Quotulatiousness

June 15, 2026

European World Cup tourists in the US

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia notes that Europeans’ reactions to visiting the United States changes once they get out of the big cities:

The posts from World Cup Europeans seeing actual America has been great. The shock and awe is hilarious.

I think it’s because their perspective has been based on TV shows (overwhelmingly set in LA or NYC, which get everything wrong about the rest of the nation because the writers are usually provincial liberal dorks who despise the rest of the country) and when they do come here as tourists it is to the same handful of tourist places. Which are always artificial, weird, and crowded.

It turns out that when you get away from our big stupid blue cities, and all the societal decay that comes from liberals not being able to govern worth a shit, America is actually really awesome.

I’ve been to 45 US states. I’ve enjoyed all of them. Even the blue ones, once I’m away from the parts that are entirely paved where lawless crazy people are allowed to shit in the streets and threaten everyone. It’s just a collapse of leadership, and democrats being inept, not giving a fuck as long as they’re still getting paid, or actively rooting for society’s destruction because they’re deluded morons who think they’re going to build a socialist utopia from the ashes.

America has managed to isolate that retarded shit tier philosophy mostly to our big blue city liberal enclaves, where lawless dumb shit can rule, while the rest of us live relatively normal lives, and our politics are primarily based on keeping those assholes away from our stuff as much as possible.

But the cool Europeans have been trapped on a continent where that philosophy rules EVERYWHERE. They’ve got nowhere to escape from their mediocre control freaks. Their shocking discovery that normal sane people can still just do things, and make things, and build, and have fun, and be safe, and raise their kids, is what’s making this whole thing fun.

I don’t follow soccer, futbol, whatever. But I am cheering on some Europeans right now. 😀

Update: Fixed broken link.

June 4, 2026

Sci-Fi and the WWII Mythos Part II : The Political Element

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

Feral Historian
Published 16 Jan 2026

Last time I was focused on cultural aspects, but what about the direct political manifestations today? Is there a resurgence of neo-nazi attitudes or is just an artifact of the ubiquity of digital media preserving everything? Why might those ideas resonate with the young, and how does it fit with my argument that the old myths are breaking down?

00:00 Intro
01:42 Right, Left, and Gen-Z
02:56 Patterns of Force
04:25 Rambling about Economics
05:48 Efficient? No.
06:39 Bifurcation
08:00 Loss of Perspective

This one is a direct result of a conversation on the Talking History program on KSMU (I’ll link the episode when goes up) and covers something that came up but wasn’t really addressed well.
(more…)

May 30, 2026

Unlike Canada, Sweden can have a sensible, rational public discussion on indigenous issues

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

Yeah, I know. I’m just as shocked as you are, but Warren Mirko and Laurisa Dohm have the receipts:

“Swedish flag” by JSolomon is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Something happened in Sweden recently that would be nearly unthinkable in Canada.

There was a substantive public discourse about the tension between Indigenous rights, the broader public interest, and the state’s jurisdiction, in prominent newspapers and on television.

Ebba Busch, Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, stood at a press conference in LuleÃ¥ and argued that reindeer herding should no longer be classified as a riksintresse, a formal national interest designation that grants legal protection in land-use planning. She proposed that reindeer stocks should be cut and subsidies re-allocated to other cultural programs in order to ease tensions between competing land-use interests in northern Sweden. Her reasoning: reindeer herding affects very large areas of Sweden’s land mass but carries limited economic significance.

The response was immediate. Indigenous Sámi groups called it election propaganda. The chairman of Girjas Sámi village published a rebuttal arguing that Sámi rights to hunt and fish are grounded in ancient tradition, and that her party’s framing mischaracterizes those rights as economic interest rather than constitutionally recognized Indigenous rights. The Swedish public broadcaster’s own reporter called the debate “a hornet’s nest“.

And yet the debate actually took place. On the nightly news, no less.

Deputy Prime Minister Busch made a substantive argument about how she thinks the state should weigh competing interests in its northern regions, with her reasoning stated plainly, and Sámi leaders answered in kind. That is democratic governance.

Canada’s political class has spent decades avoiding exactly this kind of clarity and honest intellectual engagement. It has been sacrificed at the altar of conflict avoidance and by the acceptance of canned platitudes carefully crafted to say precisely nothing at all.

Sweden ranks fourth in the world on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, with a near perfect score of 9.4/10 for political culture. It also takes Indigenous rights seriously, having established an independent truth commission in 2020 to study historical abuses against the Sámi.

And yet Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court upheld the government’s decision in June 2024 to grant an iron ore mining concession at Kallak in northern Lapland, despite contentious opposition and legal arguments that insufficient consultation had violated Sámi’s rights to free, prior, and informed consent. Now, its Deputy Prime Minister is arguing publicly that the state must regain clearer authority to make decisions across its entire territory, and that the interests of reindeer herding cannot be allowed to dominate and block decision making processes as they do today.

Sadly, Canada does not seem to take lessons from more mature nations. Or any lessons, really. Our politicians are so afraid of “third rail” issues and controversy that they avoid any hint of actually addressing real problems in favour of performative announcements, repeated endlessly with no attempt to actually perform actions.

May 29, 2026

Progressives, suddenly – “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!”

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

Apologies to Mel Brooks for hijacking that line from Blazing Saddles. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, signs of panic from the media and media-adjacent progressive ranks as they realize Silicon Valley is an existential threat to their media monopoly:

    Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound

    One aside on the Blair conversation

    I’m absolutely gobsmacked at the level of hostility to “tech bros” and the belief that we can just insulate ourselves from AI and technology

    Like listening to weavers on the spinning Jenny or Hanson cab drivers on the advent of the motor car

Look this isn’t complicated.

The left hates you because they’re (correctly) worried AI is going to replace the “work” they do for their comfortable professional-managerial class sinecures, while at the same time they are (correctly) concerned that AI generated video will completely neutralize the remaining cultural influence they wield via their control of entertainment media.

The right (correctly) views you with suspicion and contempt because you already replaced white men with H1Bindians, which hurt us economically, and also enshittified the Internet, which was further enshittified due to your perfidious collaboration with leftists during the peak of the Great Awokening’s censorship and deplatforming push.

Despite your years of service to them, the left wants to immolate your headless corpses on funeral pyres built from your burning data centres, merely because you MIGHT be a threat to them in the near future.

Despite your record of pusillanimity, the right — some of us — are willing to work with you. That is a godsend for you, because we are literally your only defence right now.

But we have conditions, and those conditions are not negotiable.

May 25, 2026

QotD: Modern movie casting

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the English speaking world, it has become common to “blackwash” movies and television shows. This is the process of removing white characters and replacing them with non-white characters. The stated claim is that popular entertainment needs to reflect the changing nature of the audience. Of course, the reason the audience is changing is that the same people blackwashing films and television shows are ethnically cleansing white societies with mass immigration.

For a long time now, Hollywood has been taking great care to make the good characters black and the bad ones white. For a short while, the bad guys could be Arab terrorists, but now bad guys are white again. If they need to be foreign baddies, then they are neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or Russian gangsters. Of course, the smartest characters are black or female. If we’re lucky, the brainiac is a black lesbian. Every computer hacker is now non-white or female.

On occasion the blackwashing gets ridiculous. Some figure from white history is played by a black actor. A black guy in a show about medieval Europe could be amusing, but that’s not how it is done. Instead, we get black cowboys saving a white town or a black playing King Lear. It will not be long before we have historical dramas in which well-known figures from white history are played by black actors as black people. Imagine Ben Franklin played by Morgan Freeman.

The Z Man, “Blackwashing”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-02.

May 24, 2026

Hollywood took the wrong lessons from Joss Whedon’s work

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

I was a huge fan of the TV show Firefly, which I think was Joss Whedon’s best work — perhaps more so because it was cancelled before any of his typical tics and quirks took the show in overtly progressive directions. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a comment on yesterday’s post about writers needing empathy to fully portray the characters they create:

    Koko (literal gorilla) @Mark68002312

    I think Joss Whedon did great at writing characters in the Joss Whedon universe. At least through Firefly.

    I don’t understand how people — even people who don’t write for a living — think the character and the context/universe they live in are independent

Joss Whedon wrote the characters in Firefly the way he did because they were:

1. Rebels and iconoclasts, thus irreverent.
2. Broken people, thus inclined to hide deep pain behind shallow humor.
3. Familiar with each other already, thus more likely to banter.

The style worked in Firefly because it created a sense of character and setting, which it was appropriate to.

Joss was no master of individualizing character voice, but he at least managed to get the group dynamics right.

However, Hollywood, sack of narcissistic overfunded retards that they are, managed to learn the wrong lesson from the show’s resonance with audiences.

“Oh, the people want light, quippy dialogue with a joke to interrupt every tense moment with a laugh. They are not interested in drama, pathos, gravitas, or emotional weight”, they concluded, and proceeded to pack every damn film with snark for the next twenty years, like Pacific islanders making landing strips and control towers out bamboo, enacting rituals to bring the “cargo” back.

The lesson they should have learned is that audience want, will always want, dialogue that illustrates and enhances character and setting.

Banter is a good tool, sometimes, but it is one good tool in a toolbox of many, and an author must select the right one to do character voice correctly.

    “He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays …”

    “Here.” Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. “Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It’s how men’s shoes are made.”

    “Thus I am served,” Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, “for scorning the arts of mechanics.”

Don Simon Ysidro doesn’t say “Well excuuuuuse me for not knowing all about shoes”, because Don Simon Ysidro is a three hundred year old Spanish nobleman turned vampire, not a homosexual Las Vegas nightclub DJ.

And when he remarks upon his own deficiency in knowledge, he says “mechanics”, not “tradesmen”, or “blue-collar workers”, because to a nobleman of the renaissance, a “rude mechanical” is not an impolite robot, he is an uncultured man who works at physical labor or crafts, rather than social or intellectual pursuits.

May 18, 2026

QotD: Medical ads

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

I don’t understand commercials for medicine anymore. I mean, I understand what they’re trying to say when they advertise a medication and list its possible side effects. I just don’t understand why they bother anymore. Nobody takes these advertisements seriously. The other day, I saw a spot for something called Restless Legs Syndrome. I was stunned when it ended without turning into a “Good news; I just saved 15 percent on my car insurance by switching to Geico” commercial. That’s how bad it’s gotten. It doesn’t even matter how legitimate the affliction is. It could be cancer at this point. It could be a pill to stop spontaneous human combustion. Wouldn’t matter. I see these commercials and instinctively shrug them off. I suffer from Grain of Salt Disorder.

Jonathan David Morris, “Thoughts On Health”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-18.

May 13, 2026

QotD: The advertising business

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Television is the great propaganda weapon of the liberal democratic state, so it is a useful window into the thinking of the oligarchs. Movies and television shows still have to attract an audience, so they are usually the trailing edge of whatever the oligarchs are trying to impose on society, but the ads are a different matter. They are the leading edge of the latest Progressive fads. They know people will not abandon a show or movie just because the ads are offensive.

That’s what makes the ads a useful window into the black soul of our rulers. The ad makers are all from the ruling class. Look at the team photo of an ad agency and it looks like the faculty of an Ivy League college. There may be a little color in there for show, but otherwise it is all men with small hats and people who still write “Episcopalian” when asked about their religion. The advertising agencies that produce these ads are the special forces of the Judeo-Puritan ruling class.

The Z Man, “Turn Off, Tune Out and Drop Out”, The Z Blog, 2020-09-04.

April 29, 2026

Three views on the Iran conflict

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, Alex Story outlines the three distinct ways that western opinions differ on the ongoing struggle with Iran:

The BBC has a long history of … careful wording in describing events in Iran since 1979. I don’t think this cartoon is unfair in portraying that.

TRUTH is the first casualty of war.

Opinions on a conflict depend deeply on the prevailing culture, erasing nuance in the process. The less of it there is, the easier it is to convince yourself of your righteousness and your opponents’ wickedness.

For instance, the Iranian question divides the world in three main groups.

The first staunchly believes that the Israeli tail wags the American foreign policy dog, working around the clock to recreate Israel’s “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates” Old Testament borders as described in Genesis 15:18.

The second will accept the long-standing Islamic Republic of Iran’s evil nature and its core philosophy of perpetual warfare leading in due course to the unbeliever’s submission but are sceptical if it can be removed solely by this war. As David, an exiled Iranian, said: “I’m caught between wishing for the end of the regime and the very real prospect of its entrenchment through external violence”.

The third will argue that the Iranian leadership should be obliterated. Ending the regime’s five-decades long barbarism, exemplified by the slaughter of “40,000 Iranians” across the country in January 2026 in Prince Reza Pahlavi’s recent words, would make the world a better place. Having lived by the sword, the mullahs should die by the sword, they will say, adding that few will miss them.

Positions turn into intellectual fortresses at the speed of light, fed by a constant stream of “news” destined to further harden preconceived ideas. Little is provided that offers any hope of peaceful co-existence. Data is used, ignored and abused, thus ensuring escalation and lying becomes the accelerator for a world on its irrevocable path to war.

But while truth dies early in the antagonists’ deadly exchanges, war eventually reveals it, and its revelations tend towards the astounding.

In our case, for instance, it has become crystal clear that Britain is now effete, irrelevant and defanged. It is a flotsam on rough international seas, bullied by some, ridiculed by others and ignored by all who have not yet emasculated themselves.

The United Kingdom, the former global hegemon and only European country to come out of the Second World War justified, is not the same country it once was, dismantled stone by stone by an establishment haughtily bent on demise over decades and encouraging others, partially successfully, to follow them down to the Gates of Hades.

Our end, however, cannot all be pinned on Starmer, Hermer, Sands, the Fabians and purple-haired socialists.

He then goes on to make the case that only a counter-revolution will rescue Britain from its current path to misery and global irrelevance.

April 22, 2026

“Finally authorities gave up and decided to let Timmy the Whaletard die in peace”

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

The German media has been breathlessly covering the story of a wandering whale who seems to delight in getting stranded on sandbanks along the northern coast of Germany in the Baltic Sea:

Timmy
Photo from eugyppius

Timmy is the name the German press have given to a confused humpback whale who got himself caught in a fishing net off the coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in early March.

Authorities cut Timmy free in the hopes that he would swim back to the Atlantic like a good whale, but instead he continued to poop around off the German Baltic coast where he does not belong, finally stranding himself on a sandbar near Niendorf like a complete fucking retard.1 An intensive rescue ensued – breathlessly livestreamed by the German press and regrettably also live-tweeted by myself. Ultimately the effort succeeded and Timmy swam free, only to strand himself again, and again, and again, and still again.

Finally authorities gave up and decided to let Timmy the Whaletard die in peace, but soon a whole raft of philanthropists and “whale whisperers” (this is literally what the press called one of them) descended on the problem and the drama of Timmy continues to this moment. The latest subplot unfolded yesterday, as our whale saviours prepared a complex scheme to lift Timmy via air cushions onto a tarp, tie him to pontoons and tug him around Denmark back into the North Atlantic. Alas, a rising tide loosened the hapless Timmy from his sandbar and he swam free, escaping this indignity at least and leaving all the whale-whispering shitheads with nothing to do but give more pointless media interviews. For two hours children across the Federal Republic jubilated as Timmy lurked aimlessly in shallow coastal waters, until of course he beached himself again, provoking a whole new narrative epicycle.

The case of Timmy the Retard Whale is oddly captivating. Most obviously it illustrates the naiveté and neotenous emotional incontinence of Germans today, many of whom have countered the pervasive secularisation of society with an exaggerated and childish faith in the overarching sacrality of the natural world and its creatures. The media have constructed a perverse Disney plot out of the endless ups and downs of Timmy’s plight: Now the whale is free! Now he is dying! Now he must be rescued! Now he is free again! Now he is stranded! Now there is hope! Now he is dying! Not only children but plenty of adults have lost themselves in this transparently repetitive drama. At one point a gaggle of dumb women even protested to demand that authorities do more to save our unsaveable humpback – who is of course merely one of perhaps 100,000 humpbacks across the world, the vast majority of whom will die in complete obscurity with nary a news article.

In my more delirious moments I wonder if Timmy is not also an omen from on high, a metaphor from the heavens to illustrate for us the ridiculous, circular farce that Germany has become.

  1. He was named Timmy for Timmendorfer Strand, where he beached himself for the first time. My efforts to christen him Horst have not caught on. I know the good Timmy is probably disoriented due to illness or injury and not actually retarded but this is how I have chosen to maintain emotional distance from the fate of this particular incorrigible mammal, who is beyond all human capacity to rescue but unfortunately not beyond all of my sympathies.

April 20, 2026

“Hail, Caesar!” oops we meant “Hail, Carney!”

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

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies discusses the unseemly media adulation1 for Caesar Prime Minister Mark Carney after more than a year in power:

Grok illustration of PM Carney as Caesar
Image from The Rewrite.

Thirteen months into his reign as prime minister, we still don’t know who Mark Carney is or how he engineered the removal of Justin Trudeau from office.

Nor do we know what really happened behind the scenes to convince five Members of Parliament to betray their constituents’ democratic decisions and, for the first time in the nation’s history, give Canadians a majority government they didn’t elect.

What we do know is that none of that seems of great interest to most of our media or, as they like to describe themselves when seeking federal subsidies, “defenders of democracy”.

As The Rewrite noted a year ago, the moves behind the scenes to effect the abrupt ouster of Trudeau remain a mystery. And, unlike with other PMs, there have been no Carney family magazine profiles. (Who can forget Justin and Sophie Trudeau‘s sexy Vogue cover?) Yes, there are the books, Values and The Hinge. We have learned he likes hockey, runs, won’t criticize China and is ruthless. But there is a tangible paucity of efforts within MSM to get beyond what is permitted to be known. We don’t even know if he watches Heated Rivalry or why the Brits called him “the unreliable boyfriend”. And yet, as Stephen Maher wrote for Time magazine last week, Canadians adore him.

As for how he has seized power in excess of that granted by the electorate 11 months ago, there wasn’t a hint of concern on the part of CTV News anchor Omar Sachedina when Carney’s majority was confirmed in a couple of “gimme” by-election victories.

The leading voice on Canada’s most-watched newscast, Sachedina appeared awestruck by the “historic” moment and “what the Liberals have been able to achieve in the past year”. When his sidekick, Vassy Kapelos, noted Carney was now out of excuses for not fulfilling the promises that won him a minority government in 2025, Sachedina suggested soothingly that Canadians remember “sometimes ambition does take time, sometimes several election cycles”.

Screencap of CTV News from The Rewrite

The message to Canadians? The Liberals have accomplished great things in the past year, the greatest of which was to do what no one in the nation’s history had ever done before — manufacture a majority without the public’s consent. Oh, and be patient. PMMC’s agenda could take a few more elections. Sit tight and trust.

The next morning, questions were not, as one might expect from defenders of democracy, about whether the PM felt a tad greasy for the way in which he had won unfettered power. Like, in some countries — many actually — that might be considered kind of scary. Here? If you watch the news, it’s dreamy.

The preferred line of inquiry was to ask Carney whether, if he was the Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre, he would quit. And so it went for the rest of the week. PMMC wasn’t asked if he worried that his majority would undermine the public’s faith in its institutions. Nor did the press corps pursue their sources to discover what inducements may have been offered to create his Judas Gang of Five.

  1. Yes, I know … the presstitutes will “love him long time” as long as the government subsidies keep rolling in.

April 14, 2026

QotD: Holden Caulfield

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

To repurpose a joke from Archer: Kid, even your balls are made of pussy. After I get done typing this, I’m going to have to go kill a deer with nothing but my bare hands and teeth just to get my testosterone level back to “dangerously low”.

Anyway, the point is, you name your kid “Holden” and what can you expect? The Catcher in the Rye is the greatest dickhead-identification device known to man. Even pretentious little snots in desperate need of a beating — I speak from experience here — think Holden Caulfield was a pretentious little snot in desperate need of a beating. It’s a 100% true scientific fact that the only people who liked The Catcher in the Rye are so repulsive to ordinary humans that they have no choice but to become high school English teachers, or go to work for the Washington Post.

I even once got linked on a site called “Kiwi Farms”, that seems to consist of nothing but Internet People making fun of other Internet People, and they all agreed with me (also with my interpretation of MTV’s Daria as “the female Holden Caulfield”, although that show took the piss out of itself more than once, and had actual human affection for its characters, and thus was actually pretty good (although of course serving the Catcher-esque function of mate sorting — if you met a girl who identified with it, run far far far away). I know, I know … MTV. And late-90s MTV, too, the guys who gave us both The Real World and Road Rules. Yeah, I’m scared too).

Anyway, though I think The Catcher in the Rye is the worst book ever written, and anyone who liked it should be beaten with the entire Jack Reacher series until their serum testosterone raises at least 300 points or whatever, I’m willing to hear other opinions: Is there in fact a worse book? Not in terms of writing etc. — even I have to admit that it’s not technically bad — but in terms of influence?

Severian, “Alt Thread: Worst Books Ever”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-10.

April 8, 2026

“Queering the Past”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It sometimes seems as though modern historians are spending all their time postulating that pretty much every prominent figure in western history was gay or lesbian or trans*. The latest attempt to present someone from British history as being trans is Queen Elizabeth I (admittedly in a drama rather than a documentary):

The “Darnley Portrait” of Elizabeth I of England (circa 1575).
National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

Appropriately, it was April Fool’s Day when I read that Queen Elizabeth I is to be portrayed as a cross-dressing man in a forthcoming television show. But we live in times when the more silly and outlandish a rumoured cultural or political plan, the more likely it is to be true. Majesty – an oddly “heritage” title for a project that clearly considers itself “transgressive” – is set to film this summer, and is seeking “trans actresses” (what we used to call cross-dressers, before they got really cross) to play the monarch.

The Sun, which first reported it, seemed drearily inclined to go along with the usual sexist claims of the trans lobby. “She is known for having traits associated with a male monarch”, it mouthed in a mealy manner in an article last week. What would those be – not getting her tits out for, if not the cameras, then the portrait painters of the era? “Some have speculated she had male pseudo-hermaphroditism, known as testicular feminisation”, the Sun continued, also noting that “others are obsessed with the Bisley Boy myth”. Yes, “obsessed” isn’t too extreme a word here – I often hear people at bus stops discussing the Bisley Boy myth. This is the claim that Princess Elizabeth died in her youth and was replaced by a local boy with red hair. It was popularised by Bram Stoker in his 1910 book, Famous Imposters – because Bram “Dracula” Stoker never made up far-fetched stories based extremely loosely on real people, did he?

The Sun quoted a “TV insider” who insists: “Most historians dismiss the claims as misogyny motivated by the idea no woman could be as strong or capable without actually being a man. But it’s a theory which captures the imagination and appears to answer a lot of other questions around the unique queen.”

What would these questions be? That Elizabeth never married and had no children? Must be a bloke, then – what real woman would forego such unqualified pleasures? It’s a sign that trans thought is so woefully conventional, so gender straitjacketed, that it just doesn’t seem able to grasp, in this case, why a woman would refuse to hand over her hard-won power to a man by marrying a stranger who didn’t even speak her language. Or that she said on the eve of the Spanish Armada invasion: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”? It’s called wordplay, I believe, and was extremely common until people with Tin Ear Syndrome – a disease affecting the “trans community” and their inordinate number of “allies” – became so prevalent among those in the arts and media.

This, of course, is our old mate “Queering the Past” (or “lying” as those not educated beyond all common sense and honesty know it) beloved of universities, museums and other beclowned institutions. There have been some truly rib-tickling examples of it, such as the claim that “trans Vikings” existed, which sounds like a Monty Python sketch; sometimes the whole circus gets too much even for the most proudly gay public figure. In 2023, the museum dedicated to conserving the Mary Rose hosted a blog, promising to understand the collection of everyday objects found on the 16th-century ship “through a queer lens”. This prompted the great Philip Hensher to post on X: “I am as keen as anyone on gay sex, but I have to say to these curators – you’re fucking mental”.

April 1, 2026

QotD: “Colour-blind” casting

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

Is noticing somebody’s skin colour an important factor in addressing your privilege, or is noticing race itself racist? And should white actors ever play a character whose historical and/or geographical context suggests that they should be played by people of colour? I ask, because people who have been watching the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall have noticed that there are lots of global majority actors playing roles that — back in the distant past of Series 1 — would have been played by white actors. Should people have noticed that? And should historical accuracy have a part to play? It certainly used to be the case that only racists noticed race, but then racists started trying to disguise themselves by not noticing race, which made not noticing race racist again.

As a regular reader of this column, I have no doubt that you want to remain on the right side of history, and I imagine your instincts are to applaud anything that is annoying for conservatives, like diverse casting in historical dramas. Sometimes being an anti-racist can be hard work, but we don’t tell people to “do the work” for nothing.

First, we need to dispense with the “historical accuracy” argument. There are two ways to do this and the first is to say accuracy should play second fiddle to representation. This is apparently the Hilary Mantel argument. The Times says the Wolf Hall author blessed colour-blind casting before she died, saying that although it was difficult: “you’re in the realm of representation. I think we have to take on board the new thinking.” Everything in 21st Century Britain should reflect 21st Century Britain. We’re in year zero, and hence not employing non-white actors in a production made today, even though there were very few non-white people in sixteenth century England, is simply racist.

The second option is to straightforwardly argue that there were lots of Black and Brown people pottering around the court of Henry VIII, so the production is historically accurate. This is the BBC Horrible History approach. Were you there? Can you prove that it wasn’t full of People of Colour? And is it worth losing your job to do so?

I prefer to hold both of these arguments in my head at the same time. Too much consistency seems a bit right-wing.

Next we need to look at specifically who is being played. Thankfully, the “colour-blind casting” didn’t select any PoGMSTs (People of Global Majority Skin Tones) to play bad guys. This was both on purpose, because oppressed people cannot be bad, and it was also not on purpose, because otherwise it wouldn’t be colour-blind casting. Whichever one it was — and it was both — without PoGMSTs actors playing historic fictionalised evil people, we can avoid the completely random casting process being labelled as racist.

David Scullion, “People of Colour television”, The Critic, 2024-11-12.

March 26, 2026

Canada’s “national broadcaster” has become an expensive irrelevance

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

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was set up to provide Canadians across the vast heartland of the country with quality news and entertainment options. Some would say it was able to achieve those goals well enough for decades, but with the rise of the internet, fewer and fewer people are watching, listening to, or reading CBC content. In some major cities, the CBC’s share of attention is a rounding error, despite the federal government subsidizing their effort on top of the annual budget they already receive from the taxpayers.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison makes the case for letting the CBC shut down:

CBC Isn’t Being Attacked. It’s Being Ignored. And That’s Worse.

There’s an old business rule most people learn the hard way: if your customers quietly leave, you’re already finished. No protest. No boycott. Just silence.

That’s where the CBC is right now.

You can spin it. You can defend it. You can fund it.
But you can’t fake attention.

We’re looking at a public broadcaster that calls itself the “voice of Canada” while pulling audiences so small they’d embarrass a local radio host. In some cases, tens of thousands of viewers in major cities. That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse.

And here’s the uncomfortable part:

Canadians didn’t lose interest in news. They lost interest in that version of news.

Because when reporting turns into messaging, people notice. When coverage feels selective, people adjust. When tone replaces trust, people leave.

Quietly.

Now layer in Mark Carney.

Carney’s entire pitch rests on a simple belief: that complex societies should be guided by centralized expertise. Managed from the top. Coordinated. Directed. Calibrated.

Sounds efficient. Sounds smart. Sounds like it belongs in a white paper.

But we already have a working example of that model in action.
It’s called CBC.

Centralized control

Institutional messaging

Weak accountability to audience demand

Heavy public funding

And the result?

A broadcaster Canadians are walking away from in real time.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a signal.

Here’s the reframe nobody wants to touch:

CBC isn’t failing because it lacks resources.
It’s failing because it lost the discipline of needing to be chosen.

When your funding doesn’t depend on your audience, your audience eventually stops depending on you.

That’s not ideological. That’s behavioural economics.

Carney’s model doubles down on that exact structure. More planning. More coordination. More reliance on expert systems that assume compliance instead of earning trust.

But trust doesn’t scale through authority.
It scales through responsiveness.

And that’s the part that’s missing.

This is where the conversation usually derails into tribal nonsense. “Defund”. “Protect”. “Save public media”.

Misses the point.

The real question is simpler and harsher:

What happens when institutions stop adapting because they don’t have to?

You don’t get stability.
You get drift.

You don’t get unity.
You get quiet disengagement.

And you don’t get better outcomes by expanding that model across the country.

You get more of the same, just bigger.

I’ve run businesses. You learn this fast or you go broke:

If people stop showing up, it’s not because they suddenly became irrational. It’s because you stopped giving them a reason.

CBC stopped giving people a reason.
Carney’s approach assumes the reason doesn’t matter.

That’s the disconnect.

Hard line:
If an institution can’t earn attention, it shouldn’t demand trust.

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