and still educational. So a couple of months ago I came up with something. It turned out to be one of those moments when the work seems like extra fun. Before I knew it, I was spending my sleepless nights on the idea, sketching rules in Word, writing questions into lists in Excel, designing the game in Photoshop, testing gameplay against myself, and redesigning. And then there it was — an actual game. It’s a game for both novices and experts, with some unexpected twists and turns. If you’re interested in this period of history and enjoy a night of board games, this is for you. Stay tuned for more updates about the launch.

Once again, many, many thanks to all of you for watching. Thank you to Iryna, Astrid, Anna, and Clara for your great work on the series. Thank you to the TimeGhost Army members for enabling me to do this. With that, as Mr. Murrow would put it:

Good Night and Good Luck,
Your Spartacus

August 14, 2026

“Ultra vires“

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eva Chipiuk explains why it’s never a good thing to have your government ever extending the things it is involved in:

Governments going ultra vires should concern every citizen.

Ultra vires means “beyond the powers”. In a democracy, governments and public institutions do not have unlimited authority. They can only exercise the powers the law actually gives them.

Yet increasingly, we see governments, regulators, agencies, and other public bodies stretching their mandates, assuming powers they were never granted, and acting as though their authority is limited only by what they can get away with.

That turns the rule of law on its head.

The question should never be: “Where does the law say government can’t do this?”

The question is: “Where does the law give government the authority to do this?”

That distinction matters.

Government is not above the law. Public institutions are creatures of law, and their power has boundaries. When those boundaries are ignored, courts must enforce them, legislatures must correct them, and citizens must demand accountability.

Because once we accept government exercising powers it was never given, the limits on government become meaningless.

Staying within your legal jurisdiction is not optional. It is the foundation of the rule of law.

August 8, 2026

Larry Correia’s A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia reposts his talking point guide on the issue of gun control:

Looks like it is time to once again post my A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points!

A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn’t be armed at all.

B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.

C. Even though it takes orders of magnitude more effort to become marginally effective with martial arts than a gun, you are better off using martial arts and not having a gun.

D. *Real Men* use their hands. This is why your mom and grandma shouldn’t have guns either.

E. Twitter randos who have never been punched in the face are experts on real life violence, and whatever you have personally experienced doesn’t count.

F. No matter how trained you are, it is never enough for the hypothetical attacker they make up. Sure, your concealed handgun might be enough to stop a regular robber or rapist, but what about if you get attacked by 20 Chechen terrorists with AKs, huh? Huh? (we call this the Dracula Riding Godzilla rule)

G. If the anti-gun vulture was ever in the military, this makes them a Military Trained Expert. Even though most of the time this means they got to put 20 rounds through an M-16 once in 1992.

H. No matter how many certified MMA bad asses or combat vets go “lol wut, dork? I’d rather have a gun.” the anti-gun Twitter vulture will remain undeterred.

I. Goldilocks Rules apply. No matter how much you know about guns, you’re either too ignorant and dangerous, or you know too much and that makes you dangerous. Whatever amount the anti-gun zealot knows is Just Right.

K. Whatever stats they pull out of their ass are sacrosanct. If you cite any numbers they reflexively scream “SOURCE?!” and then have some reason they won’t accept that source when provided. “The actual FBI Crime Statistics? LAME!”

L. At some point they’ll need to talk about how big our penises are, because guns are for compensation. Obviously the female gun owners are compensating for their tiny uteruses.

M. “I believe in the Second Amendment BUUUUUUUUT-” (insert statist bullshit here)

N. If you insist on using terms correctly and words having actual definitions, clearly this demonstrates you are a fanatic. Words mean whatever they need to mean in that moment, especially legal ones.

O. “Castle Doctrine” is a secret right wing code word that means that you can just shoot whoever you want.

P. Get ready for a history lesson about “what the founders really intended” from some dumb motherfucker who was stoned through every history class in high school.

Q. Everybody knows big blue cities are way safer than the scary red state flyover country.

R. Gun control isn’t racist! Sure, historical gun control was all about keeping guns out of the hands of the “undesirables” like freed slaves, Indians, and the Irish, but that’s totally different now!

S. AR-15s are the most dangerous gun that’s ever existed. It can fire ten thousand ultra deadly murder bullets a second and each one can explode a moose from a thousand yards away. There is nothing this miracle death machine can’t do.

T. lol your AR-15s are utterly useless against a tyrannical government.

U. The NRA is an all-powerful, super evil entity which has tricked innocent Americans into wanting ultra deadly assault rifles, to satisfy their incessant blood lust. They do this through their ultra powerful marketing, like giving out free hats.

V. Anti-gun organizations are all totally innocent grass roots movements made up of moms, orphans, and kittens, funded entirely by bake sales, who just want the best for all Americans.

W. “I grew up around guns” makes you an unassailable subject matter expert on the topic.

X. The gun industry is made up of giant soulless mega corporations who make trillions of dollars off of selling Glocks to preschoolers. This message was brought to you by benevolent small businesses like the six companies that own most of the world’s media.

Y. Even though everything the anti-gunner proposes is ass backwards and would just make the problems they are crying about worse, and everywhere they get their way good people are disarmed while evil doers are empowered…they CARE HARDER than we do. So we’re the real bad guys.

Z. “You sound angry.”

July 28, 2026

“The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization”

Filed under: Europe, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski discusses the history of the right to bear arms from ancient Greece to modern America:

The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real.

1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else.

2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after.

3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state.

4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging.

5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design.

6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign.

7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.

July 11, 2026

Governments should not have easy access to emergency powers

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As we found out in Canada in 2022, when the government gives itself emergency powers unrestricted by normal legal procedure and due process, they abuse those powers. The UK government is eager to grant itself similar powers due to a “climate emergency” that will, among other things suspend habeus corpus and the 1689 Bill of Rights:

Emergency, d’ye see? National security emergency.

But here’s the problem if the government declares a national security emergency:

    Part 1 of the act establishes a new and broad definition of “emergency”. The definition includes war or attack by a foreign power, which were defined as emergencies under previous legislation, as well as terrorism which poses a threat of serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom and events which threaten serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom or to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.

Damage to the environment in the UK. So, that matches. And if they then declare such an emergency, under the act, then the following laws — among others — no longer apply:

    The only primary legislation which may not be amended by emergency regulations is the Human Rights Act 1998 and part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act itself

That is, all other laws no longer apply. It’s an Enabling Act, allowing rule by decree for the length of the emergency. Absolutely everything is up for grabs. These laws are not, repeat not, protected:

    The peers tried to protect the following laws from emergency regulation:

    Habeas Corpus Act 1679

    Bill of Rights 1689

    Section 7 of the Parliament Act 1911 which limited the duration of a parliament to five years[e]

    Act of Settlement 1701

    House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975

    Life Peerages Act 1958

    House of Lords Act 1999

Seriously, it wipes out the entire legal and constitutional structure.

So, you know, no. Not because there is, or isn’t, a climate change emergency. But because of the powers they’ll take if one is declared.

No.

It’s not November yet, but this sign seems rather appropriate:

July 9, 2026

A new proposal for limiting “unreasonable searches and seizures”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Reason, Jacob Sullum outlines Justice Gorsuch’s proposed new test for limiting government abilities to surveil and monitor private actions:

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy swears in Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Court’s 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, which held that the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies when people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, continues to shape Fourth Amendment rulings six decades later. That was clear on June 29, when the Court decided Chatrie v. United States, holding that a government-ordered analysis of cellphone location data qualifies as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information”, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion joined by four of her colleagues. Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the result but not the rationale. The Katz test, he complained, “has no basis in the Constitution’s text or history”. He added that it has proven unworkable in practice because it has never been clear how courts should determine whether an expectation of privacy is “reasonable”.

Gorsuch is surely right that the Katz test has produced inconsistent and puzzling results. In cases addressing intrusions such as trash searches, demands for bank and telephone records, surveillance by low-flying aircraft, and police trespassing on private property, the Supreme Court has perceived no expectations of privacy it was prepared to recognize as reasonable. Applying the same test, it has repeatedly ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to information that people voluntarily share with third parties. Yet the Court has repeatedly rebelled at the disturbing implications of that principle without explicitly renouncing it.

That is what happened in Chatrie, which involved a Virginia bank robbery investigation. Police used a “geofence” warrant to identify the perpetrator by requiring Google to search customer data collected by its Location History feature, which tracks the whereabouts of cellphone users. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Court declined to apply the third-party doctrine, instead reverting to the original, unmodified Katz test.

A better approach, Gorsuch argued, would be to treat Location History records as “effects” covered by the Fourth Amendment — as a form of personal property, in other words. While it is not clear exactly how that property-rights approach would work in other contexts, it does seem less malleable than the Katz test, which gives courts wide discretion in discerning expectations and deciding whether they are reasonable. Gorsuch aptly likened the Court’s understanding of that test to its definition of obscenity in the 1960s: “We know a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ (and an exception to the third party doctrine) when we see it”.

June 20, 2026

Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”

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

Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.

The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.

If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.

The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.

As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:

– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”

– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).

– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.

– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.

– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin

– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.

– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.

– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American

Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism

While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement

It impacts you too

June 15, 2026

QotD: “… shall not be infringed”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The United States Constitution is the highest law of the land. Its Amendments, it therefore follows, are the highest of the high. Read the Second Amendment for yourself. It forbids the government from infringing on the individual right to own and carry weapons. Now look up the word “infringe” in a decent dictionary. Not a single federal, state, or local gun law of any kind, from 1917 until today, is Constitutional.

L. Neil Smith, “Ballistic Exceptionalism”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2020-09-20.

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