Balderdash

Is It Time to ‘Liquidate’ the Study of Sociology?

2026-09-14T17:10:00.000+08:00

In 2026, left wingers no longer pretend that truth exists.

Is It Time to ‘Liquidate’ the Study of Sociology? - WSJ
Sociology has long been tasked with investigating society’s most pressing challenges. But these days, sociologists’ greatest obstacle may be themselves.

Why are some people richer than others? What drives societal ills or ignites a social movement? Why aren’t people having more kids?

These are some of the most important questions facing the country today. The answers shape our lives, polarize our politics and supercharge our culture wars.

Sociology, the discipline tasked with pursuing the answers, would seem well poised to take these issues on. For decades, its analyses informed policy on issues ranging from criminal justice to immigration to urban development. It introduced groundbreaking concepts like “white-collar crime,” “gentrification,” “unintended consequences” and “cultural capital.” At various points, sociologists proposed and critiqued affirmative action, inspired and lambasted welfare reform, diagnosed and dismissed the breakdown of the nuclear family.

Yet today, sociologists are embroiled in an ideological and existential battle of their own—one that is increasingly public and at least in part of their own making. The study of people, in other words, has a people problem.

In 2023, Florida’s then-commissioner of education Manny Diaz, Jr., homed in on sociology as culture war enemy No. 1. It had been “hijacked by left-wing activists,” he said, leading the state to remove introduction to sociology from its general education curriculum at all public colleges and universities across the state.

The American Sociological Association promptly denounced the move as a blatant mischaracterization of the field and an effort to needlessly politicize a bastion of social science. Yet that same year, the ASA’s president described sociology to its members as “a form of liberatory praxis” that is “currently undergoing a renaissance as antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer and transnational theorizing lead us to more inclusive insights.”

Meanwhile, one contingent, Sociologists for Palestine, is boycotting the ASA’s annual conference (theme: “Disrupting the Status Quo”) next month. The reason? The ASA refused to authorize a vote on their own proposed boycott—of Israeli academic institutions. This has drawn a counterpetition and a backlash so fierce, the Chronicle of Higher Education called it a “War for Sociology.”

Already, ASA membership is in steep decline, with membership at 9,400 down from 14,900 at its peak in 1972.

Now, sociology, long derided by many academics in humanities and the “harder” social sciences for its perceived squishiness, is being criticized from within.

An increasingly vocal group of sociologists say the discipline’s cratering reputation is especially vivid when compared with economics, psychology and political science, all of which can seem more serious and pragmatic—gateways to law school or business school or an advanced degree in healthcare. Whereas those disciplines often use cutting-edge methodologies, sociology seems dusty and theory-laden. Even sociologists acknowledge that students are often drawn to the major because they’re afraid of math or are sold on sociology as a means to activism.

Starting in 2013, the number of students majoring in sociology dropped from 31,000 to 21,000 in 2024. One ZipRecruiter poll found sociology among college grads’ most regretted majors.

It’s tempting to write all this off as another sorry example of academia gone off the rails. But the implications of sociology’s implosion extend well beyond the confines of higher education, driving everything from what kids learn in secondary school, to how workplaces and cultural institutions function (or become dysfunctional), to which ideas inform legislation.

“I Believe in Sociology as a Weapon”

Sociology is in many ways the mother of all social sciences, she who hath birthed dozens of disciplines ranging from criminology to postcolonial studies to ethnic studies.

Unlike psychology, which operates on an individual level, sociology considers human phenomena in the aggregate and often over the long run. By examining trends in educational attainment, labor force shifts and the effects of social media and AI, it can offer a grand-scale picture of societal health.

With roots dating to 19th century European theorists like Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, sociology coalesced professionally in America during the Progressive Era. Many consider W.E.B. Du Bois the father of American sociology. Though trained as a historian, Du Bois, later a founder of the NAACP, used sociological methods to document the impact of slavery and Jim Crow on Black Americans.

Du Bois’s dual role as both a social scientist and an activist also inspired some of the fiercest debates over sociologists’ role. In 1896, Du Bois defined sociology as “the discovery of truth” and warned that if scholars “dally with the truth to humor the whims of the day” they “hurt the cause of scientific truth the world over.” Traditionally, sociologists interpreted his words as drawing a hard line between studying the truth and acting on it. But sociologists in the scholar-activist mold note that Du Bois also believed in using sociological truth in the pursuit of activism, promising in 1906 to “never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.”

Sociology is fundamentally shaped by who is doing the work, many sociologists argue. Didn’t early sociologists claim to prove white peoples’ supremacy over other races based on supposed empirical evidence? Later research by conservative and neocon sociologists informed policies like broken-window policing, racial profiling, welfare reform and colorblindness. For many contemporary sociologists, steeped in postmodern theory, the insistence that a single truth exists is a fallacy and objectivity itself, a tool of oppression.

Social phenomena are always shaped by power politics and competing interests, according to Lisa Hajjar, who studies law and conflict with a focus on Israel/Palestine and chairs the department of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, one of the biggest sociology departments in the country. “What I always tell students is that when it comes to the complex world that people live in and make and change, there is no single Archimedean point of truth,” she says. “There are just better and worse ways of presenting information and making arguments.”

According to an increasingly dominant contingent of sociologists, sociologists also need to engage with the public more forcefully.

“As bodies, we need to speak to the public when we need to interrupt public harm or advocate for the public good,” Saida Grundy, a professor of sociology and African-American and Black diasporic studies at Boston University. She compares the ASA to the American Heart Association, which uses its research and authority to advance messages intended to improve public health, providing guidelines and issuing warnings. Shouldn’t the ASA and its individual members similarly deploy their research to inveigh against injustice and advance social change?

In her view, sociology has an obligation to engage with the world. Sociologists who study immigration, for example, should speak out against ICE.

“I believe in sociology as a weapon,” Grundy says.

“What if We Just Liquidate the Discipline?”

Other sociologists say the impulse toward activism is compromising not only the aim and use of sociological research, but the quality of the research itself. In lieu of engaging in objective analysis, the discipline is shaping, even bending, the truth.

Critics of the activist-scholar model frequently cite Christian Smith’s 2014 book, “The Sacred Project of American Sociology,” as persuasively diagnosing a discipline increasingly corrupted by what amounts to a quasi-religious activist impulse.

“Sociology’s sacred project champions emancipation, autonomy, equality, justice, inclusion, diversity, open-mindedness, progress, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism,” Smith wrote. “In the end that sacred project actually tends to produce sectarian narrowness, exclusion, uniformity, silencing, self-censorship, lack of debate, the negative sanctioning of nonconformists, and the debilitation of rigorous thought.”

Smith quit the ASA around the same time, demoralized by what he saw as a lack of self-awareness among his colleagues, whose work focused on the world’s wrongs while failing to recognize their own. Professors teach from textbooks he describes as “thinly veiled political progressivism watered down to pathetic mush.” This past January, he resigned from University of Notre Dame, where he was a professor of sociology for 20 years.

“From my point of view, sociology should be producing intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world,” he says. Instead, he says, it’s producing technicians and activists. “The painfulness of all this is that I believe sociology really matters and makes a contribution. But sociology is heading down the wrong road. Over time, I’ve thought to myself, ‘What if we just liquidate the discipline?’”

During her campaign for the presidency of the ASA this year, Melissa Wilde, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, signed a petition objecting to an ASA vote on Sociologists for Palestine’s proposed boycott. She believes that sociologists, as a body, should remain neutral.

“While the activists will not be constrained in their activism if the ASA becomes politically neutral, the sociologists who do not want politics mixed into their research would be deeply constrained in their research and its impact if the ASA becomes activist,” she says. (She lost the election.)

To Ilana Redstone, a sociologist who specializes in political polarization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sociology’s troubles gained traction through the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power Co., which deemed that practices with a disparate impact on employees are illegal. According to her analysis, the moral equation of disparate outcomes with discrimination soon became enshrined within institutions like academia and the media. Underrepresentation or unequal pay among groups served as evidence of bias, she argues, leading to a proliferation of D.E.I. practices, including concepts around unconscious bias, harm and intent.

Within sociology, it meant that any inequality among groups was de facto the result of discrimination, rendering moot other possible theories, Redstone says: “We’re treating questions around causation as settled.” Even suggesting research into alternative sociological explanations is viewed as racist, morally wrong and victim blaming at best.

The consequences are playing out across society. “Once a claim is made that suggests, ‘We are on the right side of history, we are doing the work of good people who care about justice,’ that creates a lot of social pressure,” she says. It forecloses disagreement, she says, “And that has an enormous destructive effect on democracy.”

Redstone’s critique builds on others circulating within the profession. In interviews and on panels convened by organizations like Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan organization devoted to academic reform, critics say that overt politicization—of research, of teaching, of practice—is killing the discipline. They refer to a discipline in disarray, write papers with titles like “How Sociology Can Save Itself” and blog about “Sociology’s Pervasively Dubious Assumptions.”

They describe an atmosphere in which to get ahead, you must consistently submit to political litmus tests, publish accordingly and pray that you make it to tenure without getting excommunicated. Specializing in a stodgy subject like religion, the military or law enforcement—especially if one has anything positive to say—is as unfashionable as flaunting a fur coat.

In their view, contemporary sociology’s relentless focus on race, gender and class, its emphasis on the need for social change over the benefits of social stability and its obsession with inequality amount to an abdication of scholarly duty, decreasing the value of sociological research, reducing its impact and undermining public trust. (According to one analysis, 80% of articles published in today’s flagship sociology journals touch on inequality.)

This Is What the Field of Sociology Is About.”

This spring, a damning report by Vanderbilt and Washington University called out the social sciences for “a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.”

“Activist logics are taking over scientific logics,” says Ashley Rubin, the sociologist who worked on the Vanderbilt/Washington University report.

“If you look at the data on so much of the current research on capitalism, sexism, racism, you’ll see that sociology is misrepresenting the evidence, concealing the evidence or distorting it outright,” says Kevin McCaffree, a sociologist at the University of North Texas. He points to numerous studies purporting to show the pervasiveness of poverty in America, rampant sexism in the hiring of women and the harms inflicted by “microaggressions.”

“Every day, the goal in my work is to not do politics,” McCaffree says. “My job is to imagine someone in my mind who has the opposite assumptions and go back and forth with them to test my ideas. I don’t think most sociologists realize the magnitude of their own bias and the weakness of the evidence supporting their claims.”

McCaffree and other empiricists accuse scholars of engaging in “asymmetrical analysis,” depending on whether groups are considered “minoritized,” which skews the results. And an emphasis on systems denies groups or individuals within groups any form of agency. He believes sociologists owe it to students and the public to be transparent about these failures, including years of compromised research.

McCaffree is also the editor of the journal, Theory & Society, a position he took on in 2023 after the publisher fired its previous editor. McCaffree decided to reorient the publication in a more open and rigorous direction. The entire staff promptly resigned.

“The enforcement of ideological conformity within sociology is so intense it’s impossible to ignore,” he says. “Meanwhile, trust in higher education is collapsing. That’s being driven in part by politicized degrees in social science, and in that respect, sociology is the belly of the beast.”

Jukka Savolainen, a professor of criminology and sociology at Wayne State University, says too much sociological research is a “waste of resources” and a missed opportunity. “Don’t we want to learn about the causes of crime? Do we want to know whether we have Venezuelan gangs in Colorado? Or do we just say, ‘Policing is bad, parole is bad, they destroy communities, cops are bigots and the real problem is police violence.’”

Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, tells the story of a professor at Columbia University who assigned the children’s board book, “Anti-Racist Baby,” in an introductory sociology class. She opened up the first class by holding up the book and declaring, “This is what the field of sociology is about.”

What al-Gharbi calls “normie beliefs,” ones that are often true and well-founded, are relentlessly undermined within the discipline: You think religion is good? You think men and women are different? Believe that marriage is stabilizing or that police are necessary? Wrong. In this way and others, he says, professors may unwittingly discourage or alienate students.

In many sociology classes, he says, society is relentlessly depicted as “bad, bad, bad,” and in ways that offer a less accurate understanding of America.

“Based on the narrative in sociology, you’d think America is some kind of racist hellscape and that white people are uniquely depraved,” al-Gharbi explains. “In reality, people get along across difference in America better than any other country on the planet.”

Links - 14th September 2026 (Palestine/Middle East Peace)

2026-09-14T13:17:00.000+08:00

Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ on X - "Today, Mehdi also made fun of Gad Saad for describing how he was nearly executed by Islamists. He's gone fully mask off, emboldened by El-Sayed's win. He thinks he can express how he thinks harassing women and Islamists oppressing others is funny, or preferable. For those who have not been paying attention, this is who he really is. The rest is a mask, a facade of progressivism he cultivated to make a living in the United States. Now that he thinks it is safe to show what he really thinks, he will."

The Left's demonisation of Israel ignores one key fact: the success of Arab-Israelis - "Whatever the extremists of Hamas intended to achieve through their attack on Israel, their actions appear to have strengthened the country’s core and brought out a collective national spirit that is difficult to describe. Yet it was tangible to me as I travelled through different parts of the country. Another glaringly obvious reality whenever I visit Israel is the complexity of daily life and the richness of the country’s social tapestry. Israel is undoubtedly a regional powerhouse, and a technologically advanced country whose people have been shaped by the belief that inaction can lead to death. From north to south, its demographics, landscape and climate change significantly, reflecting the wider complexity of the country itself. After attending a conference on contemporary anti-Semitism in Haifa, I was struck by something that the British Left rarely discusses: the changing nature of Arab-Israeli employment and the growing involvement of Arab citizens in key sectors of the Israeli economy. As I walked around the University of Haifa, I was particularly struck by the number of young Arab-Israeli women studying on campus and sitting in its halls. Many could have been Muslim or Christian, from families of Palestinian heritage and holding Israeli citizenship. I could hear Arabic being spoken all around me. Although I did not see a comparable number of young Arab-Israeli men, it was clear that Israel’s economic future will be heavily dependent on its Arab population – irrespective of what some far-Right Israeli politicians may think. The political Left often fails to consider these changing patterns within Israel. Much of this appears to be an organic shift taking place at grassroots level. Consider Israel’s healthcare system. Without Arab-Israelis, working as doctors, nurses, dentists and pharmacists, the country’s health service would be brought close to its knees. The statistics bear this out. Put simply, one in four doctors in Israel is Arab. Just over one in four dentists is Arab, as is just over one in four nurses. Some may argue that this broadly reflects the fact that Arabs constitute approximately 20 per cent of Israel’s population, yet these are highly specialised professions requiring years of education, training and accreditation. Moreover, Israel has suffered thousands of casualties as a result of the October 7 attack and the wars that followed. Many of those injured will have been treated by Arab doctors, nurses and pharmacists. Perhaps, the most striking statistic is that almost one in every two pharmacists in Israel is Arab. This demonstrates a powerful convergence of professional achievement, business acumen and resilience within Israel’s Arab communities. Arab representation within medicine has also risen sharply since 2010. At that time, Arabs constituted only 8 per cent of Israel’s doctors. By 2023, that figure had risen to 25 per cent, reflecting a socially and professionally mobile population whose members studied medicine in Israel or abroad before returning and putting their skills to use within the country... It is also increasingly clear that Arab-Israelis – and particularly Arab women – will exercise greater influence within Israel’s education sector over the coming years. Arab women are already making a substantial contribution to education, healthcare and welfare services. What my visits also tell me is that the blanket term used by some on the Left of “apartheid” in Israel against its Arab population simply does not stack up when compared to what happened in South Africa"
When terrorism supporters rant about "apartheid" they usually mean the measures taken to prevent Palestinians from murdering Israelis, so

Eylon Levy on X - "This sounds like a typical "Irish" joke, but it's true: The Irish Government bought a new €53m jet. And insisted on removing an Israeli-made navigational system. Now it can't land in the fog 🤣🤣🤣"
Haviv Rettig Gur on X - "This feels like a good moment to remember that Ireland got rich not by producing much or innovating anything, but mostly by becoming one of the world's biggest tax havens -- by enabling large companies from other nations to hide their tax revenues from their home nations. Apple, Microsoft and Google have routed many hundreds of billions of dollars through Ireland to shelter their profits. Israel, in contrast, got rich by innovating at a colossal scale. It spends 6% of its GDP on R&D, the highest of any nation on Earth. 10% of its workforce works in tech. That's why those same Apple, Microsoft and Google all built massive R&D centers in Israel, alongside 500 other multinationals. The defense tech is famous, but Israel is also a global powerhouse in water and agriculture. And it draws 10% of global deep-tech investment in medical devices and food R&D. So a tax-cheat nation that got rich by impoverishing others now refuses a safety system meant to land planes safely in the fog from a nation that actually produces new and useful things for the world. It's one thing not to buy arms, or to exact political costs for a war you hate. This isn't that. This is just sanctimonious narcissism. Take the fog safety system, you preening tax-cheats. We promise to look the other way."
If the jet crashes in fog, it will be proof that Mossad murdered them as payback for "opposing 'genocide'"

Jim Geraghty on X - ""Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said she will not attend the Michigan Democratic Party’s nominating convention in August because she does not feel safe to be there." "I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying. And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me." Wait, aren’t you the top law enforcement official in the state of Michigan? Don’t you travel with a personal security detail? Isn’t your job protecting the safety and civil rights of all Michiganders? Are you telling me that the Michigan Democratic Party’s nominating convention in August is now a “no-go” zone for Jewish elected officials? If you won’t stand up for your own civil rights, including the right to attend a public event, why should anyone in Michigan trust you to stand up for anyone else’s?"
The reality of the modern Democratic party. And terrorist supporters cheer this.

Rachel Moiselle on X - "Kneecap: ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah!’ Irish Times: ‘omg don’t you just love their tongue-in-cheek humour’ 🥰😍🥰"

Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "I find it bizarre that Hamas attack a music festival and slaughter loads of young people who are just there to have a good time, and other music festivals are like, "Omg wow, Hamas, 😍 how wonderful, we love you.""

Paul Finlayson compared Hamas to Nazis and his life fell apart - "Douglas Murray from the UK continues to speak about rising antisemitism in the West without softening his words. Luai Ahmed from Yemen challenges antisemitism in the Arab world and supports Israel openly, knowing the personal cost to his friendships and family back home. Goldie Ghamari, an Iranian Canadian politician, has spoken forcefully in support of Israel and against antisemitism. She has received death threats. Then there is Paul Finlayson. “I said I stood with Israel, and I was called a criminal,” Paul says. Paul is an Ontario educator who taught business courses at Humber College and the University of Guelph-Humber. His life changed after he made a statement that, in another time, might not have cost him everything. He compared Hamas to the Nazis. That comparison triggered a chain of events that he says he never saw coming. According to Paul, a colleague at the university, Wael Ramadan, took issue with his views and escalated the situation. Paul says Ramadan’s social media posts reflect hostility toward Jews and that he had proximity to decision-makers inside the institution. He sent me screenshots to support his claims. Paul also alleges that senior administrators were involved. He points to Melanie Spence-Ariemma, vice-provost at the University of Guelph-Humber, and says she played a central role in the process that led to his dismissal. “She was the claimant against me and the judge, jury and executioner,” says Paul... “Suddenly, a bunch of strangers that I never met decided that I was going to be fired. They never spoke to me. They never heard my side,” he says. He describes what he sees as a pattern at his college, something I’ve also heard from teachers working at elementary schools in Toronto. “Gag, banish, threaten, isolate, defame, shun, then deny process,” says Finlayson. Damaging claims spread about him to students and faculty before he could respond: “One day I was a prized lecturer, and people showed me kindness and warmth. The next day I became the devil himself. They went to war against me, seemingly out of pleasure. “The fact that the institution encouraged this is amazing. A political statement turned into something else entirely. They said I assaulted a student. They let that rumor run and never pulled it back. He went from making $300,000 a year to $24,000. “My income has been reduced by 90%. What does that do to someone? I loved my job. I never treated a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, or an atheist with any unkindness. I gave my heart to my job. I didn’t mess with management. I didn’t mess with the unions. I was regarded as the best professor in the department. And suddenly, a bunch of strangers, a VP in an astonishing act of cruelty, decides that I’m going to be fired because I’ve insulted Hamas."
We're still told that no one supports Hamas

Hamas’ October 7th Genocide: Legal Analysis and the Weaponisation of Reverse Accusations – A Study in Modern Genocide Recognition and Denial - "This article analyses the October 7th 2023 Hamas attack on Israel through the lens of the Genocide Convention, arguing that these actions constitute genocide under international law. Drawing on international case law, the analysis demonstrates how Hamas’ actions meet both the physical element and specific intent requirements for genocide, evidenced by its ideology, systematic policies and leadership statements. The article also examines how reverse accusations of genocide against Israel have functioned as a rhetorical shield to deflect recognition of Hamas’ own genocidal actions. It analyses the legal implications for state parties and the international community."
Terrorism supporters sometimes claim that genocide doesn't require the population to go down. But in that case, there's much more of a case that Hamas is guilty of genocide than Israel. Ironic.

Palestinian mothers spread the culture of martyrdom - "In an exclusive interview with qodsna reporter in Gaza, Palestinian women explained the role of Palestinian mothers in raising and educating the next generation and their active and significant role in creating the intifada and the continuation of the resistance. Despite the repressive policies of the Zionist regime in the occupied territories, Palestinian women and mothers have played an active role in the continuation of the struggle and uprising of the Palestinian nation for more than a century. They have been able to transfer the culture of resistance to new generations and contribute to the expansion of the culture of martyrdom. The Palestinian mother is the teacher of the generations who defended Palestine and still defend the country. Palestinian women emphasize that Palestinian mothers, even after the martyrdom of their children and during their funerals, convey their message to the Zionist enemy that the struggle with occupiers will be continue until their liberation. Nasreen Razi, the media spokesperson of the women's Al-Ahrar Palestine Movement, told Qodsna correspondent in Gaza that: "A Palestinian woman is a symbol of patience, endurance, forgiveness and steadfastness because she willingly sacrifices her husband and children for her religion and homeland."... Due to the existence of these mothers and existence of a fighting and trained generation of women who believe in the culture of martyrdom, the Zionist regime can be destroyed, and this destruction is imminent, the spokesperson added. Pointing to the mothers' message to the Zionist enemy, she said that one of the messages is that martyrdom does not scare Palestinians because martyrdom is the dream of every Palestinian. Mothers emphasize that the mother sacrifices her child in the defense of the homeland and does not prevent them from doing national duty. "Najjah al-Batniji", a member of the National Relations Committee of the Hamas movement, told qodsna that determining factors of individual behavior are both inherited and acquired abilities. Hereditary abilities are obtained from parents and acquired abilities are obtained from the environment Palestinian women are unique examples among women who believe in revolution and freedom. They cultivate respect and dignity in the hearts of their children. The Palestinian mother is sure that the only way to live with dignity is to resist and fight for freedom, Al-Bantiji added. She noted that the message of the Palestinian mother is that she will never back down and is ready to pay a high price for freedom and dignity, so raising a child who is a hero is better than living with humiliation... Palestinian mothers, who are mothers of martyrs, raise their grandchildren based on this culture of resistance and struggle, for this reason, the issue of family structure and its effects on children is important to continue the path."
Palestinians are truly terrible people, sacrificing their children just to try to defeat the Jews

Palestinian Scholar: We Must Take Palestine Back by Force - "Dr. Mahmoud Al-Shajrawi of the Palestine Scholars Association in the Diaspora... "Who says that the Palestinian people are tired [of making sacrifices]? Who says that Palestinian mothers, who still give birth to 5, 6, 10, and even 15 children... We have families with 10 and 15 children. These are normal numbers in Palestine. Who says that Palestinian mothers are not ready to sacrifice 1, 2, or 3 children as martyrs, and this would be considered zakat [mandatory charity] paid by the family, for the sake of fighting the Zionist and teaching it a lesson?""
A terrorism supporter called the previous article "a great summary of the racist propaganda that vile psychopaths guzzle down willingly". What a great summary of Palestinians and terrorism supporters!

Meme - Friendly Atheist: "Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism."
WFLAtheism: "The reason the world is upset with Israel is because of the 700,000+ innocent Palestinians they've murdered. It's not because they're Jewish. Hope that helps."
"ITS LESS THAN 10% OF THAT NUMBER AND THEY MOSTLY WERENT INNOCENT. OP is Either Stupid, lying or evil."
Even Hamas doesn't bandy about the 700,000 number. Amazing.
Comment (elsewhere): "It's striking how many people's relationship to Palestine is religious, even those who would swear up and down that they don't have a theistic bone in their bodies. They say they don't believe in God, but they believe in Hamas, and they say they don't believe in the Devil, but to them, Israel is Satan. And they persecute critics of the global jihad ideology with the fervour of a clerical class empowered (and all-too-pleased) to enforce dogma and doctrine."

Meme - Man with Palestine pin: "Oh, I don't care about Palestinians. This pin lets me call Jews "white supremacists," "racists" and "Nazis" as much as I want."

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "The destruction of antiquities, art, and cultural heritage throughout the Middle East is devastating. A deliberate effort to erase thousands of years of history that existed before Islam. No history, no civilization, no memory, no future."
James Lindsay, anti-Communist on X - "There's a big point here that goes deep. Every totalitarian system destroys history (including historical art, heritage, temples, etc.). We've all heard Orwell on this: he who controls the past controls the future, or however it goes. Yes, that. But there's something else. Jews. If you were to summarize, perhaps incompletely, the Jewish faith, it is a faith of memory. Nearly all their holidays and rituals are about memory. Memory of who they are and what their covenant is. Who their God is and how they are related to Him. What the outcome of that faith has been sustaining them as a people and being as a light to the nations. Jews persist seemingly miraculously, impossibly, in part because they are people who keep their own sacred flame: the memory of who they are. There's deep strength and power here. So, maybe consider this, both sides of the lesson, as you can see them here in this grotesque little video."

Captain Allen on X - "On This Day — July 25, 2000
Yasser Arafat sent his wife & young daughter out of the country so he could launch a terror war without them in the way. The Camp David summit had just collapsed. Within hours, Arafat ordered the Palestinian security forces to prepare for violence. This was not a spontaneous uprising. It was not caused by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount two months later. It was a premeditated decision to reject a historic offer of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and choose bloodshed instead. His own widow later admitted it on camera: “He said, ‘You have to leave Palestine because I want to carry out an intifada and I’m not prepared to shield myself behind my wife and little girl.’ … He had already decided to carry out an Intifada after the Oslo Accords and after the failure of Camp David.” The handwriting had been visible for months. In April 2000 ,Arafat told Fatah youth he would “launch a new intifada.” Marwan Barghouti said final-status issues could only be settled by “force of arms.” Two weeks before Camp David, Arafat told Fatah leaders in Nablus they were ready to “erase everything and start everything afresh.” What followed was one of the bloodiest periods in Israel’s modern history. More than 1,000 Israelis were murdered by 2005 in suicide bombings on buses, in restaurants, and at a Passover Seder. The goal was never a state living side by side with Israel. It was a war to replace Israel. Revisionists still insist there is “not even an iota of evidence” that Arafat planned the Second Intifada. His own wife’s words destroy that lie. He chose war. The blood is on his hands."

Meme - CJ Werleman @cjwerleman: "You can be 90% sure that all "Islamist" terror attacks committed in the West within the next few weeks are sponsored by Israel and blamed on Iran. THE CJ WERLEMAN SHOW"
Terrorism supporters also claim that Israel was responsible for killing everyone on October 7th, so there's no limit to how ridiculous a claim can be for them not to accept it - as long as Israel (or maybe the US) is blamed. Conspiracy theories just rot your blame

The perversion of ‘Zionism’ - "During the rest of the 20th century, Zionism could mean one of at least five things: first, the right of self-determination of the Jewish people; second, the desire of Jews to live in their ancestral land; third, the establishment of the state of Israel as it was originally constituted; fourth, the territorial expansion of that state; and fifth, simply the survival of the state of Israel into the future. Many modern critics of Zionism conflate all five meanings, or at least refuse to specify which they intend. Those who use Zionism in the last sense, to be clear, think that the state of Israel should literally not exist in 2026: that is, that a country founded 78 years ago, under the legal auspices of the UN, must now be somehow dissolved or dismantled. How this is to be done without enormous violence is left as an exercise to the reader. The enemies of Israel deployed the rhetoric of Zionism pejoratively in all these ways throughout the 20th century. At the heart of this effort was the Soviet Union, which infused anti-Israel propaganda with Nazi ideas about Jews. Izabella Tabarovsky, the scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism, has pointed out that “many of the core tropes that animate the anti-Zionist Left today are carbon copies of ideas that the KGB and the Department of Propaganda’s ideologues developed, weaponised, and popularised with particular intensity in the wake of the Six-Day War” in 1967... In the early 1980s, a Soviet propaganda unit called The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public promoted the idea, according to historian Theodore H Friedgut, that “the state of Israel served as the striking force of American imperialism in the Middle East, using Nazi-like methods to accomplish its goals”... In 2011, Hamas reacted with alarm to a proposal to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust, saying: “Holocaust studies in refugee camps is a contemptible plot and serves the Zionist entity with a goal of creating a reality and telling stories in order to justify acts of slaughter against the Palestinian people.” In the same year, another Hamas official wrote: “The lie of the Zionist Holocaust crumbles with countless holocausts committed by the Zionists in Beit Hanoun, al-Fakhoura school and other places in Palestine.” Hamas’s 1988 charter names “Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, espionage groups and others” as examples of “Zionist organisations”, taking the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in Russia in 1903, as Gospel... In 2013, Corbyn said that a group of British Zionists, regrettably, “did not understand English irony”. By this time, in the Labour Party and elsewhere, the term Zionist was now often being used as simple code for “Jew”. This was more blatant in the abusive shortening “Zio” – which, oddly, Leftists had eagerly adopted from David Duke, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, who popularised the slur throughout the 2010s with his radio rants about “Zio-Communism”, “Zio-economics”, “Zio-history”, “Zio-supremacism”, and “Zio-occupied America”. After the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, Duke said: “The real murderers are not the bullets, but the Bullies of the Zio Media.” (Perhaps not coincidentally, there has been a marked increase, on X and YouTube podcasts, in outright Holocaust denial since the start of the war in Gaza.) Last year, an undergraduate at the University of Oxford was arrested and charged with stirring up racial hatred after he chanted “put the Zios in the ground” at a pro-Palestinian march (he denies the allegation)... “I have heard testimony and heard for myself first-hand,” she wrote, “the way in which the word ‘Zionist’ has been used personally, abusively or as a euphemism for ‘Jew’, even in relation to some people with no stated position or even a critical position on the historic formation or development of modern Israel"... a 2022 academic study, “Platformed antisemitism on Twitter: Anti-Jewish rhetoric in political discourse surrounding the 2018 US midterm election”, found that, in nearly 50 per cent of its uses on the site, the word Zionist was clearly being deployed as an anti-Semitic slur. The fact that such abusive language on the Left predates by many years the Gaza conflict that began in 2023 gives the lie to any claim that it is just a regrettable excess of emotion in the face of a brutal war, an understandable overflow of sympathy for innocent victims. On the contrary, the Gaza war just made such language more publicly acceptable... one candidate for Newcastle city council posted to social media her hope that “every single Zionist” be killed... people who deploy the term “Zionist” are often no clearer about what exactly they mean by it in any given instance; and nor are their audiences. According to research conducted by the political scientist Mira Sucharov in 2022, 72 per cent of American Jews consider themselves Zionist if the term is defined as “a belief in a Jewish and democratic state”, but only 10 per cent agree if the word means “the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel” – the definition, she explained, that “comes to the minds of most anti-Zionists”... the Israeli writer Jonathan Shamir argued that, because it is so “ambiguous and varied in its meaning”, the term “Zionism” routinely “stifles any productive conversation” – not least because, as he pointed out, a lot of Israelis who identify as Zionists are on the peacenik Left. “For so many, identification as a Zionist is a red line: the person in question is immediately considered racist,” he observed. “Yet so many of these so-called Zionists are at the forefront of the fight for justice for Palestinians."... It’s difficult not to agree, then, that “Zionism” and “Zionist” are by now well past their political sell-by date as terms of rational discussion"
Weird. We keep being told that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Why then would Hamas oppose teaching Palestinian children about the Holocaust?

Meme - "The Times of Palestine
Blindfolded Palestinian Detainees Forced to Sit Under Scorching Sun *Blindfolded Palestinian Detainees sitting in the shade*"
Everything about Palestine is a lie so it's not surprising terrorism supporters can openly contradict themselves and see no problem.

Rawan Osman روان عثمان on X - "Mustafa commented under one of my videos and challenged me: “How do you explain this?” So here it is. This coin is from 1927, issued under the British Mandate’s currency order. It carries “Palestine” in three languages: Palestine in English, Falastin (فلسطين) in Arabic, and Palestina (פלשתינה) in Hebrew. Next to the Hebrew, in parentheses, are two Hebrew letters — Aleph, א & Yod, י, — an abbreviation for Eretz Yisrael (ארץ ישראל), “the Land of Israel.” Jews under the Mandate refused to let “Palestina” stand alone; they insisted on marking their historical name for the land alongside it. As for “Free Palestine”, this slogan wasn’t invented by today’s activists. Decades before Israel existed, the Zionist Organization of America used “Help Free Palestine” on its own fundraising material, calling for the land to be freed from foreign rule so a Jewish state could be established there. And it wasn’t just a slogan. Jews living under the Mandate carried Palestinian passports. They were, legally, Palestinians. So when the Mandate ended and Israel was declared in 1948, that liberation the slogan called for actually happened for the people who’d been using the word “Palestine” and “Palestinian” all along. Many of the era’s Jewish/Zionist institutions carried the name proudly too: Palestine Airways, the Palestine Post, the Palestine Electric Corporation, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (today’s Israel Philharmonic). 76 years on, the tragedy is that this reality still isn’t accepted. Instead of building on what exists, generations have been spent trying to undo 1948 rather than move past it and the toll of that refusal falls hardest on Arab Palestinian children and youth, who deserve leaders focused on building rather than reversing history. Palestine, as it was understood by everyone living under the Mandate — Jew and Arab alike — was freed in 1948. History can’t be undone. The only way forward is accepting that, and building peace from where we actually stand. #freepalestine️ #Israel"

GDP Haters Aren't Making Serious Arguments

2026-09-14T09:10:00.000+08:00

GDP Haters Aren't Making Serious Arguments

The US is wealthier than Europe, and the gap between the two keeps growing. No one can deny this anymore, so some have taken to arguing that we shouldn’t care that much about GDP, because other countries do better on other measures. Here’s one particularly annoying piece, which includes the following chart.*comparing the UK to US states and it supposedly coming out ahead*

I like how this treats left-wing policy goals themselves as accomplishments. “Paid maternity leave”, “higher minimum wage”, and “statutory paid holiday.” What if a country just declared the entire year a paid holiday? I guess that would be a great success story. This reminds me of how the Soviet Union had an endless number of rights guaranteed in its constitution, for all that was worth.

Economic statism is always sold as something that will help make societies richer. When it fails, you can just point to the policies themselves as a success that refutes the need to worry about economic comparisons at all! I can just start listing right-wing political goals like more religious freedom, free speech, and lower taxes to prove America is a better place to live.

Even on the more objective measures, we can say that Nigeria does better than the UK on obesity and prisoners per capita. It also has a healthier birthrate. Is Nigeria better than the UK? Sure, maybe by some criteria. But the UK is still much wealthier, and it would be foolish to deny this or act as if it is unimportant.

Putting aside the clearly political criteria, the argument of the GDP skeptical crowd is that wealth is not the be-all and end-all. What good is GDP if you die sooner, you’re addicted to drugs, and you live in a state of constant economic insecurity? Of course, most alternatives to GDP per capita correlate very strongly with it. But when the differences between countries are relatively small in percentage terms – like between the US and UK, but not between the UK and Nigeria – we might argue that the poorer society is “better” in some sense.

It’s fine to say you’d rather live in Europe than America. But the denigration of GDP is always done to make an implicit or explicit point about policy, usually without explaining exactly how the things other countries do better on are related to them being poorer.

It’s not a big mystery why the US has a relatively low life expectancy: mainly opioids, higher obesity, car accidents, and murder. Slower European growth is caused by higher taxes, bad energy policy, and more stringent business regulations, particularly when it comes to labor. If the US adopted Western European economic policies, would our life expectancy match theirs? Would higher taxes make Americans skinnier or less likely to die in accidents? Nobody ever sells a tax proposal this way. “We need to raise the marginal tax rate. Sure, it might make us all poorer. But Europeans pay more, and they’re less fat than we are, so it’s definitely going to be worth it when we all lose weight.”

One may argue that the US can learn something from the way Europe enforces traffic laws or something. Yet I don’t know why such a conversation has to reference GDP at all. You can just say “I like X about Europe, we should do this specific thing in the way they do.” There is no pushing a button that says “Lower GDP, smaller waist sizes.”

Here’s a chart of GDP per capita versus obesity rate, with the US and European countries highlighted.

In America, 42% of adults are obese, compared to less than 13% in France. I would definitely sacrifice a bit of wealth to get down to France’s numbers.

But what is the policy implication here? This is mostly a cultural issue. But if the US simply adopted French economic practices on taxation and business regulation, we’d end up poorer and just as fat. We probably should adopt French policies on things like housing and nuclear power, which would be good for GDP, but again I don’t think that would change the obesity numbers. If there’s an actual anti-obesity policy we can implement, it would be worth losing a few GDP points over, but nobody has put that on the table.

Sometimes life expectancy numbers are used to indict the American health care system. But there is little reason to believe that this explains why Europeans live longer. In fact, the evidence generally points in the opposite direction. When you contrast survival rates for the same kind of cancer between countries, the US generally comes out near the top.

Compared to four other advanced nations in one study, between 2011 and 2017, older Americans who suffered an ST-elevation myocardial infarction – a type of heart attack – were more likely to undergo percutaneous coronary intervention, though Canada was in first place. International comparisons show that Americans with hypertension are more likely to know they have it and more likely to be treated. One 2003 study found that, of those 35 to 64 with hypertension, 53% of Americans were taking medication for the condition, compared to an average of 27% among six European countries. And despite the higher American obesity rate, as of 2015 Europeans generally had higher high blood pressure, which may be attributed to more extensive treatment in the US.

None of this is surprising. Europeans spend less on health care, and socialized medicine means worse quality, for the same reason that socialism leads to worse outcomes in other contexts. The US health care system is a semi-socialized system, which is preferable to going all the way. It must also be noted here that the US is responsible for the vast majority of medical innovation worldwide, which Europeans and others benefit from. So the American system should get credit for advances in treatment that other countries make, though it rarely does because people inclined towards left-wing economic ideas don’t want to admit capitalism works and their preferred ideas would make the world worse off.

Another argument you will sometimes hear is that Americans work more hours, and that explains at least part of the income differential, which is true. In some cases, the gaps are substantial; Americans work about a third more hours than Germans and the French.

Of course, you would expect countries that disincentivize work to work fewer hours. You could imagine a government that taxed all income at 95%, saw working hours collapse, and then declared that it chose more leisure. That’s obviously not a desirable outcome. There’s nothing stopping Americans from seeking out jobs that have fewer hours, but generally people like earning money. They also appreciate leisure, and there’s no reason to believe that government knows what the right balance between work and rest is, or even that if it could be confident of the right balance, it would be wise to impose that on the entire society.

I don’t know what the “ideal” or optimal number of hours worked per week is. But we’re more likely to reach that point in a society that puts fewer barriers in the way of people earning as much as they want. I generally don’t see government policies as choices societies make in any real sense. They’re usually better understood as products of historical contingency and elite bargaining, given how sticky the status quo tends to be. The only way to meaningfully speak about choice is in the individual context.

The GDP-haters seem to interpret “the US has a higher GDP than Europe” to mean “the US is better than Europe.” So they want to respond that actually, Europe is much better. But they’re the ones who are acting like a child saying his dad can beat up someone else’s dad.

This is a dumb way to think about international comparisons. Which country is richer and which country is safer or has a higher life expectancy are different questions. If you think there’s something the US can learn from Europe, explain exactly what it is. But you can’t just say Americans shoot each other more, and therefore European tech policy is better.

There are GDP deniers on the right too. JD Vance doesn’t want to champion woke socialist Europe, so he picks Japan to make his point in his latest book. He writes that, despite the country struggling on conventional economic measures, the strawberries there are delicious and everything is clean, which led him to conclude that “maybe economics is just fake.” So does it follow that raising American taxes or stopping free trade would make our subways safer and our bathrooms more sanitary? You can go ahead and make the argument, I guess. But “economists say Japan is less wealthy, when it’s actually safe” does not argue anything. It’s little more than a cheap rhetorical ploy. The goal is to distract the reader, which one does by denouncing “economics” as a profession in order to create a permission structure that allows them to ignore logic and data and replace them with wishful thinking.

It’s like if someone says Car A is faster than Car B, and someone responds Car B has a nicer color. Maybe this is a sensible thing to say if there is a tradeoff between speed and how nice the car looks. But you actually need to show the connection! You don’t get to just assume that red cars are slower than blue cars because you have a bias against the engineering method that makes cars go faster.

Whether on the right or left, every GDP skeptic is basically arguing for policies that cannot be defended in a straightforward way. Japanese are always going to commit less crime than Americans. Telling us that Japan is safer has no relevance to debates over taxation, trade, or land use regulations, any more than knowing that Europeans are skinnier and have less access to opioids suggests that we should adopt socialized medicine.

You can bet that if Europe and Japan had higher GDPs than the US, all of the GDP skeptics would eagerly champion this fact. What would we think of a politician who promised higher living standards and oversaw an economic collapse, but then turned around and said it doesn’t matter because crime went down? We’d say good job on crime, but you still failed on economics.

I would actually turn this argument on its head, and say America is amazing for having such a high GDP despite its less responsible and well-behaved population. Compared to Europeans and East Asians, Americans commit more violent crime, drive worse, eat themselves into obesity, and show many other kinds of personal flaws. Despite that, we’re still wealthier than Europeans and East Asians. People talk a lot about the pathologies of the black community in terms of high rates of crime and out-of-wedlock births, but black Americans earn roughly as much as the French. This is quite remarkable, and should be attributed to our superior economic system. The fact that Germans earn about as much as Hispanic Americans do, many of them a generation or less removed from developing world poverty, is a strike against the German system. If you could send our Hispanics to Germany and bring an equal number of Germans over here in exchange, like in a fantasy novel written by Stephen Miller, I’m sure the Hispanics would end up worse off and the Germans would be much wealthier.

Wealth isn’t everything. But it’s really important, and the only time people deny this is when they don’t like the fact that free markets continually prove superior to high levels of taxation and regulation.

Capitalism and Leisure / Welfare instead of Space

2026-09-13T17:33:00.000+08:00

Tired Peasant @HorrorGorl: "Capitalism stole the time we’re supposed to spend with each other."
Chris Freiman @cafreiman: "Counterpoint:"
"Estimated lifetime hours of work and leisure
Unit 3 'Scarcity, work, and choice' Section 3.9 'Explaining our working hours: Changes over time' in The CORE Team, The Economy. Available at: https://tinyco.re/3090321 [Figure 3.21] *Lifetime Discretionary Hours going up, Lifetime Work Hours going down, Lifetime Leisure Hours goung up*"

Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1: "It’s the same story every time “You must reject greatness, extort the productive, and demolish your civilization so that yet more subsidized corn syrup can be funneled into my maw”"
*Fat black woman with black girl in wheelchair*
Sign: "Billion $ for space. Pennies for the hungry"
"With sign "billions for spoce, pennies for the hungry, Mrs. Mattie Gray, lame daughter Jackie, 8, demonstrate at NASA site."
Breaking911 @Breaking911: "NEWS 12: "Danielle Grant is starving." *fat black woman*"

We Could Have Settled Mars; Our Regime Chose Global Zimbabwe Instead
Mars vs utopian welfare programs

Links - 13th September 2026 (Indigenous Peoples: Canada)

2026-09-13T13:07:00.000+08:00

Jim McMurtry on X - "Premier Eby uses the word “reprehensible” three times in talking about residential schools, e.g. the sexual abuse. There was infinitely less sexual abuse in these schools than on reserves today. The predators are all Indigenous males who never went to residential school."
Damn colonialism and inter-generational trauma caused by residential schools!

Frances Widdowson on X - ""I don't think we should have to prove to anybody what happened to these [dead children at Kamloops] because they are there and they send us messages telling us they're there...[@tkemlups] Chief Casimir and I went to visit the sacred site. You can tell they're there, right?""
Jonathan Kay on X - "Indigenous leader declares that no proof is necessary that 215 dead children lie below the surface in Kamloops because indigenous people have the psychic power (which white people cannot “understand”) to communicate with dead people & experience their “energy”"
Time to condemn Christianity as superstition

Aaron Pete on X - "Robert Fife has been holding power accountable for nearly 50 years. I admire individuals who challenge power, expose corruption and fight for justice and fairness on behalf of everyday Canadians. Throughout his career at CTV and The Globe & Mail, Fife has broken major stories ..."
Jonathan Kay on X - "Some of the stuff is pretty bonkers. At the 41 minute mark, Fife claims he knows that there are real unmarked graves in Kamloops. As proof, he told a story about some woman who started crying when talking about residential schools."
Danceinnadighetto on X - "He is an exemplar of the Canadian boomer elite and not any different from his UK forebearers. Relaxing on his status to expound on magical MSM myths like climate; immigration-good; rednecks-bad. The Globe (what a name!) is garbage and only survives due to subsidies."
Time for left wingers to call the Globe centre right again

Rent-seeking reconciliation industry needs conflict-of-interest rules and an end game - "Reconciliation has narrowed from the official goal of correcting historical and current wrongs perpetrated against Indigenous peoples into a pay-to-play model that increasingly resembles rent-seeking. The incentives are all there. Project proponents need legal certainty and physical access. Under the BC NDP government, this increasingly extends beyond consultation and simple “engagement” to the need to gain permission (by whatever deal necessary) from the Indigenous community claiming the territory where the project is located. Often this takes some form of partnership involving a combination of capacity funding, compensation, revenue sharing or equity. Ottawa’s own description of the pipeline emphasizes consultation, Indigenous equity, loan guarantees, and partnership. The emerging unofficial rule strikes uncomfortably similar to a line from the classic mob film, Goodfellas: “F— you, pay me.” Because once you strip away the binders and bureaucracy, the situation looks a lot like a shake down. But even questioning this state of affairs draws attacks, and accusations of being hostile to reconciliation or outright racist, rather than a rational inquiry into public governance. The Supreme Court has stated that Crown consultation with Indigenous peoples is a process, not a guarantee of a particular outcome. It requires good faith and, when warranted, accommodation. The B.C. government, enabled by the federal government, has gone much further. Sections 6 and 7 of the 2019 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) allow cabinet to authorize joint or consent-based statutory decision-making agreements between the province and Indigenous bodies. Under a consent-based agreement, a project or land use can’t proceed without approval of the Indigenous group. Without consent, the project is essentially vetoed. This did not descend from the clouds as natural law; it was a deliberate legislative choice by the NDP government, apparently enabled by the federal government. In essence, Indigenous consent requires lucrative financial deals for major projects to proceed. And the BC NDP government has created a chokepoint for major projects, with the costs and risks borne by industry and citizens. The Eskay Creek mine in northern B.C. is a case in point. Under the Eskay Creek section 7 agreement, Tahltan consent was required for the project to move ahead. The Tahltan approval process was tied to an Impact Benefit Agreement negotiated with the mine proponent, Skeena Resources. As part of a reported nearly $2 billion in benefits that would flow to the community under the agreement, the company also advanced the Tahltan government $40 million to be disbursed to community members before they voted whether to approve the project. In all, Skeena Resources and other sources estimate life-of-project benefits for the Tahltan community will reach $1.2 billion in cash, $570 million in contracts, and more than $184 million in wages. Separately, Tahltan will also receive 37.5 per cent of the provincial mineral tenure tax, which is estimated to reach as much as $1 billion. While $1.19 billion in revenues are projected for the province during the life of the mine. Apart from money, there is the question of authority. In northwest B.C., for example, the province has launched joint land-use planning across roughly 16 million hectares with five First Nations, while new mining-tenure registrations are paused across just under one-third of the planning area. The province says it will engage local municipalities and tenure holders, but the framework remains government-to-government; local governments do not legally qualify. If co-management becomes the operating principle, it risks transferring public control over public land to small Indigenous groups (with no democratic duty to the public at large), before British Columbians have even seen the final map. This model will only continue to sow distrust and cynicism over dealings with First Nations. There may never have been a point in modern B.C. history when reconciliation has been under more scrutiny, or at greater risk of becoming a toxic word. There was no need for it to be this way. Other models based on cooperation and good faith have shown a better path for reconciliation. The Haisla, for example, conceived of the Cedar LNG project, secured 50.1 per cent ownership, approved the project through a community vote, and borrowed $1.4 billion to finance their stake. That is true ownership and real risk-taking, because the Haisla carry downside risk if the project fails. The Nisga’a Nation has partnered with Western LNG and Rockies LNG on the Ksi Lisims LNG project, which is proposed for Nisga’a treaty land. Ksi Lisims and associated infrastructure are expected to attract more than $30 billion in investment if they proceed. These examples reflect First Nations seeking to build and be productive partners, rather than simply charge tolls for access. An owner only gets paid if an enterprise succeeds, while a landlord gets paid regardless. By pursuing sweeping changes to land use and opening the door to the pay-to-play model, the NDP government also risks amplifying inequities between First Nations. The NDP approach rewards litigation and strategic geography in a manner that advantages Indigenous communities with the leverage and resources to hire experienced negotiators. First Nations more poorly positioned economically have far fewer opportunities to develop projects or negotiate revenue. The federal Community Well-Being Index shows greater variation among Indigenous communities than among non-Indigenous communities. Turning reconciliation into a preordained hierarchy based on project location is manifestly unfair and destined to fail... Reconciliation in this model has become an industry, rather than a settlement, and its business case depends on never finishing the job."
Damn Trump keeping Canada behind!

Report examines colonial legacy of Canada's national parks | Toronto Sun (aka "Parks Canada report calls creation of national parks a 'colonial injustice' for Indigenous peoples") - "“For millennia Indigenous people have cultivated reciprocal relationships with land, water and ice guided by cultural practices, values and knowledge systems,” said the Evaluation of the Indigenous Guardians Initiative Internal Review, as reported by Blacklock’s. “Beginning in the 19th century the development of national parks and protected areas in Canada disrupted these relationships through exclusion and colonial injustices. “In establishing national parks, Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their homes, denied access to traditional territories and prohibited from hunting and harvesting on park lands,” the report said. The document is dated 2024 and was released without comment on June 22... “Stoney Nakoda were prevented from using the land as in past ways,” the report said. “These laws, practices and policies caused historic and ongoing harm for Indigenous communities. They eroded Indigenous systems.” Parks Canada was established in 1911 as the Dominion Parks Branch. Charged with administering a small group of parks and reserves, it became the world’s first national park service... A 2019 report titled Framework For History And Commemoration proposed that all federal observances address issues of “colonialism, patriarchy and racism” nationwide. “In Canadian history colonialism, patriarchy and racism are examples of ideologies and structures that have profound legacies,” the report said. “Nothing can be immune from review,” the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board, a Parks Canada agency, wrote in its 2019 report Careful Review Of Existing Designations. “Every designation can be re-evaluated.”"
I remember when left wingers supported national parks

Gabriel J. Benton ☦️🇺🇸 on X - "In 1697, Natives kidnapped Hannah Duston from her home in Massachusetts. Then they bashed her newborn baby's head against a tree. Today, people want to vilify her, because she killed her captors in their sleep and scalped them. Hannah Duston simply did what any true English mother would do. Pro-Tip: many American Indian tribes weren't exactly nice people."
Mike Kobe (Wild Horse) 🪶 on X - "During King William's war, Abenaki tribesmen killed 15 children in this particular settlement before taking Hannah Duston and her baby. They killed the baby (presumably to stop it making noise) and when they went to sleep, Hannah slipped out of her bonds and killed ten(!) of the Abenaki in their sleep with a hatchet. She then scalped them, which to me sounds quite reasonable. She deserves a statue in my opinion."
If white people defend themselves against "indigenous" people, that's "genocide"

Alberta First Nation sues Ottawa over $5 treaty annuity, argues amount stuck in 1899 - "A northern Alberta First Nation is suing the federal government to increase its annual treaty annuity payments. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam says the $5 his members receive every year is an amount that’s stuck in 1899, when Treaty 8 was signed. The payments date back to the signing of treaties across the country more than a century ago and were meant to provide assistance to First Nations members... First Nations across Canada, including other Treaty 8 signatories, have also launched legal challenges over the payment amount in recent years, and in 2023 Ottawa and the Ontario government reached a $10-billion settlement with 21 First Nations in that province... The claim notes the purchasing power of $5 has declined significantly since the treaty was signed and that there was never any mention of inflation when it was being negotiated. One online calculator pegs $5 in 1899 to be worth roughly $200 in today’s cash."
Weird. Left wingers tell us that the treaties are sacrosanct and can never be amended or renegotiated, and must be honoured for the rest of eternity, or that would result in the breakup of Canada.
Of course, they won't be satisfied with $200 either.

Leaders demand better health care for First Nations people after chief's 13-hour wait at Winnipeg hospital - "First Nations leaders are raising concerns about the quality of health care their citizens receive after the chief of a northern Manitoba First Nation waited in pain for about 13 hours at a Winnipeg hospital last month. Little Grand Rapids First Nation Chief Clinton Keeper, a cancer survivor, recently needed emergency medical care after experiencing complications from a kidney stone that obstructed his urinary tract, the Southern Chiefs' Organization said"
When you want special treatment not just for "indigenous" peoples but chiefs. Of course, they won't give up their money to fund more healthcare. Or go to their medicine men with their sacred and reliable ways of knowing

China clandestinely targeting First Nations leaders to procure Canada's natural resources: NSICOP - "Beijing is targeting Canada’s First Nations leaders with intelligence operations based on tourism that are aimed at securing Aboriginal-controlled natural resources, a Top Secret report from Ottawa’s intelligence-review watchdog NSICOP says. Additionally, Beijing funded a British Columbia provincial candidate and its Consul General in Vancouver took actions to cover up the candidate’s “possible Chinese Communist Party membership,” NSICOP’s June 2019 draft report alleges. The Bureau exclusively obtained NSICOP’s unredacted, 2019 report on foreign interference, which details China’s pervasive operations to bribe, coerce and co-opt Canadian leaders at all levels of government... Canada’s Aboriginal leaders — and the tension between federal and First Nations jurisdictions over natural resources in northern Canada — are an unexplored aspect of the Chinese interference story. But the 2019 NSICOP report demonstrates crucial national security issues at stake. It suggests Beijing is seeking clandestine relationships with First Nations leaders under false pretences in order to control Canada’s strategic resources in areas of increasing geopolitical importance. “In late 2011, China invited a national-level group of Aboriginal leaders to travel to China. A CSIS assessment noted that the invitation was advertised as an opportunity to develop tourism for First Nations,” NSICOP’s report says. “According to a Minister Counsellor at the PRC Embassy, the tourism opportunity was merely “beipian” (Mandarin for ‘to be fooled’) and that the true intention of the invitation was to pursue Aboriginal-controlled natural resources.” The report continues, saying that Chinese intelligence conducted research into every First Nations leader that joined the junket before they arrived in China. “The PRC conducted research on each delegate in part to identify their ‘potential usefulness’ to the PRC,” the report says. “The Minister Counsellor concluded that “Chiefs are ‘blind’ when dealing with the PRC and have no interest in knowing more.” In an interview Charles Burton, a sinologist and former Canadian diplomat, said “the idea of making friends with Aboriginal people for Chinese strategic purposes, would be part and parcel of their overall agenda to get access to the Canadian north and the natural resources that are there.” “China would be fully aware of the Aboriginal leaders that have permissions to give exploitation of resources,” Burton said. “But we don’t know to what extent gifts or benefits may have been given to the Aboriginal people from the Chinese regime.” More generally, NSICOP’s 2019 report says China’s deep interference in Canada expanded significantly, “following Xi Jinping's election as general Secretary of the CCP in 2012.”... “I’m not aware of this case, but I think a lot of people that have come to Canada and have been successful in the Chinese regime, are party members. And Beijing can leverage them, because I think it’s difficult to end your membership.” “So the idea that there could be candidates for provincial office that are members of the CCP, is very likely,” he continued. “The idea they would be used by the United Front as sleeper agents, even if they wanted to become part of Canada’s mainstream political life, that is very difficult to escape.”... “several PRC businessmen contributed to a mayoralty campaign instead of planned donations to a hospital, given that the ‘investment return on such a donation would be greater,’” NSICOP’s 2019 report says."
From 2024. Time for more "consultation". Anyway, looks like they're succeeded, and Canadians are happy about it, because they get to spite the USA as well by becoming a Chinese province

Five-year sentence whittled down to 810 days for Indigenous carjacker | National Post - "A judge defended the one-day sentence he handed a carjacker who stole a Toronto driver’s Mercedes at gunpoint, blaming the man’s jailers for failing the community... “Some decry what they call the court’s catch-and-release approach to criminal justice,” Justice André Chamberlain wrote in a recent decision where he ruled that Robinson would have to spend just one more day in prison. “If they truly believe that incarceration is the answer to our criminal justice problems, they should admit that the correctional institution’s neglectful approach to inmate care has led to shorter sentences, less time in custody, and lower rates of incarceration, even for serious offenders in some cases. The jails are the ones failing the community, the inmates, and the justice system.”... Robinson, 31, is a Black and Indigenous man. “During his time at the Toronto South Detention Centre (the South), the Indigenous Unit was eliminated. In September 2025, correctional officers removed and disposed of the artwork, teachings and prayers that were in the former Indigenous range,” Chamberlain said. “The position of Native Inmate Liaison Officer (NILO) has been and remains vacant, denying Indigenous inmates access to consistent Indigenous support services in the institution.” Robinson is a “Status First Nations adult with maternal ties to the Carry the Kettle Nakota First Nation,” said the decision. “His personal history reflects the enduring and well-documented impacts of intergenerational trauma arising from the legacy of residential schools and the colonial policies instituted by successive past governments, resulting in a cultural genocide. His maternal grandmother attended the Lebret Industrial School, and the resulting disruptions have contributed to a loss of cultural identity, fractured parenting models, and exposure to substance use and trauma within the family system.” His “upbringing was marked by family instability, emotional suppression, and a disconnection from cultural supports and traditions.” The death of his maternal grandfather when Robinson was 16 “represented a significant turning point in his life,” said the decision. “This loss appears to have intensified feelings of grief and abandonment, contributing to subsequent emotional dysregulation and substance use.” In early 2024, Robinson “faced multiple concurrent stressors, including bereavements, a serious illness affecting someone close to him, financial instability within his family stemming from the impending foreclosure of his mother’s home, and the abrupt loss of a significant business contract” for his audio engineering business, said the decision. “The convergence of these events is described as precipitating a ‘tailspin,’ and the temporal proximity between the loss of the contract and the index offence, within days, is particularly striking.” Robinson, who had past convictions for aggravated assault, theft under $5,000, and robbery, described for the court conditions he was held in at the South... “Jaiden Robinson has lived his life under the yoke of racism and colonialism. His background reflects a textbook Gladue profile: entrenched intergenerational trauma, compounded childhood abuse and addiction, and systemic disadvantage, alongside clear evidence of resilience and rehabilitative potential when supported through Indigenous-led programming,” Chamberlain said."

7 First Nations sign nuclear reactor ownership deal with Ottawa, Ontario
Dallas Brodie | Facebook - "Quit saying this is “in partnership” - if they put up their own money from their accumulated surplus, then it could possibly be seen as a partnership - provided other groups had a chance to bid on it as well. But giving taxpayers' money to FN to be “in partnership” does not form a true partnership - if you get money for free, your business decisions are not guided by proper risk management. Will the FN share in the losses if this goes south? Or is it always a risk-free investment when we form these “partnerships”? Until these deals are properly structured with risk to all partners, it is nothing more than welfare by a different name."

Geoff Russ: The South Africanization of B.C. | National Post - "The likely renaming of the small British Columbia community of Okanagan Falls exemplifies the toxicity, unworkability, and power of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) and “decolonization” more broadly. It is a top-down, legally binding process, not an organic or democratic one. DRIPA, passed by the B.C. NDP government in 2019, requires the province to align its laws with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which includes recognizing and restoring traditional Indigenous place names. The mandate to rename Okanagan Falls stems from these legal obligations... Chief Clarence Louie said, “When it comes to reconciliation and land claims and Indigenous people having rights, those aren’t up for a vote.” Okanagan Falls is seeking to become B.C.’s newest municipality. However, through the incorporation process, the very name of the community itself has become subject to a higher dispensation. This is the South Africanization of B.C., in which an ideology of historical accusation, and the causes of “reconciliation” and “decolonization,” are turned into a permanent regime of racial political privilege, with undemocratic renamings only part of it. Unlike South Africa, Canada has no legacy of apartheid, and there is no reason for us to conduct our politics as if such a legacy exists. What we call a place matters greatly. If it did not, those on the political left and radical Indigenous activists would not devote so much time and energy to changing place names. After the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa’s new, supposedly post-racial government for the “Rainbow Nation” also began to wrap itself in the language of reconciliation. Rather than becoming a movement for national healing, the politics that followed evolved into something that included almost punitive dispossession of property, vicious rhetoric, and history wars. Sound familiar? Much of Canada is walking the same road, especially in B.C., and DRIPA has been made into a legal weapon. Following rulings that found DRIPA was legally binding to all past and future laws, rather than merely a guideline, NDP Premier David Eby attempted to suspend the legislation. He stopped himself in his tracks after the First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC) warned that any amendments without its permission would result in the pursuit of “every available avenue, legal, political and through direct action.” Faced with a situation that stopped barely short of open rebellion, Eby backed down. New powers have been unintentionally ceded to unelected Indigenous authorities, and they will fight to keep them. These powers include the ability to change what is on the maps of the province. Regarding democracy, the true spirit of “reconciliation” and “decolonization” has driven a wedge through Powell River, a small city on the B.C. coast. The local Tla’amin Nation has demanded that the city be renamed, and has rejected a referendum or opinion poll on that change, arguing that “the human rights of a minority should not be decided by a majority.” Even Powell River’s own Joint Working Group has said a poll is “not the appropriate tool.” Local power players have staked much on the renaming. After a wave of pushback, they are afraid of losing in the public square. The replacement of Powell River is already occurring, piece by piece and without public consultation. Powell River General Hospital was renamed in 2022, followed by the school board, both replacing “Powell River” with the name “qathet,” which means “working together.” Furthermore, the regional Vancouver Island University satellite campus was renamed to “tiwšɛmawtxʷ,” meaning “house of learning,” to eliminate references to Israel Powell, a controversial colonial official. Very ugly racial language has accompanied these changes. Former Tla’amin leader Maynard Harry went on the record declaring that, “the white people in Canada are subhuman because of what they’ve allowed to happen.” He repeated the word “subhuman” several times. There is no healing to be found in those words, and they make suspect the very notion that healing was ever the goal, rather than power. South Africa has already renamed more than 1,500 communities since 2000 on the basis of race, reconciliation, and retribution. Historic towns like Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage, and East London, all of which have great importance to Afrikaners and Anglo-South Africans, have had their names replaced. These changes were often made despite public surveys indicating fierce opposition, including from some Black South Africans, from the residents of these communities. These name changes have occurred alongside land and property seizures in the “public interest,” often with little or no compensation. Even if one were to concede that South Africa’s renaming policy is justified on the basis of correcting historic wrongs, that doesn’t justify emulating those policies in Canada. Even so, the B.C. NDP has fully embraced this worldview, such as Premier Eby calling B.C.’s origins an “original colonial mistake,” while his MLA Rohini Arora said in the legislature that India, Pakistan, and Canada “share the same colonizer.” In this worldview, B.C. is a sin that must be purged and remade into something new. The NDP has authorized literature that declares the term “British Columbian” to be exclusionary. It publishes official guides for immigrants where the only history section is about the mistreatment of First Nations. Newcomers are being taught to despise B.C. before even signing a lease. B.C. is obviously not materially, economically or historically comparable to South Africa, but its political narratives are converging. Black nationalists in South Africa chant “Kill the Boer” as a threat to white farmers, while Indigenous chiefs in B.C. speak of non-Indigenous people as “subhuman.”"
Time to slam Israel for renaming towns to Biblical names, because we all know that the true eternal names of places are what they were just before "white" people "showed up"
Treason is only bad when it threatens the left wing agenda. Alberta must forever stay in Canada to pay for the gravy train

Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ Was a Warning We Ignored

2026-09-13T09:57:00.000+08:00

Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ Was a Warning We Ignored

Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate seems to have aged in reverse. It was published in 2002, though I read it in 2006 when I started developing an obsession with evolutionary psychology. At the time, I viewed it as the killing blow to blank slate psychology—the notion that human nature is purely a product of social construction. The book sat on my shelf all these years as a representation of an argument that had been definitively won. But after personally battling gender ideology and sex pseudoscience for almost a decade, it now represents a warning to society that went shamefully ignored.

The intellectual habits and belief systems Pinker criticized did not disappear. Instead, they infected neighboring fields, became infused with moral dogma, and then expanded from making claims about the mind to making claims about the body itself.

Blank slate psychology has a long history. John Locke once described the human mind as “white paper” drawn on by life experience. Twentieth century behaviorists were even more extreme. John B. Watson famously claimed that, given a dozen infants and full control over their environment, he could train any one of them to become a doctor, lawyer, artist, or thief, regardless of inherited traits. This confidence in the power of conditioning spread into psychology, education, and popular culture.

Pinker’s great achievement in The Blank Slate was not simply showing that genes matter, as many competent scientists have demonstrated before. Rather, it was exposing the way that fear of human nature had distorted entire fields of study. Many intellectuals seemed to believe that simply recognizing innate differences would somehow justify unequal treatment before the law or weaken the case for social reform. Pinker argued that scientific facts must be separated from moral judgments, because if you believe that equality under the law requires everyone to be biologically interchangeable, you’re hitching your moral commitments to empirical claims that are always only one experiment away from being proven false.

As an evolutionary biologist, I have always found the strongest version of blank slate psychology almost impossible to take seriously, because even the most cursory glance at nature shows it to be false. Put down the Women’s Studies journal article and look at data from our closest animal relatives. Simply knowing average body size differences between the males and females of a species can tell us a great deal about their likely current behavior as well as the evolutionary forces in the past that produced them. For instance, when males are a lot larger than females, as in gorillas, we generally expect intense competition among males for access to harems of females, and large differences in reproductive success as a result. When size differences are small or nonexistent, as in gibbons, we more often see males and females pairing up and less extreme competition among males. While this rule doesn’t hold in every case, it is a firmly established pattern with a sound evolutionary reasoning.

Humans did not emerge from outside nature. To believe that humans have somehow shed all our inherited tendencies requires one to hold that while every other animal has behavioral traits shaped by evolution, humans somehow lost them, only for our societies to recreate the same sex-related patterns through socialization. Why would evolution erase these tendencies only for culture to independently produce them in the same form? Why not just keep the evolved tendencies? I have yet to hear coherent answers to these questions.

Political pushback to this basic evolutionary reasoning is not new. When E. O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, the vast majority of the book focused on nonhuman animals, where readers were presumably all nodding along to his sound and compelling arguments. But in the final chapter, he crossed what he later called the “guarded boundary” between the natural sciences and the humanities. The social justice activists of the era accused sociobiology of promoting racism, sexism, eugenics, and even genocide. At a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, protesters poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head while chanting that he was “all wet.”

Shockingly little has changed since then. Human evolutionary psychology—especially when applied to sex differences—is still met with strong resistance. I hesitate to call human evolutionary psychology “controversial” because the notion of evolved psychological differences between the sexes is almost universally accepted as true among evolutionary biologists. The evidence is overwhelming. We’ve since moved on to asking and answering the relevant questions downstream of that fact, like which traits differ, how large those differences are, and how biology and culture might interact.

Socialization matters, of course. I don’t know any biologists who’ve ever claimed it doesn’t. But many feminist scholars and social scientists frequently portray culture alone as a complete explanation, but strangely only for the biological differences it finds ideologically inconvenient. Colette Dowling’s The Frailty Myth, for example, argued that the athletic advantage that boys enjoy over girls are mostly produced by culture and tried to argue that strength differences mostly disappear when men and women are matched for size and training. But this simply isn’t true. Controlling for body size, males have considerably more lean mass and much greater upper-body strength. That doesn’t mean training doesn’t matter, but it does not erase sexual dimorphism.

Given that we have more than enough data to debunk blank slate psychology many times over, why didn’t Pinker’s book and the quarter-century of data generated after its publication settle the debate once and for all? Unfortunately, academia is unusually good at shielding bad ideas from outside criticism. Most scientists are busy with their own research and assume that weak arguments will remain on the fringes. This was my mindset for years. I viewed sex pseudoscience as akin to belief in a flat Earth. I only spoke up once I realized how quickly it was gaining political influence and institutional protection. This was made possible by treating disagreement as a form of harm, which isn’t really a debate tactic available to flat-Earthers.

That was my experience after I published “The New Evolution Deniers” in 2018 and began challenging the widespread denial of biological sex differences beyond the brain. Blank-slate psychology had somehow mutated into blank-slate morphology. The older and more familiar claim was that male and female minds were basically identical until society imposed gender roles on them. The new claim was that the sexes themselves were infinitely malleable social constructs that can be altered through identity, language, hormones, or surgery.

Once a field becomes protected from criticism on moral grounds, it completely loses its “self-correcting” empirical anchor and begins to drift further from reality.

Pinker has taken a different path from mine. He has remained in academia and used the enormous credibility he has built over his career to defend reason, scientific truth, and open debate on volatile topics. He is Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and a co-leader of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom. His work on psychology, language, human nature, and rational thinking makes him unusually difficult to dismiss as a crank.

Prominent dissenters make it easier for others to speak openly. An adjunct professor can often be quietly cancelled; Steven Pinker is much harder to silence. His calm demeanor and precise style also helps. I have tried to follow the same approach of prioritizing facts over rhetoric.

Some people on the right dislike Pinker because of his strong opposition to Donald Trump. But political tribe is the wrong place to draw the line. The more important divide is between people who try to discover what is true and people who attempt to bend the facts to conform to their ideological commitments. On that question, Pinker has been one of the most ardent and consistent defenders of truth out there, and he has done so from within institutions that desperately need internal resistance.

The Blank Slate remains essential reading because the impulse it challenged never disappeared. It may never disappear. Pinker understood early that denying human nature does not make society more moral or humane, because you cannot build a better society on a false theory of humanity.

What is Europe even for? Decline and tragedy at the heart of the West

2026-09-12T17:50:00.000+08:00

When you have managed decline, and endorse it too.

The author dismisses Trump's comments on mass migration, but that only worsens the fiscal problems he does cite. He also approvingly cites the left wing policies that're weakening Europe, while later saying Europe should follow Mario Draghi's recommendations. Ironic.

What is Europe even for? Decline and tragedy at the heart of the West - The Globe and Mail

"European leaders at the Munich Security Conference this month, the world’s premier geopolitics summit, where the elders of the Old World spent a weekend telling everyone it was all going to be okay.

Times are bad, but we are strong. Such was the energy of the conference. The embodiment of this message was French President Emmanuel Macron, who, without saying the words, anointed himself Captain Continent. “Europe has been vilified as an aging, slow, fragmented construct,” but in fact “everyone should take their cue from us,” he said...

Try as they might to project otherwise – and perhaps because those continental leaders tried so hard – it is plain that outside, beyond the hotel’s 19th-century façade, Europe’s light is fading.

The EU has irreversibly fractured with Brexit, no matter how much British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it ain’t so in Munich. War creeps from the east, and Big Brother USA unfriends Europe and eyes its wallet. Not that there’s much to take. Britain’s and France’s economies are barely growing, and Germany’s is stagnant. Facing crushing debt and populist upheaval, continental governments are revolving doors where nothing gets done. Today prisoner exchanges are done in the United Arab Emirates. Gaza peace talks are held in Qatar. Ukraine negotiations might be held in Geneva, but Europe was not at the table...

A once-mighty people has been brought low. “Europe is a myth,” Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, said at a WEF panel. “It’s a beautiful myth, but it’s not working.” Or, using the gamer-speak recently adopted by Tesla’s Elon Musk, one might say the continent has become a “non-playable character.”

It raises a tough question: What is Europe even for? And for those on the other side of the West, who draw our values and institutions from the old country, it raises a further question: What does an irrelevant Europe mean for us?...

We can trace the source of European decline endlessly. Brendan Simms, the Cambridge scholar, writes about five centuries of the destructive “struggle for supremacy” among the closely packed European powers that led to their second-fiddle status to the United States. Ian Morris of Stanford University traces the origins of Brexit for 10,000 years. Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King once said “some countries have too much history.” Such is Europe’s tragedy.

History was what culminated in the Second World War and the utter devastation it wrought. It was only American money that saved the continent, aid from a land unravaged by war. And the Old World was never again the same.

In 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt after the latter seized the Suez Canal, a major shipping route they funded. But U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who disdained such echoes of colonialism, had his own geopolitical priorities. Mr. Eisenhower, who had Britain deeply in his pocket, threatened to sell British bonds and ruin its economy. Prime minister Anthony Eden lost that standoff, and then lost his job.

Then Britain would find it could not even win a stare-down against China, a backwater only recently recognized by the world. In 1982, a steely Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking Chinese leader no taller than five feet, bluntly threatened to invade Hong Kong. Britain made concession after concession and walked away with what is arguably nothing. It left prime minister Margaret Thatcher “depressed,” she later said. So shameful was that moment, Queen Elizabeth II was deliberately kept away from the handover ceremony.

History has these moments sometimes, which capture the tides of centuries: Europe had become neutered, wearing a veneer of wealth but underneath just a sick man of the West.

In a rules-based world where institutions are respected, all of this might have mattered less. It may even have been better. One man’s lustrous past is another’s colonial nightmare. The world was moving in a new direction, away from the might-makes-right that has defined much of existence. A new Europe emerged: less powerful, more compassionate, an enthusiastic champion of a new multilateral world. And Europe found a new sort of power.

But then that veneer of wealth started to crack. As entitlements piled up, debt grew and growth slowed. The 2008 financial crisis sparked the eurozone sovereign-debt crisis. The American economy was once about the same as the EU’s, but over the past 20 years, the U.S. economy has more than doubled to US$30-trillion; the 27 EU countries’ economies are at only US$20-trillion, barely more than that of one rising China.

Six U.S. companies founded in the last five decades are valued at more than €1-trillion. In Europe, no company founded during that period is worth even a tenth of that. Some higher-education rankings show only one EU university in the world’s top 30. “Europe is no longer at the forefront of progress,” the European Central Bank’s Ms. Lagarde said in 2024. Europe has been content with old-school industries such as machinery, trains and cars. And those depend on two items that are now either gone or going: cheap Russian energy and abundant Chinese demand. On top of that, China now also makes machines. The proportion of sectors in which China vies directly with the eurozone is 40 per cent now, up from 25 per cent at the turn of the millennium.

Meanwhile, France has now seen five prime ministers in just over two years. Its troubles are the same ones that broke the unwieldy coalition of Germany’s former leader Olaf Schulz, the same that Chancellor Friedrich Merz now faces and the same afflicting the British government that saw six prime ministers in 10 years and its chancellor of the exchequer crying in parliament: Welfare, pensions, healthcare – the entitlements that once stemmed from prosperity now weigh on budgets, but woe be to any government that tries to cut them or raise taxes to fund them.

And so radical politics rise in Europe, for anger and empty stomachs push people toward flashy prophets. In France and Germany, centrist coalitions are barely holding on.

Add to this the return of Donald Trump and geopolitical brinkmanship. The United States does not want to carry Europe or the world order anymore. And we live now in an era of extremes: If you’re not a superpower, you’re not a power at all...

The fraying of the transatlantic partnership, like a rotting carcass, is now attracting vultures. China sees the decay of what Germans call the Weltordnung, and it sees further reason to test Europe, to play hardball in trade talks. Russia, already bent on regional dominance, flies drones into Poland and Romania. Seldom before, perhaps not since the Dark Ages or the fall of Constantinople, has such a proud continent seemed so small in such a big world.

After it came back from a season break in 2024, Emily in Paris, the show about an American gallivanting across a caricatured continent, was 36.6 times more popular in Canada than a typical Netflix production. Forty-four per cent of Canadians want this country to join the European Union. These data confirm anecdotes: It’s hard to go a week without seeing friends’ Instagram pictures from Porto or Tuscany. And you somehow know six people who have done a semester abroad in Aarhus or Stuttgart.

This Euro-lust is not undeserved. Decline is long. Ask a Roman in the fourth century, and she would not know that her empire was falling. Even as Europe fades, its wellspring of soft power remains visible. Canada’s cultural ties aside, we live in a world that Europeans built. China’s super rich have snapped up European vineyards. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un studied in Switzerland. The Thai king treats Germany as a second home. The UAE loves France’s Louvre museum so much it spent US$1.3-billion on licensing and loan fees for Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Indeed, the vestiges of Europe’s power show precisely why its decline is a problem: We mourn a loss only when it has value.

Even with Mr. Trump’s disdain for Europe, he mandates that new federal buildings use classical architecture to “visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity.” Mr. Trump swears by Italian suits and Swiss watches. Germany’s Mr. Merz charmed Mr. Trump with an invitation to his ancestral hometown. Britain’s Mr. Starmer used a royal invitation as a trump card during his visit to the White House. Mr. Trump later also accepted an invitation to the Dutch royal palace. Mr. Carney, to assert Canada’s sovereignty, invited King Charles to deliver the throne speech, an event the likes of which have not been seen in nearly half a century. Cambridge’s Prof. Simms has suggested making Charles emperor of Europe, a modern day Charlemagne, to stabilize the continent.

There’s even some power left that is more than soft. There’s a saying that the United States innovates, and the EU regulates. It’s meant derogatively – that the United States gives the world internet giants and the artificial-intelligence boom, and Europe mandates caps that stick on bottles (for better recycling) and made Apple use USB-C. But think about the impact. The EU sets global standards in regulating climate protection, competition, food handling, privacy and social media. In a world often criticized for unbridled capitalism, where trillion-dollar corporations are gaining unprecedented power, the EU is the lone bulwark against problems that the free market either creates or cannot address.

And where Europe retreats, its antithesis fills in the blanks. It sounded like a good thing when the colonial powers left Africa, and it was, but now we do not live in a good world. Russia’s Africa Corps, mercenaries who took over from the Wagner Group, have been active in six countries that we know of and probably more that we don’t; more than half of that continent has some military pact with Moscow. China has stakes in 46 ports and includes all but two countries in its Belt and Road infrastructure program. In Djibouti, Chinese debt has accounted for as much as 70 per cent of the economy. Eyeing Africa’s natural resources, Russia and China now own so much of the continent that there are reports of them meeting and clashing with each other. In the United Nations, most of Africa votes with China and Russia, although that’s probably no big deal – who cares about UN votes these days?

Europe’s decline exacerbates the trajectory the world is on, and we will end up with a meaner, smaller place. If Europe does not fix its trajectory, it would be to the detriment of not just itself – and therein is also a lesson particular to Canada.

In this new era, institutions and soft power – no longer underpinned by the hard power of the United States – no longer command the clout they used to. Now it is all about defence and industry. It’s about power and money, although it boils down to just money, for that is where power comes from.

Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief and Italian prime minister, painstakingly wrote 400 pages on this subject in 2024, calling for regulatory reforms, a unified capital market and €800-billion more per year in business investment, among 170 recommendations. “We have reached the point where, without action, we will have to either compromise our welfare, our environment or our freedom,” Mr. Draghi said. “This is an existential challenge.” But, as Politico noted, “Draghi’s report got about a day’s worth of coverage in the continent’s major media outlets and then was quickly forgotten.” European leaders must heed that report.

Beyond the major, structural changes, there’s a simple solution: Work harder. Continental productivity is still relatively high – how much economic value a worker produces with how much work. It’s just that Germans work 86 hours for every 100 hours Americans work, and the French work even less at 77 hours. In Britain, critics say, decades of social policy that saw work as inherently bad for mental health has resulted in a vicious circle of unemployment. Germany’s Mr. Merz lectured his country earlier this month, saying, “Work-life balance and a four-day week will not be enough to maintain our country’s current level of prosperity.”

In that respect Canada shares something with Europe: Through our trade and security dependency, we, too, have been propped up by the Americans, who now grow weary of that role. We must take in a lesson: Throughout modern history, dark trends originate on the continent and then ripple forth. In Europe, this country sees a crystal ball, threatening a future in which we, too, will be so irrelevant.

Some of Canada’s path will be easier than Europe’s. Canada has vast natural resources, and a handful of provinces and territories is easier to corral than 27 countries plus the others. But while Europe can simply work harder, Canada is already working hard – we work the same hours as Americans, but with our abysmal productivity we make only European wages. Something has got to change.

The greatest issue of all is that one of Canada’s strengths is also a weakness: We have but a handful of provinces and territories – a small internal market that has problems trading with even itself. Europe, the second-biggest economy, can stand alone and be the big cheese if it musters the will. But Canada, the world’s 10th-largest economy, never can. For Canada to prosper and stand tall, we need a stable world order and big players in it that respect that order. Canada needs a strong Europe.

So, it is all the more important that Europe gets its act together. It must accept the inevitability that life will get harder. The only choice is when. For all the 100-page reports and complex proposals from various policy shops, it really boils down to a marshmallow test: Will Europe make the hard decisions today so that it may have a better tomorrow, or will it coast on accumulated wealth and standing until it all runs out?"

Links - 12th September 2026 (Trans Mania)

2026-09-12T13:48:00.000+08:00

Chris Milburn: Woke doublethink controls Canada | National Post - "the Standing Committee on Science and Research met to examine explicit affirmative action hiring practices for women. However, when Conservative MP Vincent Neil Ho asked a witness — Dr. Mona Nemer, a molecular biologist and Canada’s chief science advisor — to define “woman,” chaos erupted... Immediately, Liberal MP John Paul Danko interrupted on a point of order. “It is Pride Month,” Danko said, clearly agitated, “and Order 18 prohibits personal attacks, insults and offensive language.” Danko’s interjection kicked off several minutes of acrimonious debate as Ho pressed the question, and his colleague persisted in trying to shut him down. For viewers, it must have felt like stepping into 2021–22, when “What is a woman?” became one of the defining flashpoints of the culture wars. While many countries have since begun retreating from the postmodern ideology that fuelled that moment, Canada remains stubbornly mired in it. Postmodernism’s most damaging legacy has been its insistence that even our most basic and self-evident truths — including the biological reality of womanhood — are open to question. This wasn’t a problem when the ideology was confined to obscure fields like 19th-century French literature or 1920s feminist art. But like a malignant cancer, postmodernism spread quietly at first before metastasizing throughout our cultural and societal institutions. Along the way, it produced increasingly absurd ideas, such as “decolonizing light” and “queering math.” But to most people, the most visible consequence has been the efforts to “break the gender binary.” As science fiction author Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Activists can try to “break the gender binary,” but its existence is as fundamental a truth as the physics of light or the reality of mathematics. Our human existence as male or female is as definite and fundamental a distinction as black and white or up and down. So why do governments and institutions in Canada continue to push forward this harmful, unscientific ideology through, for instance, the recent appointment of a gender activist as the head of the Canadian Pediatric Society? Wokeism’s advocates will, no doubt, claim that the United States’ recent retreat on the issue is fuelled by the supposed transphobia and bigotry of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. However, countries that would normally be considered “progressive” are also eliminating ideologically based policies and returning to a science-based approach. In the United Kingdom, the government closed the infamous Tavistock Clinic and greatly restricted hormonal and surgical manipulation of children in the wake of the release of the Cass Review, while Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have restricted the use of puberty blockers. Gender activists may believe that it is harmless to view sex and gender as fluid. But there are very real-world consequences. Just ask the biological women who, almost overnight, were forced to share women-only spaces such as changing rooms, prisons, or rape crisis centres with biological men. Or ask the women and girls who watched biological men take their places on sports teams and their spots atop the podium. More than a half-century ago, George Orwell warned of the dangers of “doublethink” — the psychological process of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind and accepting both as true. He also wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Today, Canadians are forced to engage in doublethink on a range of contradictory ideas, from “I’m a proud Canadian … but there is no Canadian culture” to “We are living on stolen land … but I support open borders and mass immigration” to “Women need affirmative action in hiring … but asking for a definition of ‘woman’ is deeply offensive.” The heated exchange between MPs Ho and Danko and Dr. Nemer highlights how “double-thinkers” can retreat to defensiveness and anger when their contradictions are challenged. For many Canadians, it was another moment adding to a growing sense of unease. Doublethink is not just bad for individuals, it is unhealthy for our country as a whole. We need to be able to agree on basic realities, such as the sex binary. Canada needs to break wokeism’s grip on the nation. How can we begin to find answers if we can’t even ask questions?"
It's telling that asking someone what a woman is is considered a personal attacks, insult and/or offensive language.
Left wingers get very upset when you challenge them, because of cognitive dissonance. They are also not used to being challenged because they stay in their echo chambers and safe spaces

For The Win on X - "Sophie Cunningham must use caution in trans sports debate | Opinion https://t.co/jiGICWsCpH 📸 Trevor Ruszkowski, IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect"
J.K. Rowling on X - "Caution didn't win women the vote, or equal pay, or fair sport, or the right to single-sex spaces. Sophie Cunningham is standing up for women and girls everywhere and it's glorious. Fuck caution."
Left wingers only celebrate badly behaved women and/or "standing up to the establishment" when they push the left wing agenda

Women Speak Tasmania | Facebook - "Heather Herbert, a trans-identified male who worked as a web developer at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, publicly celebrated the death of Ann Widdecombe (former Conservative minister and Reform UK MEP and spokesperson and gender-critical woman). The university launched an investigation and Police Scotland later charged Herbert over the posts. Now some of the same activist circles that spent years insisting “misgendering is violence” and supporting court actions against women (see the Kirralie Smith case in Australia) are suddenly discovering that free speech is fundamental. Free speech for thee but not for me? It’s either a two-way street or it’s not."
How ignorant. Don't they know free speech is to push the left wing agenda?

Aja ♀️🇬🇧 on X - "Dear corporate PR teams: You were told backing women who defend women's rights would destroy your brand. Instead, Sophie Cunningham's Adidas release sold out in under 24hrs. Turns out the loudest people on Twitter aren't your customers. Women are. Maybe it's time you remembered that."

There’s nothing to celebrate about the extremism of trans Pride - "I went along to observe the Trans+ Pride event in London. As a lifelong feminist with more than 20 years’ experience campaigning against gender ideology I was well aware of the misogyny inherent to this movement – as well as the risks it poses to women and children. I was with Michael Kerr, who spent seven years living as Caitlin before detransitioning last year, and is now seen as an enemy of the trans movement. I have spoken out against gender ideology for more than 20 years, and was not expecting a warm welcome. What I hadn’t anticipated was how upset I would find it. The sight of hundreds of young women showing off their double mastectomy scars left me tearful. The first thing I had witnessed on arrival were two women, both with facial hair, passing cream to each other, wincing as they massaged the scars where their breasts had been. Many of the young women had serious outbreaks of acne as a result presumably of going through a puberty induced by cross-sex hormones. Yet despite having been surgically and chemically altered, they remained identifiably female. There was also a higher proportion of disabled participants than might be expected (as indicated by the use of wheelchairs and walking sticks) with an unmissable over-representation of relatively young women. “This is my last summer with tits,” read one placard. There was also aggression, threats and warnings of violence. It wasn’t long before I was spotted; an organiser used the sound system to announce that there were Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) in attendance. The chant, “There are many, many, many more of us than you”, went up, and my name was shouted out. Several of the most obscene placards referred to JK Rowling and included threats of violence. One man held a sign reading: “Vore all transphobes.” Vorarephilia is a sexual fetish involving eating another person. He had fake blood running down his face. Another stated: “The EHRC can suck my d---.” But perhaps the worst was: “90 per cent of pigs in the UK are gassed to death, but TERFS still exist.” Sarah Jane Baker was there chanting about prisoners’ rights, having been released from a male prison in 2019 after serving a lengthy sentence for kidnap, torture, and attempted murder. At a similar demo in 2023, he urged participants to “Punch a f---king TERF”. This time, the words “Free Gaza” were painted across his naked breasts. Bash Back was in attendance: “Stand-up, fight back!” as was the usual omni-cause, with some claiming the trans “genocide” to be comparable to what is happening in Gaza. Sex workers’ rights activists were there too. Chants and slogans proclaimed “trans joy”, and there was a near-constant refrain of “HRT, HRT, over the counter and for free!” One young woman’s placard featured a QR code for her GoFundMe request for “top surgery”. Amid the many “Protect the Dolls” signs, a lot of paraphilia was on display. Next to me was a furry, complete with tail, and sizeable groups of sado-masochists (many of them biological females) wore heavy leather and, in one instance, a gas mask. A man sporting a black veil pointed theatrically at me and Kerr before making a dramatic throat-cutting gesture. I asked a group of gay men why Trans+ Pride was necessary in addition to LGBT Pride (which is held across the country throughout the summer). Their response was that trans women were being kept out of “their own” bathrooms and other facilities, and had no rights. When I mentioned women’s rights – did they understand that female-only spaces were created to defend against male violence? – they looked aghast. If one trans woman were to commit a sexual assault, they said, that would only be the same as the occasional woman who does so. As I joined the rally at Trafalgar Square, the sign “Every time you punch a TERF, a trans kid gets more rights” was waved in front of my face. But in that sea of misogyny and threats of violence, all I could do was grieve for all those mutilated female bodies, swept along on the most dangerous form of social contagion imaginable."
Damn violent far right oppressing a poor helpless minority!

Dr Helen Webberley (she/her) on X - "Remarkable how many people who have never spoken to a gender specialist, never read a clinical guideline, and never sat with a trans person through any part of this journey feel fully equipped to redesign trans healthcare from scratch. What I particularly enjoy is the certainty. Not a flicker of doubt! Staggering. Truly. 🙄"
Comment: "Remarkable how a doctor who's been suspended several times by the GMC and had her licence revoked in 2024, is still out there spruiking the 'healthcare' that got her suspended. 🙄"

Clown World ™ 🤡 on X - "Jane Michelle Arc, a trans identifying software engineer from San Francisco, “fled” the US last year after Trump won, seeking asylum in the Netherlands over fears of persecution. Now placed in Ter Apel, the country’s largest asylum center, surrounded by migrants from war torn regions, the Red Cross has pulled its own aid workers out due to violence, and stabbings have become routine. Arc’s own words: “I will be hurt or killed” Turns out the danger wasn’t Trump. It was never Trump"

Taxpayer-funded transgender dolls to hit classrooms this fall - "“First-of-their-kind” transgender dolls — complete with removable genitalia — will debut in some Minnesota classrooms this fall to kids as young as 4 years old. The paper dolls, with gender-neutral names like “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery” and “Parker,” have removable internal and external genitals, along with more than 100 interchangeable pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles — like a trans Mr./Mrs. Potato Head. The goal is for kids to “learn about the different options that exist for who they can be,” according to a therapist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which spent over half a decade developing the controversial project funded by lefty Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz The Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health research over those six years included paying $20 to $60 for “trans and gender diverse” children and their parents to play with the dolls and “talk about gender and bodies” in groups... The trans dolls — which promise to “make gender fun” — will be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and mental health providers, according to a website of the “MyGender Dolls” company. It features an image of a boy doll wearing a dress and others in various states of sexual identity confusion... The dolls began as a University of Minnesota research project, which was later spun into a commercial venture — “MyGender Dolls” — by two licensed psychologists who are professors at the medical school. The website does not reveal the cost of the paper dolls. The University of Minnesota’s Medical School has been receiving $15 million annual funding from the state via Walz — cash earmarked to “increase the medical school’s research capacity” and “ensure its national prominence.”... Walz, who’s pushed pro-transgender policies on the Midwestern state, was bestowed the institute’s inaugural “Distinguished Sexual and Gender Health Champion Award” in 2023, a title created just for him. The scandal-plagued governor was even pictured with a wide grin alongside Medical School Associate Professor Nic Rider — co-founder of MyGender Dolls, which is bringing the radical dolls to market... “They will find anybody who’s in trouble and use this as a tool to say, ‘this is why you’re unhappy.’ This is absolutely grooming,” slammed Dr. Quentin Van Meter, past president of the American College of Pediatricians. “The younger kids — many of them still believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. And you’re then presenting them with paper dolls that kind of look fun, and you can change clothing, hair, genitals… It’s well beyond their ability to sort out fantasy from reality.”... When reached by The Post, a university spokesperson claimed no public funds were used “to support MyGender Dolls’ commercialization efforts.” But when pressed on how much taxpayer money went to research and development of the dolls, and to the salaries of the professors involved in the project, the university refused to answer, telling The Post instead to file a freedom of information request."

Andy Ngo on X - "Trans activist Sarah Jane Baker, who served years in prison for attempted m—rder and kidnapping and torture, was one of the speakers at the London Trans Pride today in Trafalgar Square. One of the trans activists held a sign declaring “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS” and the photo of @jk_rowling and the Queen."

Uncaptured by Janet Murray | Facebook - "It’s not just the BBC that ignored the more unsavoury side of yesterday’s London Trans+ Pride. Across much of the mainstream media, the event was presented as a colourful, peaceful demonstration. Images that might have complicated that narrative - including extremist placards, masked protesters and calls for violence against “TERFs”- were largely absent. At the same time, both the Metro and the Standard published an interview with Caroline Litman, whose child Alice died by suicide in 2022. Her loss is heartbreaking, and her perspective deserves to be heard. But journalism also has a duty to distinguish personal testimony from evidence. Both articles repeat claims that gender-affirming care is “life-saving”, and warn that “more children are going to die” unless government policy changes, with little indication that these are highly contested claims. Where are the voices of detransitioners, or parents who say affirmation wasn’t the right approach for their child? Journalism is shaped by editorial choices. Whether it’s the images selected from a protest or the voices chosen to explain it, what gets left out can be just as revealing as what gets included."

Meme - r/fourthwavewomen: "I have always felt this from the bottom of my heart."
"If movement declares that a man can define what it means to be a woman based on his feelings, but a woman cannot define being a woman based on her material reality, then it is a movement for the interests of men." -Tasia Aranguez

Andy Ngo on X - "Another trans person has been arrested over the m—rder of his parent. 36-year-old Safford James Wolfson, who identifies as female, was arrested on suspicion of the m—rder of Angela Caprioli. The 61-year-old woman was found dead at her home in Laguna Beach on July 20. The suspect formerly worked at Spin magazine, according to his Linkedin. He attended the private liberal arts college Pitzer College. Multiple trans people have been arrested over the m—rders of their parents in just the last couple of years. In extreme trans ideology, parricide — killing one's own mother or father — is often a recurring theme. In my research of the Zizian trans death cult, I found that its members believed strongly in m—rdering "transphobic" parents. They believed that's how they would get justice"

Thread by @hecheateddotorg on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In a recent post, I highlighted the #1 "female" disc golfer in Iceland, a man named Marteinn Hörður Kristínarson, now going by "María Eldey Kristínardóttir." Kristinarson was the national champion in Iceland in the "womens" pro open, formerly open, category from 2021 to 2025. But did you know, the top "female" disc golfer in Iceland before Kristinarson came onto the scene was also a man? Meet Hilmar Jón Pálsson, now known as "Kolbrún Mist Pálsdóttir". Pálsson began playing "women's" disc golf in 2016 and immediately won that year's "women's" national title. He then proceeded to win nationals again in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, only coming in second in 2021 after Kristinarson arrived on the scene. For the past 10 years, the best "female" disc golfers in Iceland have been men. It should be noted that there are relatively few female athletes in Icelandic disc golf, and Pálsson and Kristinarson have occasionally been the only two in the category in smaller competitions, but these titles are still meaningful for the women who compete for them. Pálsson is an activist, and appears to have been one of the board members of the Frisbee Golf Association of Reykjavík that approved the decision to continue allowing men into the women's category (in other words, the decision to abolish a women's category). In 2019, he was appointed to a committee with the National Olympic and Sports Association of Iceland (ÍSÍ), that worked to give boys access to girls' teams, co-authoring a guide in 2020 "Trans börn og íþróttir" (Trans Children and Sports) Like so, so many other organizations in the 2010s, Icelandic disc golf and Icelandic youth sports in general were guilty of consulting a man pretending to be a woman on the abolishment of the women's category rather than actual women."
Matt Osborne on X - "All the best female disc golf players in Iceland are men, what a stunning and brave coincidence"
Weird. We keep being told this never happens

The Globe and Mail on X - "Storm co-owner fined, suspended five games by WNBA after confrontation with fans"
Jonathan Kay on X - "And by “confrontation,” you mean the woman lost her mind and started screaming at two girls because they believe that biology exists"

Meme - greg_meyer61: "Only about 0.5% of high school athletes are transgender. About 0.002% of collegiate athletes are transgender. The frequency of voter fraud is 0.000845% per the far right Heritage Foundation. Yet, a whopping 24% of households spend nearly their entire income just on necessities. Transgender people in sports and voter fraud are issues invented by Republicans to scare gullible voters so they will ignore what their economic policies are doing to everyday Americans."
Meanwhile left wingers fixate on school shootings which kill fewer people than cows and claim that measles deaths are only low because of vaccination so we can't afford to lose vigilance
Since ICE only shot 10 people in 6 months, will left wingers shut up about it or will they continue to pretend there's an issue to scare gullible voters so they will ignore what their immigration policies are doing to everyday Americans?

Meme - "White Woman *female reproductive system* Black Woman *female reproductive system* Latin Woman *female reproductive system* Asian Woman *female reproductive system* Indian Woman *female reproductive system*
Trans Woman *male reproductive system*"

Meme - "*Pirate boy*
KIDS KNOW WHO THEY ARE
Avast ye, mateys! If ye be looking for a life of excitement, adventure, and booty, then a career in piracy be the perfect choice for ye! Imagin seas, free from the constraints of landlubber societ whenever ye want, and do whatever ye want. Ye can merchant ships, or even maroon your enemies on d of the crew! Pips Ye'll form life watch yer mentionin could bec But be wa could be But that' start livi enjoy the fo treasure So what lool ing th ates would na e-knit bunch, and theyhave our fellow pirates, and ye'll always have someone to cussion of p is, spices, silks - lubber could eve hot all fun and gar by the navy, or e hat are ye waiting for? Arrr! Join the crew today and At wait, there's m free parrot; a l o the Pirate Quarterly Bec enture, and dom of sai want, and ga ev W the omeor to w out mentioning the booty. Gold Cl Ye could become richer than any eing a pirate be not all fun and o to survi be complete without en martoned on a desert island. e! As a pirate, you'll also get to te to booty ig the high seas, free from the ever ant ships or ever 'e a a 3200 all part o y the ema vhat are you waiting for? Arrr! Become for a life hoice for val Imsnine the fraodom of"

Liberal sports secretary says IOCs new gender testing rules concerning | National Post - "Canada’s top federal sports official says he’s “concerned” about new eligibility rules limiting Olympic women’s events to biological females, but says the changes are unlikely to stop Canada from trying to host the Olympics in the future. Secretary of State for Sport Adam van Koeverden told reporters in Calgary on Monday that he was worried about the International Olympic Committee’s plan to roll out mandatory genetic screening for all athletes competing in the female category... Michele Krech, a professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University says that the IOC’s new gender eligibility rules are illegal under Canadian law. “The Genetic Non-Discrimination Act is the most obvious place to look, but the rules could also run afoul of Canadian human rights legislation or the Charter,” said Krech. Krech said that hosting the Olympics would put Canada in a legal grey area. “The Government of Canada already bears some responsibility for allowing these rules to be enforced in Canada. Hosting international competitions would only add to this responsibility, particularly if the hosting agreement does not align with Canadian laws and policies,” said Krech."
Peter Menzies on X - "Modern man explains that, in Canada, it’s important for men to explain to women in sport what it means to be a woman in sport"

Michael on X - "Another Twitch Streamer, Silvervale, a VTuber, was brought to tears after being doxxed/harassed for playing Hogwarts Legacy."
The "be kind" and "empathy" crowd are incredible hateful and vicious

La Belle Époque 🏺🍇 on X - "When I say that a Troon is a not a woman, I am grilled by libtards about biology, epistemology, the utter meaning of words themselves, etc. When a Troon says they are a woman, not an ounce of inspection is applied to them (or themselves)"

CPS pulls its hate crime guidance for schools after 14-year-old girl mounted legal challenge - "The Crown Prosecution Service has pulled its LGBT hate crime guidance issued to schools earlier this year after a 14-year-old girl mounted a legal challenge against it. On January 21, the CPS issued its 'LGBT bullying and hate crime schools pack' which warned schools they could face legal action if they do not allow transgender pupils to use their preferred toilets or changing rooms. But lawyers acting on behalf of the school girl, known only as Miss A, said their client found the guidance “very distressing” and was concerned that she could face prosecution for failing to abide by the rules set out in the guidance... The letter accused the CPS of “misrepresenting the law” and acting “irrationally” by pulling together the guidance “without input from bodies with specialist knowledge of child welfare”, such as the Department for Education. “It is extraordinary that no statutory organisation with expertise in safeguarding and the welfare of children has been consulted,” lawyers on behalf of Miss A wrote. "
From 2020. Left wingers only love and praise young activists when they push the left wing agenda

Gad Saad on Cancel Culture, Idea Pathogens and the Future of Discourse

2026-09-12T09:51:00.000+08:00

Gad Saad on Cancel Culture, Idea Pathogens and the Future of Discourse - Newsweek

Gad Saad's escape from Lebanon as an 11-year-old set the stage for a life that would eventually combine psychology, politics and scathing Twitter takedowns of his critics. A Canadian Lebanese evolutionary psychologist, professor, host of the YouTube show The Saad Truth and the author of a new book called The Parasitic Mind, Saad's main mission is to combat what he calls "idea pathogens," or omnipresent wokeness, by another name. Known to his fans affectionately as "the Gadfather," and often battling his critics on Twitter with a blend of satire and data, Saad first became interested in the work he's doing when he saw topics becoming taboo in his professional home in science...

Newsweek: Your background is really interesting. How does it influence your work?

Gad Saad: I was born in Beirut, Lebanon. We were part of the last group of Lebanese Jews who had steadfastly refused to leave Lebanon. But when the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975—the Lebanese civil war is the standard by which all butchery is measured against—it became impossible to remain in Lebanon. So we were there for the first year of the civil war, and then luckily we were able to escape to Canada.

The most direct way it [shapes my work] is that it allowed me to see what happens to a society that is instantiating a perfect ethos of identity politics. In Lebanon, everything is defined by identity politics. In this case, it was your religious heritage. There's an internal card in Lebanon, which basically is like an internal passport that states, very prominently, your religion. And if you were Jewish, they didn't even write "Jewish," they wrote "Israelite." So it even creates greater animus against you, even though you've got nothing to do with Israel and you're Lebanese. So I saw what identity politics does to a society, and to now see it lauded as a wonderful way to organize society 45 years after I left Lebanon is quite disheartening.

There's a debate now about who is allowed to speak about what. Your background allows you, in a way, to speak to our current moment. But do you agree with the idea that you need to have experienced something in order to have an opinion on it?

No. People can analyze the Holocaust, even though they didn't go through it. Oncologists study cancer even though they've never suffered from it. On some matters, of course, your lived experience adds one data point to the total narrative. I think in my case, the fact that I do hold the highest hand in victimology poker, or the gold medal in oppression Olympics, makes it more difficult for the enemies of reason to use the woke calculus against me. And so I use that against them, in a somewhat sardonic way, but in a very effective way, because they don't actually listen to the veracity of your arguments. Instead, whoever has the greater victimhood wins, and the reality is it's going to be very tough for most people to defeat me. And so they end up losing using their grotesque calculus. And so in that sense, I am pleased to have had my lived experience because it allows me to defeat the idiots.

On the whole, what are you trying to accomplish?

I'm trying to avoid that which has been tried in previous societies and failed. I'm trying to make people understand the anomalous reality that the West was able to create. I say "anomalous" because, in the history of human civilization, it's a complete outlier that we've had the types of societies that we're able to create in the West. This is not the default value. So to have found the magic recipe where freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and the scientific method and all the other wonderful things that the West has offered us, are allowed to flourish, and to now see it being thrown away under the cloak of the progressive robe is very galling to me. It upsets me, it angers me. I become righteously, I think, indignant. So I'm trying to offer people, if I may use the terms, a vaccine against the brain parasites that have absolutely infected the minds of Westerners.

Was there a specific moment that you decided to get into this? What was the thing that pushed you over the edge?

I guess it started in my scientific work. In my scientific work, I apply evolutionary psychology and the behavioral sciences in general, and in consumer behavior in particular. And for most social scientists, the idea that we would use biology to explain human behavior is really heretical. "Surely, Doctor Saad, you're not saying that the same mechanisms that explain the behavior of my dog and the zebra and the mosquito explain consumer behavior. That's grotesque, Doctor Saad." Of course that's silly, because we don't somehow exist outside of our biology. We don't exist in a supra plane, where our biological heritage ceased to matter or exist. And so I started seeing these tensions to view some ideas as heretical in my scientific world. "Don't discuss sex differences—that's sexist." "The fact that Arianna Grande bench presses less than the center for the Dallas Cowboys is only because her parents taught her to play gently with dolls and taught Bubba to really play aggressively with his blue truck." Surely you don't think there might be any hormonal physiological, anatomical, behavioral, differences across the two sexes. And so at first, I was bewildered by this. So it started by being something that was being fought only within the hallways of academia and the fancy peer-reviewed journals. But then the idea pathogens escaped and started infecting every nook and cranny of society. And so then I took my fight from the typical environment, which I fought in academia, and I started going public. And as my platform grew, my voice grew, and I took on more and more sacred cows.

Do you think that, in the West, America's rightful embrace of civil rights, and anything that looks like civil rights, has led people to take on a lot of these ideologies?

In The Parasitic Mind, I have an entire chapter on thinking vs. feeling. It's a false dichotomy, which is why I refer to it as a form of epistemological dichotomania. To always try to create two mutually exclusive realities. We are either thinking animals or feeling animals. Well that's perfectly incorrect: We are both. What matters, as I explain, is when do you activate the right system? For example, when I'm walking down a dark alley and I see four young men who look suspicious and are loitering around, I'm going to get an affective-based response: My heart will start racing; my blood pressure will go up; I might start perspiring. That affective response makes perfect evolutionary sense. On the other hand, if I'm trying to solve a calculus problem, all of the affective response in the world is not going to help me solve that calculus problem. I need to trigger my cognitive system, my thinking system. A fully grown mature adult recognizes that the world is made up of cost benefits, it's made up of trade-offs, opportunity costs, competing interests. That's what happens when you grow into adulthood. People have this very kind of infantile view.… The maladaptive empathetically progressive, really view the world through only a feelings lens.

The term cancel culture gets thrown around all the time. What do you think of the criticism that cancel culture is overblown and it's not real, and there's nothing to fight against?

It's insane to argue that. I have a chapter called Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome.The metaphor is now well understood as, there's no way you're going to accept reality. When there have been 36,000-plus terror attacks in nearly 70 countries since 9/11, and nearly every single one of those terrorists will state exactly why they are committing the act, and they will quote the exact passage from their religion about why they're committing the act. The super progressive and smart Westerners who analyze the situation say, "No no no, it's not because of what they said. It's because of beard bullying. It's because of climate change, it's because of lack of solar panels. It's because they weren't exposed sufficiently to art; if they'd only been enriched by art, they would've known better. It's because of lone-wolfism. They're alienated. So that's what ostrich parasitic syndrome is. Don't believe your lying eyes. How many more examples does one need of cancel culture before you think it's real? I recently spoke at the Jewish Public Library—so if you want to appreciate the singularity point of wokeness, here it is: The Lebanese Jew who escaped execution in the Middle East is trying to be deplatformed by progressive Jews from speaking at the Jewish Public Library. I mean, we've hit the singularity point. It's impenetrable to reach such people. There is no amount of evidence I can offer you that can convince you that this is serious. I receive innumerable emails where people testify to me—because I've become sort of the grand confessor—where people write to me from all over the world, saying well here's my situation, professor Saad.

Here's a typical one: "My adviser just found out that I said something complimentary about Donald Trump. Now he's removed my name from a paper I've been working on for a very long time and it looks like I'm going to be kicked out of the lab." That wasn't from Yemen, that wasn't from North Korea, that wasn't from Communist China. So how many people need to be deplatformed before you actually take it seriously?. I think it's a very serious problem, because it has normalized the reflex of people saying, "I don't like what you might say, cancel him." Even if not a single person were actually canceled, the fact that people are emboldened to view this as a viable strategy, therein lies the problem. Twenty years ago, you didn't have that reflex, because the zeitgeist was: We live in a free society. Today we don't have that zeitgeist. so it's a profoundly serious problem, it's a terminal illness.

In your book you say, "The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible." So when you point to someone as a racist or a homophobe, you shut down the conversation because it's impossible to prove you are not one of those things. What is your advice for people who are looking to engage in tough subjects but are continuously getting shut down by those accusations?

Using satire effectively is a very very powerful way to stay ahead of those possible accusations, because what you're basically doing is using satire in a very trenchant way. In the way a surgeon's scalpel cuts through warm butter, it cuts through the nonsense. For example, sometimes when I receive a compliment on my book, I'll look at the person on Twitter and if they are white, I'll retweet it and say, "It looks like you are a white person, I'm trying to decolonize my Twitter feed for the purposes of equity and systemic racism. Only accepting compliments from noble people of color." How come I can't be canceled? Because I have literally replicated the exact structure of the argument. By the way, that's why satirists are the first to be executed in regimes. We don't go after the guys with the big muscles when we are dictators, because the guys with the big muscles are easy to control. But the guys with the sharp tongue and the big brain—those are the ones you have to get rid of.

It's hard to offer complete advice that is applicable to every person. But the general advice is you need to activate your inner honey badger. The honey badger is a a very small animal, and yet it can withstand an approach by six adult lions. It means be fierce in the commitment to defend your first principles. I will stand in a ring with anybody to defend an idea that I know I can defend. When I don't know enough about a subject, I will tell you frankly I don't know enough so i'm uncomfortable making a pronouncement. What people have to do is develop the intestinal fortitude and the cerebral fortitude to have the ability to defend the principle of presumption of innocence. I don't emote louder than you, I don't get hysterical, I don't cancel you. I say, "Let me convince you with a preponderance of data."

Do you believe that there is a silent majority against cancel culture that thinks these ideas are absurd. And if you do, do you think they'll be a backlash soon that's larger than anything we've seen so far?

It depends what the population is that you're looking at. In academia, the majority are the proliferators of the idea pathogens. The rate of Democrat professors to Republican professors in American universities is astoundingly lopsided. But if we say that the population is the entire U.S., not the intelligentsia, then it is absolutely the case that the silent majority is not made up of the blue-haired people.

But I analogize it in this way: When you look at the 9/11 terror attacks, it didn't take 19 million people to bring down the twin towers, it didn't take 190 million people to bring down the twin towers, it took 19 terrorists. But then there were a whole bunch of other people who supported their cause. It's a similar dynamic in academia. There are very very few ultra-rabid blue-haired people on campus, but there are enough of them to keep the rest of us in check. In a sense, that's why Donald Trump was so problematic to the blue-haired people, because he really did represent a possibility for a catalyst for this cataclysmic change. The silent majority, if we mean the entire U.S. population despises this stuff—but I also think that most of them don't do anything for all of the reasons I enunciate in Chapter 8. They diffuse the responsibility onto others: "I don't want to lose my job, I don't want to lose friends on Facebook, I wanna still be invited to the cool kids party in Malibu."

Oftentimes people ask me what is it that fundamentally drives me. I think it comes from a very exacting code of personal conduct. At the end of the night when I put my head on my pillow and I'm about to go to sleep, the only way for me to avoid insomnia is to know that I've done all that I could, however big or however small, to contribute to the battle of ideas, to the defense of truth and liberty and freedom and true classical liberal values. My two fundamental life ideas are truth and freedom, and that's what drives all of my actions. If the silent majority were able to somehow access that courage, to speak out, I genuinely think that it could solve this problem in a couple of years. It won't take generations. If we don't, it will be a very very slow, laborious, train ride to hell.

You propose in your book, as part of the solution to the battle of ideas, that social media companies be regulated as utilities. Do you think we'll see that happen?

Not as long as the media companies are able to play both sides of the political aisle with unbelievable political donations. The diabolical brilliance of all the social media companies is that they understand human nature and so they go to the Republicans, who might be the source from where some of these bills might be coming from, and they say, "Here's $5 million for your next campaign. Are you still against us?" I worry that because of that, because of people's myopic selfishness and instrumentality the social media companies will always win. But I suspect that if it gets bad enough, people will wake up out of their stupors, although you would think that shutting out the sitting president of the U.S. might have been a moment by which people take notice but apparently not, so we have to wait and see.

In the months since you wrote your book, the idea of "intent vs. impact" has gained more attention in the public discussion—that it doesn't matter what you were intending it just matters how people took it. What do you think of this idea of intent vs. impact and what the impact of that will be on society?

Let's take, for example, forbidden knowledge in academia. The idea of forbidden knowledge is that there might be downstream ill consequences to you doing research in this topic, therefore stay away from it. That's a grotesquely bad idea. If we follow that principle, then there's this little field called physics that we should have never pursued because of atomic bombs. We have the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. It didn't come because we understood feminist dance therapy, it happened because physicists did that. Those physicists could or could not have known the consequences of having studied physics. But we did not tell them that there could be a future whereby you'd use the production of weapons as a consequence of you being physicists. That's not my problem as a scientist. I follow truth wherever it takes me, and it's someone else's job to worry about the consequences. For most things, we need to be careful about the dichotomy you're talking about. In the criminal justice system, we do recognize that depending upon what your intent was, what we charge you with. the dichotomy you mentioned has become fuzzy and confused, and that's what causes a lot of the problems I discuss in the book.

What are you most concerned about in the near future and what are you most hopeful about?

I am most concerned that the pandemic of these ideas pathogens is going to continue unchallenged. I often end my video clips with: "Slowly, we inch." I updated this to "Quickly, we gallop." What I refer to here with that imagery is that we are either slowly inching or quickly galloping toward the abyss of lunacy. Once you fall off the abyss, that's it, gravity is taking over. What worries me is that our response will not come quickly enough for us to defeat the new idea pathogens that are afoot, so that in the future to defeat those ideas it won't come peacefully to defeat those ideas, it will come violently.

On the flip side of that, I think it can quickly be overturned—if the silent majority truly wake up in unity and say, "I've had enough. I don't want to be talked down to in this way, I don't want to not recognize what biology means. I don't want my children to be taught that they are bad because they are white or they are any color. I've had enough." It's going to be difficult, but if the zeitgeist changes so that people are emboldened to speak out, that's what gives me hope.

The East Asian Package

2026-09-11T17:36:00.000+08:00

The East Asian Package

"If you look at almost any kind of cross-national data, you notice that East Asians are fundamentally different from other peoples. So much so that we might talk about an “East Asian package,” a series of traits shared by South Korea, Japan, China, and the Chinese-descended nations and territories of Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan. There are indications that even North Korea shares many of its important components, despite it being the most isolated country in the world. This package includes:

Low levels of crime... American liberals often respond to complaints about crime by saying that it is a natural part of living in a big city. But the largest and most crowded East Asian cities have less crime than rural and suburban areas in the West!
Extremely low rates of illegitimacy...
High levels of academic achievement, particularly in math and science. You can see the 2018 PISA results below. Some people think the Chinese numbers here can’t be trusted because they only tested urban centers, but we’re still talking about kids who are coming from families that are poor by Western standards. North Korea doesn’t show up in international comparisons, but it actually fields a formidable Math Olympiad team, and has constantly shocked Western analysts by how quickly it’s been able to develop advanced military technology. The East Asian aptitude for math and science is reflected in it being the only non-Western part of the world to produce multiple major tech giants, including familiar names such as Samsung, Mitsubishi, Sony, TSMC, and Alibaba.
High levels of economic growth in recent decades... There’s a book called How Asia Works that tries to attribute this to East Asian nations adopting the correct developmental policies, but as Scott Alexander points out, “It seems weird that all the countries with good policies would be right next to each other.” Indeed, many of the policies the author suggests, like land reform, have been tried outside the region with limited success. Even if the book could explain economic development, it doesn’t explain East Asian success in other countries, nor the rest of the East Asian package.
Extremely low fertility... While East Asians weren’t always infertile, indicating that this isn’t an immutable trait that exists independent of cultural and historical circumstances — we did somehow end up with 1.4 billion Chinese, after all — the nations of the region have without exception responded to economic growth and modernity by being much less likely to start families, and the extent of the collapse isn’t like anything we’ve seen anywhere else in the world.
High life expectancy...

What’s really amazing about all of this is that these countries are extremely different by most conventional measures of how we understand and classify nations. China is an authoritarian state and about at the middle of the pack when it comes to income and its urbanization rate, while South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are all developed and urbanized democracies in good standing. As mentioned before, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau are basically just cities, though we have numbers for them and can study those places in the cross-national context.

Moreover, you find the East Asian package outside of East Asia, among people of East Asian descent. In the US, Asians famously get higher test scores than whites, and are so successful that the affirmative action debate centers around whether schools can keep trying to stop them from becoming too large a portion of the student body. This is similar to the politics of many Southeast Asian countries, where Chinese success is a constant source of tension with lower-performing natives. In the UK, Chinese students have the highest test scores of any ethnic group. The Japanese are considered a “model minority” in Brazil. One could go on.

You’d think social scientists, if they were serious people, would treat this as one of the most important things they could be studying. We all want a longer life expectancy and less crime, and reducing illegitimacy and getting test scores up are forever goals of public policy. We have a major region of the world that is filled with extreme outliers on all of these measures. If there was a country with nearly no cancer, wouldn’t medical researchers want to know why that was? Why is it so uninteresting that an entire region of the globe seems almost completely free of the social pathologies that afflict much of the rest of the world?

I never see liberals talk about the East Asian package, except when they’re arguing with their fellow leftists and trying to debunk some misconceptions they hold, in effect making a conservative argument. Conservatives and moderate anti-wokes, in contrast, like to talk about Asians, since their success seems to refute the liberal worldview. Amy Chua, for example, has famously argued that cultural differences explain which ethnic groups in the US succeed.

But do Japan, China, and Korea in fact share a common culture? People sometimes make this point in a circular way. The fact that East Asians behave similarly across various countries and social contexts supposedly indicates that they belong to the same culture. A group that does well on tests “values education,” while one that doesn’t have children out-of-wedlock has “conservative social values.” We might as well say differences in crime rates reflect how much various communities “value crime.” Such explanations are useless.

But is there a non-circular way to approach the topic? I think there is, and once you do, you struggle to find evidence that China, Korea, and Japan have all that much in common culturally. Without falling into the trap of circular reasoning, we can measure cultural distance or similarity by the following criteria.

Religion. We often say that peoples that share a religious faith belong to the same culture. About 70% of Japanese practice Shintoism, a religion that exists in no other country in the world. A similar number of Chinese either have no religion or practice “Chinese folk religion.” Meanwhile, in South Korea, a quarter to a third of the population is Christian, a faith that barely exists in Japan or China. All three countries have sizable Buddhist populations, but they each practice the religion in ways that reflect their own independent cultural histories. There has certainly never been anything equivalent to the Catholic Church in Europe, that is, a centralized spiritual authority for the region.
Language. Linguistic similarity and relatedness tend to correlate with closer cultural affinity, both because close languages allow for communication across political boundaries, and indicate that people belonged to the same community not that long ago. Linguists put languages into family trees, based on the theory that the major families of the world each represent an ancient proto-community. All forms of Mandarin are part of the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Meanwhile, when I studied linguistics as an undergrad, Japanese and Korean were said to be “language isolates,” meaning they had no known relatives, although Wikipedia tells me that they are now considered part of the “Japonic” and “Koreanic” families. Some scholars have proposed something called the Altaic family, which would encompass Japonic, Koreanic, Turkic, and Mongolic languages, but this appears to be a minority view. In other words, although East Asian languages have shared loan words over the centuries, Mandarin is at its core as distant from Japanese or Korean as English is from the indigenous languages of Australia. Korean and Japanese are either just as distantly related, or share a common origin so deep in the past that most linguists doubt that they should even be grouped together.
Political history. As mentioned above, China is a dictatorship, while Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are democracies. Singapore is somewhere in between. Japan has been an independent unified nation for over 400 years, and has had a parliament or some form of representative government since 1889. It generally has been extremely xenophobic and closed off to outsiders. The Joseon dynasty of Korea (1392-1897) was so isolated from the rest of the world that Western scholars named it the “Hermit Kingdom.” China under Mao underwent one of the greatest social upheavals the world has ever seen, and it now has a very unique political system. It’s true that Japan briefly colonized Korea and Taiwan, but this was an exception to a long history in which the three major peoples of East Asia had relatively little contact with one another and lived under different kinds of governments. Even if East Asians did start out sharing the same culture, it’s hard to see how the events of the last 150 years, from the Meiji Restoration to World War II and Maoism to democratization across much of the region, wouldn’t have caused divergence given the different experiences of these nations.
Moral psychology. According to Joe Henrich, writing in The WEIRDest People in the World, Japan has “a unique social psychology, distinct not only from WEIRD societies but also from populations in South Korea and China, with which it’s often mistakenly lumped together with psychologically.” Even placing South Korea and Chinese-derived countries and territories together strikes me as a stretch based on the data. Check out this famous chart based on the World Values Survey. It’s gerrymandered in a way that would make a Republican state legislator blush. All East Asians get grouped into the “Confucian” category, despite China being closer to Belarus than it is to South Korea, and Japan being as close to Protestant Europe as it is to its neighbors. Given how distant China is even from Taiwan and Hong Kong, one could argue that it would be too much to grant that all Chinese-derived nations and territories have a similar culture.
Pop culture. Japan and South Korea have produced pop cultural products that have large fan bases abroad. China has not, remaining unattractive to outsiders, or as Peter Thiel calls it, “weirdly autistic.” And although I’m no expert in either, from my limited experience K-Pop and Japanese anime strike me as fundamentally reflecting different values and cultures.
Attitudes towards sex. South Korea is by almost any measure a socially conservative country. It bans pornography, while Japan is known for being extremely creative in this area. Until very recently, South Korea prohibited most abortions and even adultery, with change only coming through court decisions. China is of course even more socially conservative, and has zigzagged from an emphasis on gender equality during the Mao era to the Xi government declaring a war on sissies and telling women that it’s gross for them to remain single over 30.

If having a similar culture doesn’t mean being similar in terms of language, religion, moral psychology, political institutions and history, pop culture, or sexual attitudes, what could it mean? Again, one can’t define “cultural similarity” in terms of things like high test scores and low levels of crime and illegitimacy, as that’s what we’re trying to explain in the first place.

We can see how culturally separate East Asian nations are from one another by imagining what a similar exercise would look like for Europe. Here, using the same methods, we can find strong evidence for cultural connections. With a handful of exceptions like Hungarian and Basque, all languages of the continent belong to the Indo-European family, broken down into categories and subcategories like Germanic and Slavic. All countries have historically been overwhelmingly Christian and except for Belarus and Russia all are democracies. Finally, European history can be understood as a series of consolidations and fragmentations of various empires, from Rome to the Soviet Union. The idea of united Europe, or Christendom, has been strong enough to inspire major political projects, as varied as the Crusades and the EU. For centuries, Europeans have seen themselves as part of one community, with political, social, and scientific ideas easily permeating across ever shifting state boundaries. In contrast, in East Asia there has never been a strong idea of an identity that encompasses Japan, China, and Korea and separates their civilization from those of other peoples, or at least nowhere near to the same extent. Thus, while it makes sense to speak of a European culture, the idea of an “East Asian culture” seems like a convenient shorthand used to arrive at a quasi-explanation of why countries that happen to be next to each other have similar outcomes. Europe is even more of a coherent concept in the World Values Survey cited above, unlike the gerrymandered East Asian category.

None of this is to say that some ideas like Confucianism and Buddhism haven’t crossed the borders between China, Korea, and Japan. Only that political, social, religious, linguistic, and other kinds of links between the nations of the region have been extremely tenuous and weak compared to Europe, and also other parts of the globe we consider broad civilizations like the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world.

Liberals believe in “stereotype threat,” in which our expectations and perceptions regarding how groups behave become self-fulfilling prophecies. We’ve seen that cultural explanations for the East Asian package favored by conservatives don’t make much sense, so maybe liberals are on to something...

Granted, stereotype threat as a way to understand the East Asian package has certain difficulties. It would need to explain how stereotypes operate globally, across cultural, linguistic, and political barriers. Somehow, a Korean in Los Angeles and a descendent of Japanese immigrants in Brazil must both know that Westerners expect them to have a certain collection of traits. This influence of stereotypes even penetrates foreign countries, including China, despite the best efforts of the government to keep its population culturally isolated from the outside world. Of course, Xi Jinping is no match for the power of global stereotype threat, given that it even made North Koreans good at math. Kendism may also need stereotypes to travel back in time to work since East Asians somehow were already wealthy in the US decades ago, despite China being associated with crushing poverty throughout most of American history. But these are small details for Kendism, an ideology so convincing and scientifically well-established that universities produce glossaries to teach its core tenets.

Say what you will about Kendi, but he’s given us a framework that can possibly explain the East Asian package. Can it be a coincidence that we see the highest levels of economic growth and mathematical success, and lowest levels of illegitimacy and other forms of anti-social behavior, in countries that are geographically adjacent, despite the limited cultural links between them? And that people from these countries show similar traits when they move abroad? Journalists and academics write papers about low South Korean fertility or remarkable Chinese growth over the years, or about Asian success in American schools, and look for local factors at work, without seeming to understand that they’re observing any kind of broader phenomenon. It’s like if scientists were trying to figure out the association between elevation and weather, and were coming up with an independent hypothesis about the relationship on each continent without ever attempting to synthesize various kinds of data into a more general theory.

Given that conservatives and anti-wokes more generally have done such a poor job of presenting a theory that fits what we see in the world, it is no wonder that Kendism has unrivaled influence. With our advanced modern state of understanding of social phenomena, it remains the only school of thought that has broad explanatory power."

Links - 11th September 2026 (Migrants: UK)

2026-09-11T13:35:00.000+08:00

Reform will stop the boats - "When the Australians faced a wave of illegal boat migration, they deployed their military in response. Illegal crossings fell to zero within weeks. It ended the crisis. It also saved lives. Between 2007 and 2013, 1200 migrants had died making the journey. The Australian military operation reduced that to zero. Over 170 migrants have already died trying to come to Britain via the Channel – this policy would have saved their lives too. The Tory Labour establishment will say it can’t be done. They must, or face the reality of their own failure. But the former Navy commanders who engineered this plan leave no room for doubt: it can be done, and it must be done."

Michael Howard: Reform won’t stop the migrant boats, but I have a solution that will - "When I was home secretary, in 1995, I reached an agreement with my French opposite numbers, under which any migrant who was refused admission to one country would be returned to the other... Under the provisions of the European Union, of which we were, of course, still a member, the Dublin Convention was due to come into force in 1997. Under the terms of the Convention, asylum seekers in the European Union were required to make their application in the first safe country they reached and, if they didn’t, they would be returned to that country. Had it worked it would obviously have led to a sharp reduction in the numbers seeking asylum in the UK. So I accepted a clause in the 1995 agreement I made with France which provided that, in relation to asylum seekers, it would be superseded by the provisions of the Dublin Convention. I thought the Convention would work. How naïve I was. It became entangled in the bureaucracy and red tape which were so characteristic of the EU. Astonishingly, for most of the time when it applied to the UK, as members of the EU, the numbers returned to us from other countries exceeded the numbers returned by us. So much for the claims sometimes made that Brexit is to blame for the channel migrants crisis, as the Dublin Convention would have ensured their return. I, at least, did not have the benefit of hindsight. Those who make those claims do. So to claim that the Dublin Convention would be the answer means that they are either deceiving themselves or wilfully deceiving the public."

Basil the Great on X - "🚨BREAKING: RED CROSS DELETES VIDEO AFTER MIGRANT MURDERS BRITISH WOMAN
The Red Cross made a sympathetic cartoon video showing the journey of Sharif, an Afghan travelling to Europe When Sharif got there he MURDERED a British Woman and stuffed her body into a suitcase They wanted you to feel sorry for him but he killed a young woman like the savage that he is The Red Cross must be held to account for the blood they have on their hands"

Reformer on X - "Former Conservative minister Edwina Currie suggests a policy of brothels in villages near asylum seekers as a way to reduce sexual violence"
James' dog. on X - "Interesting the discourse has moved from ‘future doctors’ to ‘we need to feed asylum seekers with naked women or they’ll commit heinous crimes.’"
Luckily, the human rights of the asylum seekers are well-protected

Zara Hussain on X - "A street in Bristol still has the England flag up. Strange, because the World Cup ended weeks ago. When will Bristol Council remove them?"
Railfan Reborn on X - "> Foreigner immigrates to England
> UK government spoils her with unlimited welfare
> Demands the flag of her new country be torn down anyways
Remigration is the moderate solution."
Migrants need to be protected from seeing such hate symbols, so they should be sent to a place where they will probably never see them again, e.g. their countries of origin

There’s only one ‘fair’ place to place illegals, and that’s Bristol - "At last, an admission from the Government that illegal immigrants are a pain in the neck. After years of wagging their fingers at uppity plebs who dared to say it’s not nice to have 800 men from God-knows-where imported into your community, now officialdom admits that’s true. How else are we to interpret Andy Burnham’s harebrained proposal to house more of these un-vetted blokes in middle-class parts of Britain? It’s not right, he says, that it has fallen to our “poorest communities” to host these border-busting men. So in the name of “fairness”, he’ll be calling on leafier towns to “play their part”. This is the closest we’ve had to an acknowledgement that these intruders are a burden. That all that blather about them being “vulnerable” souls from war-torn lands who might just “enrich” our lame nation was just that – blather, lies, the faux-virtuous bleating of a clueless political class. What Burnham is essentially saying is that we must share out the pain of illegal immigration. So can we all say it now? Are we finally free to say it is deeply undesirable to wake up one morning to find hundreds of men from distant, regressive lands wandering through your town? It is precisely the accidental truthfulness of Burnham’s proposal that makes it so insane. It is unforgivably reckless to wilfully inflict social pain on proud, tidy towns. It is an assault on the soul of England itself to subject the most pleasant parts of this green and pleasant land to the menace of un-vetted foreign men. Not content with sowing rage and tension in working-class towns by stuffing the local hotel with men from afar, now the Government wants to serve up the same madness in the manicured enclaves of middle-class Britain... The impact has been dire. Women and girls feel unsafe. Some have suffered horrific assaults, including those seven Doncaster girls aged between 12 and 16 who were trafficked for sexual abuse by an Iraqi asylum seeker. Social media is awash with video evidence of the civic discord caused by our deranged experiments in mass immigration. But the solution is not to “share out” such social misery. A responsible government would see such problems and think: “How might we put a stop to this?” And not: “What other towns can we bring this lunacy to?” If we must house these men who have no right to be here, I say send them to Bristol. That Green-run city puffs itself up as a “City of Sanctuary”. Its preening activist class claims to love migrants. Green Party leader Zack Polanski reckons mass immigration is “Britain’s superpower”. Okay, here you go. Both middle-class towns and working-class suburbs have made it crystal clear they don’t want these armadas of men, so you can have them instead... Home Office minister Anna Turley says this is about calling on middle-class communities to do their “fair share” in the great migrant crisis. This cuts to the blackened heart of the immigration issue. What in God’s name is “fair” about asking hard-working communities to take up the slack of the state’s dereliction of duty? What is “fair” about demanding that even towns of 300 or 400 people open their arms to 1,000 men who barged illegally into our nation? These are staggeringly unreasonable requests. The Government is treating historic communities as if they were board games, which it might manoeuvre and fiddle with as it pleases... What an extraordinary abdication of the very first duty of a state, which is to defend its territory, and its people. Forget messing with middle-class communities – just police the borders and swiftly deport intruders. And, for the meantime, let’s make Bristol take more than their “fair share”."

Burnham’s migrant plan is going to blow up in his face - "Such an admission only makes sense politically if the Government appeared actively to be trying to stop the flow of boats, and then negatively processing and returning those young men who arrived in this manner. This isn’t what people see. All they hear are excuses about how hard it all is. Secondly, the timing was a disaster: straight after the massive incursion of illegal immigrants into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, and the sighting of huge new boats in the English Channel capable of carrying more than 250 men. In effect, it looks like the scale of the problem is so enormous, asylum seekers are essentially “spilling out” into rural England. Thirdly, and this is yet to be felt in earnest, the pictures are going to be terrible. By housing asylum seekers in parts of England that could be used as a backdrop to an episode of Poirot, Reform and others will be able to portray the starkest, most extraordinary contrast, that voters across the country will find shocking. At present, to an extent, asylum seekers have often been hidden in plain sight. In hotels in less affluent, often-multicultural areas, you wouldn’t necessarily know who was an asylum seeker or not. Now, villages with small and settled populations will find themselves dwarfed by large-scale accommodation facilities next door. This takes us to the issue of class. In justifying the move, a Downing Street source said: “Andy feels the current system is unfair, and as a point of principle, he wants to see a redress of the distribution.” Extraordinarily, this source confirmed the move would cost more money, apparently because of the difficulty of finding cheap accommodation in leafy areas: “He acknowledges that it would cost more money to do it fairly, but that is what we need to do.” This sounds like Labour’s justification for a wealth tax – as well as their earlier taxes on private education – and it reflects how the modern Left sees class. They seem to think there’s a negative working-class identity which is formed primarily through hostility and struggle. It’s as if there’s a zero-sum game, where working-class people suffer because of middle-class privilege. The problem is, the English working class don’t think like this. While they tend to favour wealth taxes and a progressive tax system more generally, this is entirely because they want more money to pay for the NHS and other public services. They don’t want a punishment beating meted out to middle-class people out of hostility or envy. Most working-class people want to “get on” themselves – and certainly they want their kids to have opportunities for a better life – and don’t view the affluent as the enemy. More to the point, their identity isn’t formed by negative perceptions of struggle, but mostly by positive perceptions of their local area and their country. They tend to love their towns and their local heritage and they tend to love England too. This is why they love their (fading) high streets, their heritage sites and local football clubs – but also usually the British Armed Forces and the Royal family too. It’s this mix of local and national patriotism which explains their hostility to the housing of so many asylum seekers in their towns. Most feel their local area can’t physically cope with so many new arrivals; and most dislike the idea of a country with no border control. The English working-class will not come to think Burnham’s policy is a fair and good one; on the contrary, they’ll sympathise with those now affected and think it underlines the incompetence of the political class. If Burnham is hoping for working-class people to think “now the posh people can have some”, he’ll be sorely disappointed. There’s another important aspect of the English working-class the left forgets, which is directly applicable here. Where class hostility emerges, it’s because of perceptions of unearned, unfair wealth or benefits... this is why working-class people tend to be the toughest on welfare cheats. And this is why so many are so angry with the current asylum system, which appears to be set up to attract and then reward those who come here illegally."

Burnham’s asylum housing plea is a costly political misjudgment - "When Mr Burnham learnt that two of the killers of Pc Andrew Harper were set to be released from prison early, he decided nothing could be done, went on holiday, and apparently hoped the problem would fix itself. He seems to think the same way about Britain’s broken asylum system. In neither case is he correct."

Middle-class Britons understand what a genuine refugee is – Andy Burnham doesn’t - "The Prime Minister apparently has much less common sense than ordinary people. They know the difference between today’s bogus “boat people” and genuine refugees, such as Jews fleeing the Nazis, Hungarians in 1956, Ugandan Asians in 1972, or Hong Kongers and Ukrainians more recently. Middle-class Britons are the most generous and hospitable people on earth: look at their unique munificence to charity and readiness to volunteer. But they don’t see why they should pay the price for the Government’s failure to secure our borders. Many readers will know British families who have made real sacrifices to help Ukrainians over the past few years. It is an insult to hundreds of thousands like them for Andy Burnham to suggest that only the poorest are “playing their part” towards refugees. Blaming middle-class Britain for Labour’s failure to control migration suggests that the new PM, like his predecessor, has no answers to the problems of migration and integration."

The Left is finally paying the price for its idiotic belief in open borders - "Burnham’s plan should have at least one tremendous benefit. Smug, middle-class progressives will finally receive their comeuppance because, for the very first time, they’ll be forced to face the consequences of their own idiotic beliefs. No longer will they be able to proclaim that refugees are welcome here, safe in the knowledge that the “refugees” will in reality be deposited in the type of frightful, gammony dumps that vote Reform, far from their own charming locales. And, just as importantly, no longer will they be able to delude themselves about the type of men that the boats tend to contain. These delusions were exquisitely exemplified by the BBC comedian, Zoe Lyons, during an edition of Question Time in November last year. Britain, she declared, was “missing a trick” by failing to take advantage of all the “talent” that the small boats’ occupants have to offer. “Many” of them, she explained, are “doctors”, “scientists” and “engineers”. Seemingly, it had not occurred to her that, if these men were doctors, scientists and engineers, they wouldn’t be coming to Britain by dinghy. They’d be coming by plane because they would have easily secured a visa. Also, if the boats are filled with doctors, scientists and engineers, why do the French do so little to prevent them from setting sail?... such imbecilic fantasies will not survive Burnham’s new plan. As a result, middle-class Left-wingers should belatedly grasp why it is that the rest of the country is so unhappy about illegal immigration, and realise that it’s not merely because everyone is a massive racist. Of course, I suppose it’s possible that these people will stay true to their principles by joyfully welcoming the new arrivals into their neighbourhoods, and eagerly inviting them to their dinner parties. (“And will you be bringing your wife and children, Mr...? Oh, I see. It’s a funny thing, but just about all you refugees seem to be single men. Don’t women and children flee war and persecution, too?”) Equally, though, they might respond like Rachel Millward, the Green Party deputy leader, who indignantly fought Home Office plans to house 600 male asylum seekers in a former Army training camp in her part of East Sussex. Or like Calum Miller, the Lib Dem MP, who’s been fighting plans to house 1,250 male asylum seekers in a former MoD site in his part of Oxfordshire. Given a choice between these two approaches, I would guess that most middle-class progressives will opt for the latter. If so, it will do our immigration debate the world of good. Because there’s only one way to cure the woke Left of their support for open borders. And that’s to give them exactly what they claim to want."

Brendan Clarke-Smith on X - "Doctors, nurses and engineers don’t generally throw their documentation away and pay gangs to smuggle them in on small boats."
In 2025, we still had left wingers claiming many "refugees" are doctors, engineers and scientists. The exact quote (~11:45): "As a country, we're missing a trick as well. If we have all of these people who have coming over seeking asylum, many of them coming from countries where they'll have been doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists, and we're sticking them away"

The middle classes didn’t work so hard to see their areas ruined by illegal migrants - "The most infuriating aspect of Britain’s experiment with mass migration has been the way in which it was foisted upon the electorate with a contemptuous disregard for the very concept of a democratic mandate. Which party included in its manifesto a pledge to increase migration incrementally until it reached an all-time high of a million newcomers a year? Not New Labour. Not the Conservatives under any of their leaders. Not the Labour party of Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham. Nobody asked us about it. Yet that is what we got. Which brings me to Burnham. Yesterday, our brave new leader announced that middle-class families should “play their part” by keeping schtum while small boat arrivals are given accommodation nearby... New YouGov polling has revealed that just one in five people now think that migration has been “mostly good” for the country. In January, 79 per cent of voters wanted the Government to concentrate on stopping small-boat crossings... how many of the illegal migrants streaming across the Channel are genuine asylum seekers? It’s absurd to expect people who have worked extremely hard to build a good life for their family to potentially jeopardise all that in order to accommodate migrants who shouldn’t be here in the first place. If our political masters really cared, they’d do something about that. Both legal and illegal immigration may be thorny problems to solve, but they are the product of Britain’s own policies and political culture, and our leaders are squarely to blame. Take the small boats: forget “smashing the gangs”, for heaven’s sake. If every man landing on our shores was incarcerated pending deportation, possibly in some nightingale-hospital-style pop-up prison on a remote Scottish island, with no mobile phone, no access to black-market work, no cash handouts and no hotel accommodation, the problem would soon dry up. This vandalism is, in other words, the result of political choices. It is not some natural disaster afflicting our country that requires us all to pull together and share the burden. It was brought upon our heads without our consent by a political class that is a) incompetent and b) steeped in the twin dogmas of centrist fundamentalism and niceism, both of which have been resoundingly discredited. Yet now Burnham expects the beleaguered middle classes, who are already groaning under historically vast levels of taxation, to put up with a load of foreign criminals – for they arrived, let’s not forget, illegally, and from the safe jurisdiction of France – on our doorsteps. I don’t want to live next door to a Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian small boatman who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl within days of arriving, or a Mohammed Sharwarq, the Syrian who assaulted a cleaner, a head chef and other residents, or any of the numerous other violent migrants who have been welcomed with such generosity by our governments. Why should we? I repeat: we never wanted it, we never consented to it, and we have frankly had enough of it. For this reason, let me float a counter-proposal. Every prime minister since 1997, and every home secretary, should take four illegal migrants into their homes, and pledge to care for them with great compassion until such time as the migration crisis is over. Starting with Burnham himself. That should focus their minds."
One cope is to claim that net migration estimates are wrong because the methodology sucks
Human rights means you can't detain asylum seekers, so too bad

Andy Burnham still isn’t listening on illegal migration - spiked - "The post-Southport riots were like a heatmap of Home Office-imposed asylum accommodation. According to a private cabinet briefing, ‘15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots’ during those grim days in summer 2024 ‘are in the top 20 per cent of local authorities with the highest numbers of supported asylum seekers’. But the answer is not bussing more Sudanese to Sevenoaks, or more Afghans to Alderley Edge. If anything, the chances of ending up in one of Britain’s more premier postcodes could become yet another one of those ‘pull factors’, making a £2,000 ‘mega-dinghy’ ticket look like even more of a sound investment. The primary issue with illegal migration is clearly not the uneven distribution of illegal migrants. But rather than leave the ECHR, rip up the Refugee Convention and finally detain and deport those who violate our borders, Labour appears resigned to shifting the problem around. There is a curious literal-mindedness to how the government is responding to public outrage over asylum. Protests outside of migrant hotels? Let’s move the migrants into HMOs, then! Oh, you don’t like the HMOs, either? Let’s stick them on some old military bases instead! It’s almost like they think we’re mugs. If Burnham reckons any of this is going to placate the populace, he’s in for a shock. Indeed, the latest place to erupt over the asylum issue is well-to-do Piddington, a village in Oxfordshire, which is threatening to declare independence over plans to stick 1,250 male migrants in the nearby Bicester Garrison – a number almost four times larger than Piddington’s tiny population. The British people are not heartless, migrant-bashing bastards. They can be incredibly generous to refugees when there is a pressing need, a sense of historical or moral obligation, and precious few concerns around crime or cultural compatibility. Which is why hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Hongkongers have settled here in recent years without anyone raising an eyebrow. But they’re also not idiots. They know that allowing anyone to claim asylum, provided they can pay a people smuggler enough to ferry them across the Channel, is illegal migration by another name – not least given these people aren’t actually fleeing war, they’re fleeing France. They also know that opening the door to men, and they are almost all men, about whom we know nothing, often from cultures with frankly medieval attitudes towards women, is unlikely to end well. The now daily stories about horrific sex attacks committed by illegal migrants, have revealed, once again, the wisdom of the masses and the wilful blindness of our virtue-signalling elites. No one voted for mass and illegal migration. Voters don’t want the effects of it shared out more equitably across the income scale. They just want it to stop. One day they might get a government that is actually willing to listen."

Donna Louise on X - "Just when you think the UK couldnt get more ridiculous. Asylum seeker Amgad Abouelazm has 67 offences (51 of them theft). Homeless. On drugs. Stealing from shops and cars. Now the Home Office is housing him and paying him benefits. Magistrates give him a conditional discharge and order zero compensation because his means are “limited.” This is what “asylum” looks like in Britain in 2026. 67 crimes. Zero real consequences. Taxpayers still paying. We are being taken for fools!"

Tony Smith CBE on X - "It’s probably worth saying at this point something I’ve said before, lest it gets lost in the sands of time and political rhetoric about immigration and illegal entry, and how we got to this point. I was an immigration officer in the 1970s and 1980s. The power to grant or refuse leave to enter was vested to me in law under the authority of a Chief Immigration Officer. Anyone arriving without a valid passport (and a visa if required) was refused entry at the border, detained, and removed on the next available ship or aircraft whence they came. This was under the Immigration Act 1971 (still In force although amended massively by successive governments ever since). It was some 20 - 30 years after the 1951 ECHR and the 1951 Refugee Convention was signed. Nobody claimed asylum. Nobody claimed human rights. No country refused to take people back. Those who had destroyed their passports were removed on a letter, signed by me. Fast forward 50 years and now anyone who arrives at the border without a passport or a visa automatically claims asylum or human rights. Immigration Officers of today (or Border Force Officers) are thereby disempowered to send them back before their asylum claims or human rights claims are considered. And their appeals are dismissed. They cannot be detained in the meantime because under the Hardial Singh principles immigration detention is only lawful if there is a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable period of time. Which there isn’t of course. So the only option available to the officer is to grant temporary permission whilst these applications are considered. And if the applicant claims to be destitute they must be given support and accommodation at public expense. Because failure to do so would put the government in breach of A3 of the ECHR (inhuman and degrading treatment). And even if the applicant is eventually refused protection - and loses their appeal - we need to get a passport to remove them on. And they often refuse to comply with the documentation process. Even if they do many countries still refuse to issue them with a passport and refuse to take them back. And even after all this they can abscond and if ever caught start the whole process again. This is where we are and so far no government has been able to break the Gordian knot that ties the hands of our officers. In order to do that they would have to reverse decades of laws and judgements - and demur from long held well intentioned international conventions. And probably look at the British Constitution itself to curtail the opportunity of political opponents to use the courts to thwart the will of Parliament. This is not to criticise or favour any political party or policy. It is simply a matter of record to inform the next generation of politicians and the civil servants charged with the duty of implementing any new laws or policies they may introduce. And to ask why - if we did it back in my day - why can’t we do it now? I even wrote a book about it. I hope someone keeps a copy for posterity - or even history - when thinking about how to fix this seemingly intractable problem."

Rupert Lowe MP on X - "The British Dental Association has accused me of 'potentially dangerous rhetoric' because I oppose illegal migrants getting priority dental care - as evidenced by Restore Britain's investigation. I suspect the British people agree with us..."

Daily Mail on X - "TV presenter who exposed people smugglers forced to flee home after police warned of death threats"
Mary Harrington on X - "This is also why rape gang investigations keep finding asylum seekers among the suspects Because it’s all the same network of criminal gangs Britain has an ethnic mafia problem"

The New Truth

2026-09-11T09:27:00.000+08:00

From 2020. Another article on the religious aspects of wokeness.

The New Truth

"Perhaps that’s a uniquely New York thing, to place so much faith in talking. But it once felt very American, too... American because, if you could think it and you could argue it, then maybe you could be it, too. It was at least possible. And it was democratic in the best sense. You could talk to anyone, butt into any stranger’s conversation, as long as you had something interesting to say.

I don’t know how to argue in America anymore, or whether it’s even worth it. For someone like me, that is a real tragedy and so I would like to understand how this new reality came about.

There are distinct and deep-rooted traditions of rational empiricism and religious sermonizing in American history. But these two modes seem to have become fused together in a new form of argumentation that is validated by elite institutions like the universities, The New York Times, Gracie Mansion, and especially on the new technology platforms where battles over the discourse are now waged. The new mode is argument by commandment: It borrows the form to game the discourse of rational argumentation in order to issue moral commandments. No official doctrine yet exists for this syncretic belief system but its features have been on display in all of the major debates over political morality of the past decade. Marrying the technical nomenclature of rational proof to the soaring eschatology of the sermon, it releases adherents from the normal bounds of reason. The arguer-commander is animated by a vision of secular hell—unremitting racial oppression that never improves despite myths about progress; society as a ceaseless subjection to rape and sexual assault; Trump himself, arriving to inaugurate a Luciferean reign of torture. Those in possession of this vision do not offer the possibility of redemption or transcendence, they come to deliver justice. In possession of justice, the arguer-commander is free at any moment to throw off the cloak of reason and proclaim you a bigot—racist, sexist, transphobe—who must be fired from your job and socially shunned.

Practitioners of the new argument bolster their rationalist veneer with constant appeals to forms of authority that come in equal parts from biology and elite credentialing. Have you noticed how many people, especially online, start their statements by telling you their profession or their identity group: As a privileged white woman; as a doctoral student in applied linguistics; as a progressive Jewish BIPOC paleontologist—and so on? These are military salutes, which are used to establish rank between fellow “az-uhs” while distinguishing them as a class from the civilian population. You must always listen to the experts, the new form of argument insists, and to the science. Anything else would be invalid; science denialism; not rational; immoral.

Because of the way it toggles back and forth between rationalism and religiosity, switching categories by taking recourse to one when the other is questioned, the new form of argument-commandment, rather than invalidating itself or foundering on its own contradictions, becomes, somehow, rhetorically invincible—through the demonstration of power relations that the arguer denies exist, but are plainly manifest in the progress of the argument.

The group of historians who submitted their letter of dissent to The New York Times, objecting to the historical claims in the paper’s flagship 1619 project provided a nice demonstration of this point. They questioned the project’s scholarship and in response, were accused of being old white men, as indeed most of them were, and antique reactionaries. When they pleaded that they were not abettors of white supremacy but objected to the project’s historical claims, they were told their history was in error. In the end the historians, however distinguished their careers were beforehand, appeared confused and defeated, complaining solicitously in their allotted column inches in the paper’s letters section.

The 1619 project, meanwhile, having essentially conceded the historians’ central point, lost nothing at all. It marches on unscathed toward becoming the official curriculum in the nation’s public school system, replacing the products of the American historical profession as a whole, which must either adapt or suffer a similar humiliation. The outcome proved that whether or not the historians were right about the facts of history, they had made a fundamental error in judging where power lies. At best, they are dopes who thought they were smarter, which is to say more powerful, than they are. At worst, they are professionally self-destructive, and—who knows—maybe even racists.

Argument itself requires that certain fundamental questions are settled and beyond dispute. In order to argue over whether the sky is blue, we’ll have to agree on what the sky is. The new argumentation has not only vastly expanded the number of subjects that are supposed to be beyond argumentation, it has, by a sleight of hand, reversed the nature of the matters that cannot be questioned. Now, it is precisely the most contentious issues—is biological sex a valid concept? Is racism and abuse so widespread in American law enforcement that we should immediately defund the police?—that must be accepted a priori.

To insist that the conclusion that the arguer wishes to reach, with its implied corollary commandment, must be accepted by his or her opponent as a premise before the argument begins is not the move of a person who has confidence in their truth. It is the opposite of any form of reasoned argument. It is coercive. Except the people who argue this way claim that they cannot possibly be coercive, because you must accept the premise that they don’t have power—even if they are editing The New York Times Magazine, or threatening to get you fired from your job. You say they can’t have it both ways? They say, why not—and then accuse you of opposing the powerless, which, it turns out, is a form of authority that cannot be trumped.

The reason we cannot argue about certain things is because they have already been proven true and the truth they have established is such a significant moral advance—like ending child sacrifice—that to question the rational basis on which the truth rests is to risk eroding a foundation of the moral progress that separates us from encroaching barbarism. If you want to argue about those things, then you are a barbarian—which means that argument with you is impossible, because the only argument that barbarians understand is being put to the sword or sent off to a labor camp.

Do you need me to give you an example of this kind of argument? Not really, because such arguments have become the norm. But here are a few recent examples:

The moral injunction is: “Believe women”—and you believe women, don’t you? The argument underlying the slogan is that sexual violence is rampant in America and goes unaddressed and unpunished because of the endemic misogyny in our society. There are rational assertions contained within this argument: The claim that American women are the victims of rampant sexual violence enabled by ingrained cultural and legal biases was advanced initially as matter of social science—that is, as a matter of science—based on empirical evidence such as a famous study that found 1 in 5 women on American college campuses had been sexually assaulted.

If women were being victimized at such appalling rates and their assailants routinely going unpunished, it followed that they required protections greater than those which our current notions of legal and judicial fairness provided. In fact, one could see how it was precisely our prevailing notions of fairness, like due process or the rights of the accused to face their accuser, that were integral to an institutionalized “rape culture” responsible for the heinous epidemic of sexual assault against women.

Here are the two parts of the argument by commandment. There is the empirical assertion—let’s call it X. And there is the moral claim suggested by, or perhaps even mandated by the evidence of X—let’s call that Y. Empirical evidence shows that there is an epidemic of sexual assault against women, that epidemic requires a drastic corrective, and that corrective enshrines a moral claim and a commandment—American women are sexually victimized, egregiously and without the protections of a justice system that systemically discriminates against them. Therefore it is virtuous to “believe women” and to encode that belief formally in new procedures of law and justice.

Only it turns out the rational argument was wrong. The evidence did not actually show that 1 in 5 women would be sexually assaulted on a college campus, a statistic repeated by President Barack Obama himself to justify “sweeping changes in national policy.”

It turns out that the author of the study himself acknowledged that it was based on surveying only two campuses and the numbers could not be extrapolated to a national trend as the White House itself had done. Other studies widely cited at the time to justify the construction of a punitive new Title IX sex bureaucracy were also marred by significant methodological shortcomings.

But if you were clueless enough to point out the flaws in rational claim X, even if just to wonder over matters of degree, then wham!—you were whacked in the face with moral claim Y. Evidence X isn’t evidence; it’s window dressing. And if you’re too stupid to understand that, then you’re probably an even worse person than the arguer supposed.

Because—think about it—who else but a fervent, drooling misogynist, or a rape apologist, or a real live rapist, namely someone both ideologically and emotionally invested in actively disbelieving women, would be so interested in picking apart the evidence that supported such an obviously virtuous and necessary claim—especially now, at a moment when people are literally dying? What basis would anyone have to question X aside from the desire to violate the moral value of Y?

It’s no surprise that the entire #MeToo movement grew out of the revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein—a loathsome man who was, by all accounts, a bullying asshole, a lecher, a tyrant, a sweaty groping pig. But in the end, justice finally caught up to him and Weinstein became the evil pig who launched a whole movement. And that was where most of us stopped thinking about it.

But there were a few more twists in the story. First, there was Asia Argento, one of the first actresses to come forward with her story of sexual abuse at the hands of Weinstein and one of the leaders and public faces of the #MeToo movement—who turned out to be an accused sexual predator herself. No one should have to be a “perfect victim” or a moral exemplar to be given sympathy and believed, but Argento was pushing it.

Then there was the evidence that came out in Weinstein’s trial. One of his key accusers was a young aspiring actress with whom he had a yearslong relationship—just the kind of vulnerable victim that Weinstein was said to have sought out. But the private correspondence kept by this woman, which included both letters to Weinstein and letters to her boyfriend about the Hollywood producer, suggested something far more complicated than a predator-victim relationship of the kind that is criminally prosecutable. Especially revealing was the woman’s claim that Weinstein’s sexual organ was defunct, a detail that, if true, would present all sorts of complications for an alleged serial predator like Weinstein. Or should have.

Do we believe in the rightness of #MeToo because of what the Weinstein case revealed or in spite of it? It seems perfectly clear that Weinstein is guilty of some of the crimes against women of which he has been accused, but equally obvious that it is not supposed to matter on which specific charges he is guilty and on which he is innocent by the standards of the law. Weinstein’s guilt must be totalizing so that it can serve as a stand-in for an empirical case justifying a set of new rules and commandments. The entire discourse has been warped to fit a Hollywood narrative—wherein drama and action (and whatever good they might accomplish) are never mustered for regular people but only for the wealthiest members of the American cultural elite. It is rather difficult to point this out without appearing to excuse the actions of someone like Weinstein, but perhaps a movement truly concerned with ending gender discrimination in the workplace and protecting the victims of sexual assault would have focused on the retail industry or the healthcare field, rather than on Hollywood.

Black Lives Matter is a movement that makes its core doctrinal claim a value that no decent person can object to. It asserts that, not merely formal legal acknowledgement, but full human dignity and consideration has been uniquely robbed from black Americans throughout the country’s history. No one with a basic knowledge of American history can deny that this claim is true. But the statement Black Lives Matter makes also has a more pointed political meaning, which is that black lives are systematically devalued in the present, and under assault from racist police violence and an overarching regime of white supremacy that animates every aspect of modern American life. That life, therefore, is in urgent need of reparative justice—like defunding the police, and establishing formal and informal systems of preferences that this time prefer blacks over whites, that statues of white men must be pulled down, that corporations must fire their current employees and hire new employees based on their skin color, and that a massive program of public reeducation must be set in motion across American society, and especially in public schools.

There may be no more totemically powerful moral claim in all of American life than those three words: “black lives matter.” As a meme it is invincible. But the moral claim, with its demand for immediate radical changes to policing and other institutions of American life, is not just a moral claim, it is also supposedly a reflection of observed and analyzed material conditions. For instance, that there is an epidemic of racist, or, more correctly anti-black, police violence in America.

It seems appallingly obvious that systematic police violence targeting black Americans is real. The evidence is everywhere: in the state-sanctioned snuff films that circulate on YouTube and throughout social media maintaining a sense of terror and siege. It does little good to point out that the majority of police violence in 2020 America is directed toward white people, or that a total of 14 unarmed black men were in fact shot in America last year, while a greater number of unarmed light-skinned men were shot by the police, or that a majority of police officers protect their communities in a lawful manner under often difficult conditions. And since it doesn’t matter if you concede that there is evidence of racial bias in policing, just not at anything like the catastrophic level that justifies calls to defund the police, and it doesn’t matter whether you acknowledge a significant need for police reform to make it less prone to escalating violence and more accountable—since that hardly seems to matter in the context of a discussion that now centers on police abolition, why would anyone go to the trouble.

The paradigmatic case of police violence in the modern era was the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It was Brown’s death, shortly after Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida, that consolidated the movement’s power in national politics. The motto born of the killing that gave birth to the modern era of race relations was “hands up, don’t shoot.” Only we know now that this phrase, a shorthand for the evidence that indicts the society and justifies its rejection and refounding, did not describe the reality of Brown’s death. A lengthy investigation of the killing by the Obama Justice Department found that Brown did not have his hands up and may have been charging at Wilson when he was killed. Of course, the Obama Justice Department report also found evidence of racial bias in the Ferguson police force but it did not support the central claim about the killing of Michael Brown. And so while the DOJ findings were dutifully reported in the press, it was, at the same time, often kept at safe distance from discussion of Black Lives Matter, the movement, the moral claim, the commandment.

The police execution of Michael Brown, who was shot with his hands up, proved the rational basis for the moral claim that “black lives matter” with its implied set of commandments. The moral position further legitimated the idea that progress is illusory and reform is not possible because American society is currently organized, as the Brown case proved, to devalue black lives and thus requires radical overhaul. And so the new argument proceeds, burying contrary evidence in unmarked graves while erecting new religious monuments and shrines at which the growing number of the faithful pay obeisance.

The organs of reason and expertise have one by one, pledged their cultish loyalty to this new faith. A group of doctors wrote an article in Scientific American explaining why the mentioning or reading of the results of George Floyd’s autopsy was a racist act. Public health officials across the country, who had in May condemned public demonstrations in the strongest terms, now fully endorse the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. In a petition signed by some 1,200 health officials, they declare that it is incumbent on others in the profession to offer “unwavering support” to the current protesters as a matter of both moral and medical hygiene. They all together elide the difference between empirical claim and moral commandment by declaring that, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.” And so, the merger of pseudorationalist discourse with the new American religion of anti-racism is completed.

America’s elite institutions now routinely make statements and use language that empirically is false. Indeed, they have taken the making, propagation, and enforcement of such language as their central mission. Because these statements are false, they make solutions to the real problems that are being gestured at impossible—while turning people who may want to actually address those problems into evil rape apologists and racists.

What we are witnessing, in the rapidly transforming norms around race, sex, and gender, is not an argument at all but a revolution in moral sentiment. In all revolutions, the new thing struggling to be born makes use of the old system in order to overthrow it. At present, institutions like the university, the press, and the medical profession preserve the appearance of reason, empiricism, and argument while altering, through edict and coercion, the meaning of essential terms in the moral lexicon, like fairness, equality, friendship, and love. That the effort wins so much support speaks to the deep contradictions and corruption of American meritocratic institutions, and of the liberal individualist moral regime it seeks to replace.

Moral revolutions cannot tolerate ambiguity, but there is so much that I’m not sure of. How does one argue with this new form of truth? Not in the old way. Not by taking the bait."

The Clash of Sexual Civilisations

2026-09-10T17:25:00.000+08:00

The Clash of Sexual Civilisations

It’s a pretty sick joke. A young man from Syria or Morocco or Afghanistan risks everything to reach Europe. He survives the crossing, the camps, the bureaucracy. He arrives in a civilisation that surrounds him with female flesh on a scale his culture considers obscene — on billboards, on public transport, in the gym, on his phone. And every centimetre of it is legally mined — one wrong look, one misread signal, one drunken encounter, and he becomes not a man who made a mistake but a criminal.

The man is broke, he is foreign, and to the women surrounding him in their skimpy gym wear, he is either invisible or a threat — rarely anything in between. If, by some miracle, he stumbles into a relationship he may end up in a marriage where his wife holds every legal and cultural card — including the power to withdraw sex, his children, his assets and freedom. He traded a society where men rule to arrive at the bottom of one where women rule. A better life? In some ways, perhaps. But when it comes to the thing that matters most to young men, he may have made the worst trade of his life.

Australia’s version of this story arrives by plane rather than rubber dinghy, and the young man in question is more likely to be clutching student enrolment forms than a life jacket. He comes from China, from India, from the Middle East or Southeast Asia. He is ambitious, his family’s great hope, carrying assumptions about women and sex formed in societies where the rules are utterly different. And his encounters with female flesh involve similar cultural and legal minefields – but the courtroom awaiting him may not be a criminal court but rather a campus kangaroo court. A court in name only, where the standard of proof is lower, the rights of the accused are minimal, and the penalty for losing is expulsion and a destroyed future. He came to Australia for an education. He got one — just not the one he paid for.

What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilisations in the grand geopolitical sense, but something more intimate and more combustible — a clash of sexual civilisations. Two utterly incompatible systems of rules about men, women, power, and desire — colliding on buses and street corners, in bars and bedrooms, and the consequences playing out in courtrooms and campus tribunals across the Western world. One system gives women all the power and calls it progress. The other gives men all the power and calls it God’s will. No one is talking honestly about what happens when they clash.

The consequences should be front page news but are usually buried. Writing just last month on his Substack Uncharted Territories, data analyst Tomas Pueyo compiled Eurostat figures showing that between 2014 and 2024, while the EU population grew by less than 2%, sexual assaults across Europe increased by 72% and rapes by 150%. A doubling of rape in a decade, in some of the most prosperous and supposedly civilised societies on earth!

Pueyo then breaks down the data by nationality of offender across five European countries — Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Italy. The pattern is consistent and unambiguous: immigrants from Muslim-majority countries are overrepresented in sexual and violent crime across all five nations. Germany’s 2025 police statistics show that Algerians in Germany are 26 times more likely to commit crime than the average German. Thirteen other Muslim-majority nationalities are at least five times more likely. When broken down specifically by sex crimes the overrepresentation is even more stark.

The UK tells a similar story — foreign nationals account for between a quarter and a third of sexual assault convictions despite being roughly 10% of the population, with conviction rates rising 62% in just four years. But it is Britain’s grooming gang scandal that most nakedly reveals what Islamic contempt for Western women actually looks like in practice. In Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and scores of other towns, organised networks of predominantly Pakistani men systematically abused thousands of vulnerable white girls for decades — while police, social workers and politicians looked away, terrified of being called racist. The perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing. As Muslim community leader Mohammed Shafiq stated on the record, they believed “white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.”

“If you leave meat uncovered on the street and a cat eats it, whose fault is it?” In her book, Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, the brilliant Ayaan Hirsi Ali quotes her Somalian grandmother in warning of the consequences of mass immigration to Europe from Muslim-majority countries. She cites a UN survey of more than four thousand men in Morocco, Egypt, Palestinian areas and Lebanon, which found between one-third and two-thirds of men admitted to sexually harassing women in public.

Hirsi Ali’s anger is directed squarely at Islam — and rightly so. Her life’s work has been documenting the systematic subordination of women in Muslim societies, and the evidence she marshals is devastating. But her argument carries an implicit assumption worth examining, namely that the Western alternative represents unambiguous progress. From where she stands, having escaped one of the world’s most oppressive systems, that is entirely understandable. It is also not quite the whole story.

Western sexual culture has its own pathologies. A culture which encourages women to display their half-naked bodies in public — and then criminalises every male response, including the involuntary glance. A legal framework so aggressively expanded that the line between predatory behaviour and a misread signal has become genuinely unclear — not just to bewildered immigrants, but to men who grew up here. For a Western man who at least knows the rules, that is dangerous enough. For a man formed in a world where very different rules exist — it is a trap waiting to be sprung.

Here’s the thing about Pueyo’s soaring statistics: they are not measuring the same offences they were measuring ten years ago. Sexual harassment — “inappropriate staring or leering,” “indecent sexual jokes,” “inappropriate invitations to go out on a date” — is now formally classified as sexual violence under EU law, with individual countries steadily feeding ever-broader national definitions into the Eurostat data. Finland, for instance, redefined rape in 2023, instantly inflating its statistics to record a 23% jump in sexual offences in the first nine months alone. What counts as a sexual crime has been steadily, quietly, and deliberately expanded — and a man arriving from Syria or Morocco or Afghanistan is about to get a very expensive education in what Western feminism has done to a statute book.

None of this is to minimise what some of these men have done. Within these statistics are genuine predators — angry, entitled men who brought their contempt for women with them across the Mediterranean and acted on it with devastating consequences for their victims. That story is real and it matters. But within these same statistics are also confused, isolated young men who touched a knee on a bus, stared too long on the tube, made a clumsy pass at a work colleague, sent an unwanted text — and found themselves processed through a criminal justice system they had no framework to understand, for behaviour that in their world carried no moral culpability whatsoever, let alone criminal liability.

The irony — and it is almost too perfect — is that the refugee-welcoming, Greens-voting feminist left are likely the same women who spent decades building the legal machinery now crushing these men. It was built to catch Western men — and has been doing so for decades. The immigrants are just the latest, and least prepared, to stumble into it.

Some years ago, Australia activist Nina Funnell was one of nine finalists in an annual Women of Influence award sponsored by Qantas who wrote a letter of protest to the airline asking it to stop deporting failed asylum seekers. This is the woman who was one of the founders of End Rape on Campus, the organisation responsible for establishing kangaroo courts on our campuses. Quelle surprise!

Looking back on the steady stream of young men I have supported through this horrendous process, I am struck by how many are foreigners, newcomers who are easily targeted when they fail to navigate the confusing sexual climate they encounter on campuses. What haunts me is how rarely we have managed to save them.

Men like Chris, the Malay/Chinese tutor student dismissed by Melbourne university for various trivial accusations like placing a hand on a female student’s shoulder whilst herding students across a busy road. He’s now left the country.

Or Marcus, the Mexican doctor doing post-graduate research at a Sydney university who was suspended after a malicious and false sexual assault accusation. Two years later, a jury took 20 minutes to dismiss the case following a two-week trial. Marcus has given up his medical career.

There are many others — from India, Indonesia, China, across Asia and beyond — too frightened to have their stories told. I have talked to enough of them to know that what destroys these young men is not just the outcome but the process — the speed with which they are presumed guilty, the contempt with which their evidence is dismissed, the ease with which a university can erase years of work and a lifetime of family sacrifice on the basis of one woman’s word.

Kangaroo court is too polite a term. These are conviction machines, built by ideologues and staffed by true believers, where the verdict is decided before the hearing begins. And the cruellest irony of all is that the foreign students caught in them came here trusting that Australia was a country where justice meant something.

Yet in Australia we also see the real risk of importing men with extreme views about women. My good friend Paul Sheehan documented this in Girls Like You (2006) — about Pakistani brothers freshly arrived in Australia, gang-raping schoolgirls. But it was Bilal Skaf, the ringleader of a Lebanese gang whose 2000 attacks on teenage girls shocked the nation, who most nakedly revealed what Islamic contempt for Western women looks like on Australian soil. Bilal remains behind bars. His brother Mohammed was released in 2021 after twenty-one years — still blaming his victims, with not a shred of remorse. He was arrested just the other week for allegedly directing a large-scale cocaine syndicate. Some men don’t change. And our authorities remain determined to look the other way.

Importing large numbers of men raised to regard uncovered women as fair game is not compassionate — it is reckless. Dangerously reckless to the women they encounter — including the indulged Western women who have been taught they can dress and behave as they please, with no consequences. But mass immigration also delivers a very different kind of man — the gentle, disoriented foreign student who stumbles blindly into legal minefields.

A culture that maximises sexual provocation and then criminalises sexual response has no business congratulating itself on its enlightenment. We have lit the fuse, thrown open the borders, and then expressed shock at the body count. The least we can do is stop pretending we don’t know what we’ve done.

Links - 10th September 2026 (The European Union and Elites)

2026-09-10T13:35:00.000+08:00

‘J.D. Vance was right’: Is Europe finally waking up? | The Spectator - "As some lose faith that the US would defend Europe under Article 5, European armies are ill-equipped to protect it themselves. Donations to Ukraine over the past four years have hollowed out military arsenals. Defence chiefs in Germany and Britain warn that the failure to replace this materiel has left us with insufficient means to defend ourselves. Can Europe re-arm and reduce its dependence on America? During the conference, Merz pointed out that, despite having a collective GDP nearly ten times the size of Russia’s, ‘Europe is not ten times as strong as Russia today’. Germany’s foreign intelligence agency has estimated Russia’s military expenditure is now roughly 10 per cent of GDP, or about half of total state spending. Meanwhile, European members of Nato face a major struggle to balance budgets in pursuit of their 5 per cent target. Within this figure, it’s been agreed that 3.5 per cent must be spent on core defence needs, with the remaining 1.5 per cent spent on defence-related infrastructure. Only six of the 30 European countries in the alliance – Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway – are currently spending more than 3 per cent of GDP on core defence contracts. Apart from Germany, few Nato members have publicly set out roadmaps for raising defence spending... Despite the lagging spending, at least seven European countries have reintroduced military service... One solution European leaders discussed was the idea of creating their own nuclear deterrent that could operate independently of Washington. Unlike Britain, France has nuclear weapons that are not reliant on the US for maintenance or deployment. Some leaders have asked France to consider extending its nuclear umbrella to protect Europe. Emmanuel Macron is expected to give a speech in the coming weeks outlining his approach to the country’s nuclear doctrine. Teasing that speech in Munich, Macron said: ‘The French nuclear deterrent has, what I would call, a European inspiration’. How realistic is all of this, given the Europeans’ love of squabbling? Just look at the joint European defence projects already under way. Plans to build a new class of fighter jet, agreed between France, Germany and Spain, are dead in the water. The two companies involved in the plans, Airbus and Dassault, couldn’t agree on which would lead the project. Meanwhile, talks to allow Britain to participate in the EU’s €150 billion defence fund broke down at the end of last year because the French want us to pay a joining fee of up to £2 billion. Bickering is an inherent part of European politics, even as the Continent’s protector pulls back and its eastern border is threatened. Despite all the talk of deep chasms and elephants in rooms, Europe seems unwilling to face this reality. The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio flattered delegates, speaking of America’s European inheritance and the values shared by the two continents. But his core message was much the same as Vance’s. America had no interest in continuing to be the ‘polite caretakers of the West’s managed decline’, he reiterated. There was little indication that Europe’s political elites realised that the central message had not changed. Nor, judging by their lacklustre approach to rearmament, have they yet realised the magnitude of the task they face."

Melissa Chen on X - "Been living in London for 3 years and every time I come back to the US, I have to recalibrate. When you're overseas, you tend to forget what real abundance feels like, so much so, I just stood there in the granola aisle, mouth open, brain completely short-circuited as I stared at a ridiculous wall of infinite choice. Bajillions of brands, flavors, and innovations - chocolate peanut butter banana crunch, maple pecan espresso, keto, paleo, collagen-packed, probiotic, gluten-free, protein-loaded, you name it. I was straight-up paralyzed by options. The French call it “embarras de choix” - embarrassment of choice. That overwhelming feeling when there are simply too many great things to pick from. It’s usually used positively or neutrally (the options are desirable), but the “embarrassment” highlights the mild frustration, guilt and indecision it causes. But Americans don’t get embarrassed by it. At all. Because they don't feel guilt about having MORE. It is the Land of Plenty for a reason. It’s easy to start a food company here, it's easy to build brands, and it's easy to just employ / fire people. That freedom unleashes relentless innovation and variety, feeding an unstoppable demand for better, tastier, healthier, crazier options. No wonder Europeans lose their minds the first time they step into a Costco. American abundance is a policy and cultural choice."
Melissa Chen on X - "The sheer number of snide remarks about cheese in a can in response to this post is striking. It seems many feel compelled to mention it simply to reassure themselves of the inherent superiority of their European cheeses. Which no doubt I'm sure is true to some extent, but it's severely missing the point. Yes it's somewhat gross and terrifying that cheese can come out of a can the same way whipped cream can. But while it is about cheese in a can, it's not really about cheese in a can. It's about the sheer, glorious American instinct to look at something ordinary and ask: What if? What if we could keep cheese in that perfect, gooey, liquidy consistency - shelf-stable, ready at a moment's notice - and then invent an aerosol can to dispense it? It needs no refrigeration. You may thumb your nose down at the product but it's actually the same spirit that said, “what if we could fly to the Moon?” The invention of sprayable processed cheese is about a mindset of irreverence, optimism, and a culture that is unafraid of looking silly if it means pushing boundaries. Aerosolizing the cheese isn't easy. Any culture that can do that will start asking bigger questions without fear. What if we cure diseases with mRNA in months instead of decades? What if reusable rockets land themselves like something out of sci-fi? What if ordinary people can access computing power that once required government labs? The pretentious twats who roll their eyes at Easy Cheese simply don't get it. It’s not about sophistication; it's about agency. A people who refuse to accept “that’s just how it’s always been.” A culture that iterates, experiments, commercializes, and yes, sometimes sprays a neon orange dairy product from a can because...... why the hell not? That’s the moonshot mentality in its essence. Playful on the surface, revolutionary underneath. And it's why the European mind struggles so hard to grasp it. As long as Americans keep this fire, whether it's cheese or the cosmos, they will keep surprising the world."

Daily Romania on X - "1,000 German lawyers and judges sign petition to ban AfD, the largest party in German opinion polls, in order to "protect democracy""
Gad Saad on X - "We need to end democracy in order to protect democracy."

German police threaten to defy AfD orders if party takes power - "Germany’s police union has called on officers to defy any “unconstitutional” orders if the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party comes to power... However, the largest state branch of the police union, in North Rhine-Westphalia, criticised Mr Hüber’s intervention and distanced itself from his article. It said: “We expressly and fully dissociate ourselves from his choice of words, his comparisons and the legally problematic conclusions drawn from them”, adding that “the oath of service doesn’t remove the right to vote”. The Bavarian branch said: “Our uniforms don’t have a party colour. We don’t do party political training in the ranks of the police.” Hubertus Knaube, a historian and former director of the Berlin Hohenschönhausen memorial, which commemorates the crimes of the former East German communist regime, said Mr Hüber’s article amounted to “a call for a coup against a democratically elected government”... It won 20 per cent of the vote in last year’s federal elections, taking second place, and is now polling at almost 30 per cent nationwide – far ahead of Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats."
Left wingers claim that the US Constitution is outdated and must be amended, but they love the unamendable bits of the German Constitution, which they can use to push the left wing agenda and ban political opponents

How the anti-AfD firewall broke German politics - "the AfD has been blocked from power everywhere by a Brandmauer, or firewall, that other parties have erected around it. The most important firewall is that maintained by the CDU, Germany’s ruling party and traditionally its largest. It formalised the policy in 2018 with an “incompatibility resolution” banning co-operation with both the AfD and Die Linke... Yet the Brandmauer has failed to arrest the AfD’s rise. In 2018 Friedrich Merz, now the CDU leader and Germany’s chancellor, vowed to halve the AfD’s vote. He hoped tacking right on immigration and governing well could win back voters seduced by the AfD’s narrative. None of this has worked... in Saxony-Anhalt and other AfD strongholds, the Brandmauer is already struggling to hold. Armin Schenk, Bitterfeld’s CDU mayor, found lurking on the edge of the protest, says the “right-wing extremist” AfD should be kept from power in the country that perpetrated the Holocaust. But in Bitterfeld, he adds, “the Brandmauer is not a reality,” because “in most cases decisions cannot be taken without the AfD.” With 15 of the city’s 40 council seats, it is the largest party. Even when the Brandmauer holds, it forces other parties to contort themselves around it. Thuringia and Saxony, two other eastern states, assembled incoherent or unstable CDU-led minority governments after a strong AfD performance in elections in 2024. They are held together by strong leaders. But they serve the AfD’s narrative that the mainstream outfits are indistinguishable Kartellparteien (“cartel parties”). Saxony-Anhalt threatens to push the strategy to its limits. If the AfD wins on September 6th, the Brandmauer is irrelevant. If it falls just short, the CDU will probably need support from every other party, including Die Linke, to take office. Confronted with that prospect, some CDU members might defect: one AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt reckons five are ready to jump. If not, the strains of buying off the hard left would test Mr Merz’s authority so sorely that some think it could end his career. And if, as polls suggest, the AfD wins twice as many seats as the CDU yet remains locked out of power, it will not only be AfD supporters who ask whether German democracy is working. It is dawning on the CDU that it has painted itself into a corner. “Anyone still talking about firewalls has not recognised the signs of the times,” said Michael Kretschmer, the CDU premier of Saxony, recently. The Brandmauer in effect obliges the party to seek coalitions only to its left, especially with the SPD, which has been in power in Germany almost without interruption since 1998—despite these days barely polling in double figures. CDU members’ frustration with concessions to the SPD inspires occasional calls for a minority government that could, on certain issues (such as migration, tax and energy), seek a “conservative majority” with the AfD. Voters are shifting, too. Support for the anti-AfD Brandmauer has dwindled from a clear majority to 41%. Yet the CDU has no easy way out. Tearing down the Brandmauer would split the party down the middle and trigger a voter exodus. Even minor violations have caused trouble. In 2020 the CDU voted with the AfD to elect a (short-lived) premier in Thuringia; the ensuing furore toppled Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s national leader. In January 2025 Mr Merz ordered his party to vote with the AfD on symbolic anti-migration measures in the Bundestag. This sparked protests across Germany and boosted support for Die Linke at the subsequent election. The chancellor is said to be traumatised by the experience. To avoid these dilemmas, some in the CDU quietly hope for an AfD majority in Saxony-Anhalt. But this does not amount to a strategy. “There has never been a reasonable debate about how to handle the AfD in the CDU, just a reflex to exclude them as the new Nazis,” says Andreas Rödder, a professor who in 2023 resigned as head of the CDU’s fundamental-values commission over his calls for openness to minority governments rather than a rigid Brandmauer. As for the AfD, it once railed against the Brandmauer as a gross violation of democracy. But these days many in the AfD look forward to governing alone. “We don’t think about how to make ourselves nice so that the CDU asks us for a coalition,” says Malte Kaufmann, an AfD MP. The party’s deputy chairman in Saxony-Anhalt has said their voters want them to “finish off” the CDU rather than co-operate with it. In some countries populists have moderated to gain power. But behind the Brandmauer, the AfD has had no incentive to do so. Torben Braga, another MP, says those in the party who would like to tack to the centre have lost the argument for two reasons. First, “our election results are getting better and better without us being forced to change.” Second, the party fears that moderating its positions and ejecting hardliners would alienate some voters. “The Brandmauer protects us from having to deal with very difficult questions,” Mr Braga says... Behind the Brandmauer you can promise anything, says Christian Stecker, a political scientist at the Technical University in Darmstadt. “It protects them from the disappointment that accountability in a democracy implies.” In despair, some mainstream politicians, including Ms Winter in the CDU, now look favourably on calls to ban the AfD, something explicitly allowed under Germany’s constitution. But even if parliament approved that proposal, which seems unlikely, the constitutional court would take years to rule on it... a growing number sympathise with Mr Stecker’s gloomier view. “It’s too late for the CDU to turn around, and too late for the AfD to accept any turnaround,” he says. “Some things will tumble down, new things will emerge—and we don’t know what it will all look like.”"
More than 40% of the German electorate are far right extremists and they need to be sent to re-education camps and replaced with migrants, who are enlightened and will vote Correctly and Protect Democracy
Maybe there will be a military coup to Save Democracy
Left wingers love proportional representation. Probably because incoherent and weak governments are the aim

@levelsio on X - "The EU is now for the 6th time trying to force Chat Control through which lets them scan ALL your private messages, photos and emails without a warrant. Implictly showing the EU is not democratic and not about what the people of Europe want, because once a law is rejected, you just re-submit it until nobody is watching and it's passed
November 2023: Chat Control is rejected
June 2024: Chat Control is rejected
October 2025: Chat Control is rejected
November 2025: Chat Control is rejected
March 2026: Chat Control is rejected
July 2026: Chat Control is back
Even the EU's own lawyers stated Chat Control is unconstitutional: "generalised message scanning is incompatible with Article 7 of the EU Charter" You have to wonder why the EU is so adament about reading your private chats, right?"
To Protect Democracy, you need to let the government read your messages at will

Chubby on X - "Today is a dark day for freedom and democracy in Europe. General chat surveillance has been implemented in Brussels. A disgrace. The so-called Chat Control 1.0 cleared a crucial hurdle in the European Parliament today. This means platforms may once again be allowed to scan private messages, officially on a “voluntary” basis, but in practice this marks the return of indiscriminate monitoring of private communication. What makes this especially bitter is that a majority of the MEPs who voted were reportedly against it. According to Patrick Breyer, 314 MEPs voted against the regulation, 276 voted in favor and 17 abstained. And yet the rejection failed because it was not enough to have a simple majority of those voting. An absolute majority of all MEPs would have been required. That is the democratic scandal. When a majority of those present votes against a proposal and it still passes because a formal threshold is not reached, it does not feel like democratic decision-making to many citizens. It feels like a procedural trick. And it becomes even more problematic when you look at the context: Chat Control had already been rejected before. Yet the issue was put back on the agenda shortly before the summer break, through an urgent procedure, at a time when absences could become decisive. This is not just some technical regulation. It goes to the very core of private communication. It is about whether digital messages remain fundamentally private or whether platforms may systematically scan content again, without concrete suspicion, without a court order and without any individual cause. A free society must not turn private communication into a potential surveillance zone. Anyone who takes digital fundamental rights seriously cannot accept millions of innocent people being placed under general suspicion. Today, a dangerous signal was sent: fundamental rights can be hollowed out through procedural logic, timing and political tricks. Not through an open, clear and honest majority, but through a system in which absence effectively helps the supporters. This is a dark day for Europe. Not because the fight is over, but because today showed how easily digital fundamental rights come under pressure when surveillance logic, symbolic politics and institutional tricks come together. Anyone who wants a free internet, anyone who wants to protect private communication and anyone who takes democracy seriously should talk about this. Share this issue. Inform yourself. Look at who voted how. And never forget: freedom rarely disappears all at once. It disappears step by step, often in technical details, often in complicated procedures and often exactly when too few people are watching."

Greg Lukianoff on X - "But remember the bad guys of Europe’s past were authoritarian, invasive, and centralized for BAD reasons, whereas today’s bureaucratocracy is motivated by hugs and puppies."

EU considers satellite technology to override speeding motorists - "Since July 2024, all new cars sold in Europe have been fitted with intelligent speed assist (Isa), a system that warns drivers if they are speeding with a sound or a vibration on the steering wheel. Thatcham Research, Britain’s largest vehicle safety body, recently warned that Isa systems failed to identify when a speed limit had changed in about one in four cases."
Damn misinformation and conspiracy theories about electric cars and state control!

Mario Nawfal on X - "Google held 34 meetings with top German government officials to discuss suppressing "hate speech" and "disinformation" online. Most were confidential and some were deemed "not suitable for public knowledge." The meetings, revealed through a parliamentary question filed by the opposition AfD, included then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who attended 4 personally. The implications go beyond Germany. Under the EU's Digital Services Act, content removed or algorithmically downranked applies globally, not just within EU borders. If the secret meetings between a government and Google to shape what people can find online aren't information control, what is?"

Merkel urges EU to 'keep regulating' social media, AI - "Longtime German leader Angela Merkel called on Europe Tuesday to stay the course in its push to regulate social media and AI — warning the "foundations of democracy" were at stake. The former chancellor issued the appeal as she accepted an award at the European Parliament -- in a speech urging the bloc to live up to the "promises" made to its citizens on protecting peace, prosperity and democratic values. "Continue along the path of regulating social media," she urged. "Continue along the path of regulating artificial intelligence." "To believe that responsibility for spreading information is no longer necessary — that one will not be held accountable for lies — will undermine the foundations of democracy," warned the German liberal, who served as Germany's chancellor from 2005 to 2021. The 27-country EU has some of the world's strictest rules regulating the digital space and is currently weighing the possibility of banning social media for those under a certain age. Merkel is one of 20 laureates of a newly-created European Order of Merit, bestowed in March to recognise "significant contributions to European integration and unity, democracy and values"."
Too bad, as the Leuven Correctional Court asserts, the truth is illegal in Belgium if it threatens the left wing agenda
Time to ban the AfD to save Democracy!

Europa.com on X - "Germany’s government is proposing a bill that could block people from buying homes if they’re suspected of “anti-constitutional” views — even without any criminal conviction. The draft would give local authorities first refusal on property sales and allow intelligence agencies to share personal data to vet buyers. It is framed as a way to stop extremism. Follow: @europa"
Matt Bramanti on X - "the German constitution is hilariously funny
"Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship."
whoa based
"These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws"
oh lmao"

Democracy Without Voters - "For decades, the European Union has not just been a geopolitical partner, it has been a political aspiration for a certain Eurocratic wing of the American left. The EU is what modern Democrats imagine government should become once it has fully “evolved”, an administrative system run by credentialed experts, insulated from elections, buffered by layers of bureaucracy, and confident that dissent is less a signal to be heeded than a problem to be managed. When Democrats talk about “protecting democracy,” what they often mean is protecting a system increasingly removed from the voters themselves, one that looks remarkably like Brussels with better branding. There is a profound irony in witnessing “No Kings” protests by people who want to replace individual liberty with the European model of monarchial bureaucracy. The similarities are not subtle. Both systems elevate technocracy, process, and regulation over representation, results, and growth and both rely on a permanent administrative class that persists regardless of election outcomes, ensuring that while politicians may change, the direction of governance rarely does. Each share a quiet but unmistakable belief that ordinary citizens, left to their own devices, cannot be trusted to make the “right” decisions without guidance, nudging, or correction from above... That is why the EU model has always held such appeal. It promises control without the messiness of accountability. It offers the appearance of democracy while steadily migrating real decision-making power away from voters and toward institutions. For American Democrats who find constitutional limits inconvenient and federalism inefficient, Europe represents an end state, a system where outcomes can be managed, dissent softened, and policy insulated from the volatility of elections. The uncomfortable truth for Democrats is that many of the policies they champion, expansive regulation, growing welfare states, centralized authority, and reliance on unelected administrative bodies, are not theoretical. They are already in operation across Europe, and the results are visible in slower growth, structural dependency, a political culture increasingly disconnected from the electorate but perhaps most obvious is the dilution of European history and culture through the importation of third world ideologies, religions and social mores. The European model is not a promise, it is a case study and if elections across the Continent are any indication, people have noticed and are beginning to push back. People are recognizing the cultural destruction and right-wing nationalist parties are making historic electoral inroads. The outrage, the insistence that questioning the model is destabilizing, points to a deeper discomfort with the possibility that the bureaucratic technocrats might be losing their grip on European governance. Trump’s critique, stripped of its rhetoric, lands squarely on this point. The United States has spent decades subsidizing a system abroad that mirrors what many on the left would like to build at home. NATO is the clearest example. An alliance premised on shared responsibility has drifted into a structure where America provides the backbone while European nations allocate resources toward expansive domestic priorities, assuming the security umbrella will remain in place. When Trump demands that NATO members meet their commitments, he is not just talking about defense spending, he is challenging the underlying assumption that America will indefinitely support systems that are increasingly at odds with its own founding principles. That challenge extends eastward as well. Even nations with legitimate security concerns cannot operate under the assumption that American protection is automatic. Alliances require reciprocity, and reciprocity requires shared burden. The leaders of Europe prefer tone over substance, so Trump’s “in your face” style ensures his message will be haughtily dismissed because they prefer nuance and ambiguity. However, leadership is not about comfort, it is about confronting realities that have been politely ignored. For years, American leaders have avoided acknowledging the growing alignment between European governance and the aspirations of the American left. Trump is not avoiding the historical evidence of where the European model leads and that it is profoundly anti-American. The real question is not whether Trump is too harsh, the real question is whether Americans recognize the trajectory. Do we continue down a path that mirrors Europe, centralizing power, expanding bureaucracy, and distancing government from the governed, or do we reaffirm a system built on sovereignty, accountability, and the understanding that freedom, while untidy, is ultimately more durable? Europe made its choice decades ago. The only question for the American people is whether enough will ignore the obvious negative outcomes to give Democrats control."

Is the occasional massacre of gay people worth it to have more Muslims in your society?

2026-09-10T09:59:00.000+08:00

Is the occasional massacre of gay people worth it to have more Muslims in your society?

"On July 25, 2026, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout drove a van into the crowd at Berlin Pride, killing one woman and injuring 29 people.

Three days later, I listened to The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, speak at a vigil for the victims, held by London’s LGBT community. Khan began by saying that he was honored to be there, but devastated, because he had stood in that very spot four times before, at four other vigils for murdered gay people. He listed them, year by year. Pulse was on the list. Oslo was on the list. Khan urged unity. He reminded us to face hate with love.

I wished I could not believe my ears: A European leader preaching acceptance of the people who murder gay people, to gay people, at a vigil to commemorate the murders of gay people, by the very people European leaders accepted!

In 1999, a neo-Nazi named David Copeland bombed the Admiral Duncan, a gay pub in London, killing three people

The day after it happened, every politician, every newspaper, every institution in Britain named the ideology, named the group, and named the pipeline that produced Copeland. Nobody stood at that vigil and told victims they needed to welcome more neo-Nazis. There is no policy by which Britain actively imports more neo-Nazis. No politician calls welcoming them a moral duty, and nobody gets called a bigot for noticing what neo-Nazis believe.

The opposite is true when the mass-murderer is a Muslim. Pulse, 2016: Forty-nine dead, killed by a man who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as he fired. Oslo, 2022: Two dead, twenty-one wounded outside a gay bar the night before Pride, by a man convicted of aggravated terrorism on behalf of the Islamic State. Berlin, 2026: One dead, 29 wounded by an attempted ISIS convert who had been convicted by a German court just two months earlier of preparing to commit terrorism.

And at every one of these vigils, the same speech: Hate has no place here. Love wins. We stand together. Each time a condemnation carefully engineered to have no object of condemnation.

What is the function of a condemnation that names nothing? Who is it for?

One of my favorite phrases is POSIWID, or, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Not what political leaders say it should do, not what it might one day live up to, but what it does.

Let’s apply POSIWID to Germany...

The court deferred the decision on suspending the sentence for six months, lifted the arrest warrant over prosecutors’ objections, and sent him home under the conditions that he book a careers-counseling appointment and attend 26 sessions of deradicalization counseling. No, that is not a joke. It is a German court ruling.

This was not a man who slipped through the cracks. In January 2026, Berlin police formally classified him as a Gefährder: Someone capable of committing politically motivated violence. His phone was monitored. His case was discussed at Germany’s Joint Counter-Terrorism Center. As a condition of his freedom, he was ordered into a deradicalization program. That’s right: Who needs to put ISIS members in jail when we have talk therapy? He attended two sessions. The program’s own advisers described him as “friendly” and “compliant,” though “inscrutable,” and were planning to notify the government of their worries on Monday. (Even stopping a terror plot won’t get Europeans to work weekends.)

Let’s take a moment and think about how many opportunities there were to stop a man already convicted of attempting a terrorist attack, of attempting—who would have guessed!?—another terrorist attack. The courts knew—they convicted him. The police knew—they classified him as dangerous. The counter-terrorism apparatus knew—they had a dedicated file on him. The therapists knew—they were going to report him. And the sum total of all this knowing was a suspended sentence and a counseling schedule.

So here is the question, and please sit with it rather than reach for your tribe’s answer: What is the purpose of a system when its stated understanding is, “This man is dangerous” and its revealed action is, “No further action required”?

I recently wrote about the Barista Fallacy: Reasoning about a population from the friendly individuals you happen to know. Sadiq Khan is the most extraordinary case study of that fallacy I have ever encountered, because he commits it against himself.

When Khan, a Muslim, voted for same-sex marriage in 2013, a mufti in Bradford issued a fatwa declaring him an apostate. He received death threats. These are his own words, to a gay magazine: “I did need to discuss with my daughters issues around police protection, and there are still people who don’t talk to me because of these issues.”

In that same interview, Khan was asked about the 2016 ICM survey (the most comprehensive face-to-face poll of British Muslims ever conducted). It found that 52% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal—in Britain!

Khan’s response to the poll: “[It] doesn’t represent the people I know.”

A man who required police protection from Islamist rage over gay rights, who paid the price in his own family’s safety, is shown data describing the belief system that threatened him, and he answers with his personal acquaintances, his “lived experience.” Unfortunately, his lived experience was insufficient to shield from Islamist violence the 15 people who were murdered and 134 people who were injured in London during his tenure as mayor.

I don’t know why he does it. Maybe he genuinely doesn’t accept the data. Maybe he accepts it and calculates that saying so would do more harm than good. Maybe he’s afraid. Maybe it’s a noble lie he considers the price of social peace. But notice that every one of those explanations is deepening public distrust because each one means the person in Britain with the best evidence, both anecdotal and data-based, cannot honestly state the conclusion that the evidence supports.

Attitudes are not violence. The overwhelming majority of the people captured in that 52 percent will never hurt anyone. But massacres are not committed by averages. They are committed by the tail of a distribution, and the size of the tail scales with the size and shape of the whole. A country that admits a population admits its distribution of belief, and not for one generation, but for all of them. You can vet an immigrant. You cannot vet her unborn children. Ballout was born in Berlin. Mateen was born in New York.

According to a German newspaper, Abdul held only German citizenship, attended local schools, played football in neighborhood youth competitions, and grew up in the multicultural district of Tiergarten. He was as German as a child of immigrants can be. That didn’t deter him from attempting to mass murder his countrymen.

Which leaves exactly two honest positions.

Position One: The risk is unacceptable. Ban all immigration from populations whose belief distributions include a violent tail, because no downstream benefit justifies the recurring murder of your own citizens.

Position Two: The occasional massacre of gay people is worth it to have more Muslims in your society. Millions of peaceful people get better lives; a wealthy society can absorb rare atrocities the way it absorbs highway deaths: As a known cost of a policy it has chosen with open eyes.

This position carries a corollary: You must manage the tail. Ruthlessly. If you have knowingly accepted that some people are just going to be mass-murdered in the streets with semi-regular frequency and that’s a price you’re willing to pay, then the question is simply how many and how frequently. You have the responsibility to ensure the scale and frequency of those mass-murders are both as limited as possible. This means you cannot do things like giving convicted terror aspirants suspended sentences because you want them to have talk-therapy instead.

Arguably, reasonable people can hold either position. What nobody can honestly hold is Position Three, which is the one that European elites actually hold: Deny that a disproportionate share of recent Islamist-motivated murders and anti-gay hate attacks exists, preach “welcome” as a moral axiom rather than a policy with costs, call anyone who notices Muslims killing people a bigot, and then, when the population tail arrives driving a van into a Pride parade, hold a vigil and condemn “hate.”

I have one last question:

What would that vigil speech have sounded like if it were written by someone whose actual goal was preventing the next vigil?"

A heatwave isn't the end of the world

2026-09-09T17:42:00.000+08:00

This is before RCP8.5 got disavowed and retired too.

Adaptation is not an effective way to virtue signal, so.

A heatwave isn't the end of the world

As I write this, in my favourite local café in Rome, the temperature outside is close to 40°C. So yes, it’s hot. Yet, thanks to a relatively old invention — air conditioning — I’m able to work in comfort. The 10-minute bike ride back home will be tougher than usual, but it won’t kill me. Like most people here, I consider these temperatures to be a nuisance — but that’s about it.

According to the news, however, I should be terribly concerned — terrified, in fact. Everyone’s running headline stories about the “extreme”, “record-breaking” and “deadly” hot weather sweeping across Asia, the US and, most notably, Europe. Here, the heatwave was unofficially named Cerberus, the multi-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, before being replaced by Charon, the man who ferries the dead there. Rome is being called the “infernal city”. To be honest, I can think of several much more hellish places around the world at the moment — cities plagued by poverty, terrorism and war. And yet we are told that the current heat waves are a taste of the “hell” that awaits us as a result of climate change.

Such sensationalism is revealing of the climate hysteria that has gripped the West — and the way in which it is seriously hindering our ability to devise rational solutions. Many seem convinced that if we don’t drastically reduce CO2 emissions (or eliminate them altogether) by our unmoveable deadline of 2030, climate change will extinguish humanity, if not all life on Earth. We’re told this is because “the science tells us”. This is bonkers.

Yes, climate change and global warming are real — and yes, they are largely a result of human activity — but the planet is not about to be “uninhabitable”. The science is, in fact, much more nuanced: according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is far from clear whether the world is actually experiencing more drought, flooding or hurricanes, nor the extent to which any changes are influenced by human behaviour.

Scientists aren’t even sure what the impact on agriculture will be: one 2011 study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that by mid-century climate change might reduce global crop output by less than 1% of today’s output. As the UN climate panel put it: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers [such as] changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development.”

While the overall impact of climate change on humanity will be negative, nowhere does the science tell us that life on Earth will perish if we don’t go Net Zero by 2030. These deadlines are conjured by politicians, not scientists. As a result, the apocalyptic narrative currently dominating the climate debate is completely unfounded — and unethical. In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman warned about the “futility thesis” — how people will reject preventive action due to a fatalistic belief that it is simply too late to make a difference. Today, this phenomenon can be seen in the thousands of young Westerners who are suffering from “climate anxiety” and choosing not to have children. According to the UN’s latest Human Development Report, the world is more pessimistic than at any point between now and before the First World War — even though in almost every measurable way, life on Earth is better than ever.

Not only is this rhetoric of impending doom hindering the possibility of fixing the problem, it is also engendering all manner of authoritarian fantasies. It has become an article of faith that the best response is to drastically cut back CO2 emissions — and that this should be done whatever the cost. For if the world is about to end, anything is justified. The increasingly violent forms of “eco-activism” are also part of this trend. Fear, depression, desperation and authoritarianism are mutually reinforcing.

Yet any realistic climate policy will take decades to pay off; even if we significantly reduce our emissions in the following years, the total amount of carbon dioxide in the air will still increase, though at a slightly diminished rate. This is especially true for Western countries, which will account for a smaller and smaller share of global emissions in the coming years and decades. Even if rich countries completely curtail all emissions (an impossible scenario), the temperature increase, after 80 years, will only be 0.4°C smaller than it would have been otherwise, according to estimates by Bjorn Lomborg based on a model used by the UN’s panel of climate scientists. So even if Western countries were able to meet their unrealistic climate objectives, we will continue to experience the negative consequences of climate change — floods, storms and heat waves — for a very long time.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything to try to stop temperatures from rising above a certain limit. But if our aim is to actually save lives — and surely we have a greater moral obligation to those who are alive today than to future generations — then our priority should be adaptation: that is, measures that will help people cope with the effects of climate change, and which would save lives here and now.

Adaptation has already greatly reduced climate-related deaths, even in the face of rising temperatures: it’s why deaths from storm surges have been declining even as sea levels have risen; and why the most likely future scenario is that fewer people will die from climate-related flooding — just as heat-related deaths have been declining in certain countries. Adaptation is also why deaths and devastation due to wildfires have dropped dramatically; and why, overall, climate-related fatalities have declined by about 96% over the past century, despite a massive increase in the global population. This is testament to the strong relationship between economic development and climate resilience.

In the context of the current heatwaves, this means that, instead of “climate action”, people should be demanding subsidies for air conditioners and lower energy prices from their governments — straightforward measures that would drastically lower the number of heat-related deaths, not empty promises that won’t make a difference in the short term (and will have a negligible impact in the long term). But this is what happens when nightmares and elitist fantasies replace the actual material conditions of people as the basis for politics — “saving the planet” becomes more important than saving actual human beings.

In this way, climate hysteria is completely distorting our perception of the world. Last week, a report by the World Meteorological Organization that the beginning of July was the world’s hottest week on record received widespread attention. At around the same time, another report was published — this time by the UN Development Programme — that was greeted with less interest. But it was arguably more important. It estimated that the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent surge in inflation and borrowing costs had pushed an extra 165 million people into poverty, bringing the total global figure to 1.65 billion, over 20% of the world’s population.

Climate activists often argue that those living in poor countries are the ones who will suffer the most from climate change. This is true. But, once again, it is illogical to claim that our priority, and theirs, should therefore be to reduce global emissions as fast as possible. Poor people’s priority is not be poor. A UN global poll of nearly 10 million people found climate to be the lowest policy priority among the poor, far behind education, health, and nutrition.

Of course, these objectives can’t always be treated in isolation. There are often trade-offs: reducing or eliminating world poverty requires more growth, which inevitably entails more energy and therefore more emissions. Indeed, coping with the effects of climate change is itself energy-intensive, as the climate paradox of air conditioning makes clear. Faced with this realisation, environmentalists continue to entertain the notion that the future energy needs of developing countries can be met entirely by renewables — yet this is also a fantasy.

As a report published last year by the Breakthrough Institute makes clear, even though renewables (ideally in combination with nuclear energy, which is fully carbon-free) have a role to play in the development of Africa and other poor regions, many of the world’s poorer countries have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels in the coming years: coal, oil and natural gas. “Continued and increasing fossil-fuel consumption is regrettable, but it will mean more people will be fed with less land, reducing deforestation, and enabling the transition to modern agriculture,” write the report’s two co-authors, Vijaya Ramachandran of the Breakthrough Institute and Arthur Baker of the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago. Remember, poverty is the leading cause of death in developing countries; more growth in these countries will mean more emissions but significantly fewer deaths. Moreover, helping the world’s poorest grow out of poverty will also make them more resilient in the face of climate change.

One might think that, even for those with environmentalist sympathies, the choice here isn’t too difficult to make: fewer deaths is surely a goal worth pursuing. Instead, development banks and international funding groups such as the World Bank and the European Investment Bank are increasingly linking finance to climate adaptation and mitigation, curtailing or halting their funding of fossil-fuel or nuclear projects. Here we can observe the best example of the way in which climate hysteria is pushing us to make increasingly irrational — and ultimately very dangerous, if not deadly — choices for poor and marginalised people everywhere, in the developing world as well as in rich countries.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change; it means that we need to strike the right balance between improving human welfare — which implies more emissions in the short term — and mitigating temperature rises. As long as poverty continues to kill more people than climate change, environmentalists who profess to care about saving the world should think about who they are saving it for.

Links - 9th September 2026 (British Politics)

2026-09-09T13:28:00.000+08:00

SAS soldiers resign over war crime ‘witch hunts’ - "Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers are resigning in significant numbers over fears they will be subjected to “witch hunts” by human rights lawyers. Several sources have claimed that soldiers from 22 SAS, the Army’s most elite fighting force, have applied for premature voluntary release... Insiders say the resignations have been driven by outrage over recent war crime investigations into Afghanistan and Syria, which have been described as “witch hunts”. The treatment of elderly Northern Ireland veterans who served in the SAS has also contributed, insiders say. They are viewed as having been hounded through the courts on vexatious claims, some of which have been described as “ludicrous” by a judge. Among those understood to have resigned are several senior warrant officers, who are the backbone of the special forces and among the most experienced troops in the regiment. A number are understood to have applied for release “on principle” just before Christmas. “Morale is s--- at the moment,” one insider with knowledge of the recent losses said, while another said there was “considerable disquiet” in the regiment as a result. Sir Keir Starmer is under immense pressure to boost the military after Donald Trump’s attack on Iran showed how ill-prepared Britain was for war. It took three weeks for HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, to arrive in the eastern Mediterranean after RAF Akrotiri, a British air base in Cyprus, was hit by a drone. Sir Keir has failed to say how the Government will meet its pledge to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence, and his defence investment plan for military spending over the next decade – promised last autumn – has still not been published amid wrangling between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Treasury. The SAS resignations are a significant blow to the famed special forces unit, which is the tip of the spear in military operation and is deployed globally. Last month it was revealed that 242 special forces troops, including 120 serving troops, were being hounded by lawyers as part of £1m-a-month human rights inquiries... Secret operations across Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and Syria are being investigated by lawyers, with the troops involved facing legal sanctions if they fail to comply... George Simm, a former regimental sergeant major of 22 SAS, said troops were afraid they would “get a knock on the door” from lawyers and felt they had been betrayed. He said laws such as the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) were being applied to war zones and that the right to life for “armed terrorists and murderers” now outweighed that of the special forces troops sent to stop them from committing atrocities. “If a soldier discharges their weapon, they are almost certainly going to get a knock at their door one day,” he told The Telegraph. “It feels like a betrayal and a break in the trust. “We now have to consider the lives of the terrorists because of the ECHR. These are the guys who are shooting at us. We have all killed mass murderers and these lawyers say you should have done this and should have done that. It’s a joke. “There is a dangerous dichotomy that has crept into the command and come all the way down the chain of command and now the lawyers are all over it.” Lt Col Richard Williams, a former commanding officer of 22 SAS, told The Telegraph: “The SAS, like all involved in UK defence today, is being hit with the Labour Party’s unique, toxic, double whammy of lawfare persecution and budget cuts. “It’s hardly surprising that professional and loyal soldiers, SAS or otherwise, choose to leave.” Labour’s Troubles bill, which seeks to remove immunity protections introduced by the Conservatives in their Northern Ireland Legacy Act, has provoked anger in military circles. Some of the UK’s most senior retired military chiefs warned before Christmas that legal reform was provoking an “exodus” from the special forces. In an unprecedented intervention, nine former military chiefs claimed that soldiers’ trust in the legal system had collapsed to such a point that it “risks everything”. In an open letter to Sir Keir, they said allowing historic cases against veterans to be reopened was playing into the hands of Britain’s enemies. The letter – which included Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, a former chief of the general staff, among its signatories – warned: “Today every British soldier deployed must consider not only the enemy in front of them but the lawyer behind them. “Make no mistake, our closest allies are watching uneasily, and our enemies will be rubbing their hands.” Writing for The Telegraph in December, seven former SAS commanders warned Britain’s most elite troops risked being used as scapegoats by politicians who were “doing the enemy’s work”. The writers included two former commanding officers of 22 SAS, Aldwin Wight and Lt Col Williams, as well as three former squadron commanders, a former regimental sergeant major and a former warrant officer first class. They said the threat of legal action could result in deaths as “commanders turn risk-averse” and “soldiers hesitate where boldness saves lives”. “Britain’s special forces are small, discreet, uniquely lethal... Their humiliation rewards Moscow, Tehran and Beijing,” they wrote. “Our handling of allegations is national security, not a sideshow. “Defend our defenders fairly, firmly, eyes open to war’s moral mess – or keep doing the enemy’s work, one leak, one inquiry, one broken soldier at a time. A democracy that won’t back its warriors won’t long endure.” The Army has shrunk from more than 100,000 around 2010 to just over 70,000 fully trained soldiers now, its smallest since before the Napoleonic War. The Navy, once the jewel of Britain’s military, is now at its smallest size in living memory, with only seven frigates and six destroyers in the fleet and two aircraft carriers. Of the six Astute-class nuclear attack submarines, only one is at sea. One of Britain’s Vanguard boats, armed with nuclear missiles, spent more than six months underwater, a far longer deployment than previously carried out by the nuclear deterrence force."
Time to train another battalion of human rights lawyers

Labour’s Troubles bill could risk breakup of the UK, former general warns - "Labour’s Troubles Bill risks making a united Ireland more likely, a former British Army general has warned. Writing exclusively in The Telegraph, Gen Sir Nick Parker accused the Government of introducing the legislation to score multiple short-term political points, such as winning favour with the EU. But he said the UK Government’s strategic objective behind the Troubles legislation was not clear. In contrast, Sinn Féin is laser-focused on its aim of Irish unity and the lengthy process to pass the bill threatens to undermine the Army and the Union, Sir Nick said... “Sinn Féin’s objective has been clear for decades. It seeks a united Ireland and now pursues that objective through legitimate democratic and political means “What exactly is the UK Government’s objective? Reconciliation? Closure? Justice? Political stability? Better relations with Dublin and progress on EU reset? Supporting those who acted on its behalf? Closure for victims? “The answer appears to be all of them. The fact that there is no clearly defined aim creates a fundamental imbalance. One side knows what success looks like. The other does not.” Sir Nick has previously urged Sir Keir Starmer to abandon the Troubles bill. Legislation passed under the Tories – the 2023 Legacy Act – granted veterans conditional immunity from prosecution for their actions during the Troubles and ended all new civil cases and inquests. But Labour has introduced plans that would allow veterans to be brought before the courts decades after serving on the Government’s behalf. Ministers want to use a legal process known as a remedial order to strip out the immunity protection, claiming it is “incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)” because it could stop human rights violations being properly investigated. But critics, including Sir Nick, argue that this could mean a series of fresh civil cases that could cost taxpayers millions of pounds. Sir Nick added: “For veterans and former police officers, the consequences are particularly stark. Many now face the prospect of repeated scrutiny more than half a century after the events in question. “The issue is no longer simply accountability. It is whether democratic societies can sustain an endless process without eventually undermining confidence in the very institutions that defend them.”... Veterans groups have warned that the bill leaves former soldiers vulnerable to vexatious legal claims that former terrorists do not face."
The human rights-industrial complex smells blood. If the left hates you, they will continually pursue you till they get the result they want

Khaled Hassan on X - "Every single thing that's happening in Britain today happened in Egypt in the 1950s. The destruction of the economy. The socialist-Islamic alliance. Palestinianism. Anti-Western sentiments and viewing the Chinese, Russians, and other authoritarian regimes as better alternatives to the US. It's 100% the same. Egyptians didn't fight back. The silent majority either welcomed this nonsense or did nothing about it. It's the same in Britain today. Britain as we know it is drawing its last breath. This is the end."

Nigel Farage witch hunt has proved that British public are behind Reform UK - "The fact is for weeks all those parties have been screeching that Farage wasn’t fit to be Clacton’s MPs because of questions over his financial affairs, in particular a £5million gift from a crypto billionaire. So, Farage did exactly what those parties had been demanding, he resigned his seat telling the people of Clacton he’d stand again and they could vote for him if they wanted to – or not. But that wasn’t good enough for all the party leaders who promptly threw their toys out of the pram saying they wouldn’t stand against him. And we all know why not. It’s because they’re terrified they’ll get slaughtered if they go up against Farage. Even Kemi Badenoch, who I’d begun to respect, ran away and called it a “fake election”. No, it’s a very real one which she doesn’t have the guts to stand in because Farage got 45% of the vote in the last by-election and smashed the Tories majority of 26,000. This time round, she knows they’d lose even more votes as would all the others. So, they pretend that running scared of the fight is about not playing the game of a man they despise. Trouble is, no-one’s buying it. The British people aren’t stupid. They know our political establishment is TERRIFIED of Farage, in particular Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, who tweets and rants about him daily and who this week went into red faced overdrive screaming that what Farage had done was just one big stunt. Seriously? This from the cringemaking king of stupid stunts. At least Farage hasn’t had to stoop to bungee jumping or falling off paddleboards to get voters’ attention. There’s not a single Labour, Tory or Lib Dem MP who has the guts or the conviction to do what Farage just did in Clacton because they know they’d all be kicked out. Yes, there are genuine questions to be asked about his finances and they’re being investigated. Farage has always said that the £5million donation was a gift to fund his security because he’s been attacked more than most other MP’s and for years has to pay for his own protection. He and his family are constantly under threat and he lives in fear of having acid thrown in his face – something which comic Jo Brand joked about. “Why bother throwing a milkshake when you can get some battery acid,” said this vile woman. This week Farage understandably lost the plot when Sky News pitched up outside his daughter’s front door. Now why the hell do that when she’s got absolutely nothing to do with his political life? It was harassment, pure and simple, and any parent would be spitting nails... guess what, while they tell us Farage is finished, membership of Reform has surged yet again – which tells me the British people don’t like witch hunts and they don’t like politicians ganging up against someone who wants what they do."

Of all the strains of Farage Derangement Syndrome, this one is the silliest - "Farage has money and nice things, say these people with money and nice things, so how can he be anti-establishment? It’s underpinned by such an archaic vision of “the establishment”. These people seem to think that being establishment means wearing red braces and chewing fat cigars, as if it were 1984 and Thatcher was still in Downing St and Duran Duran still at No1. Perhaps they think the ruling classes also wear bowler hats and yell “You boy!” at every urchin they meet on the streets. They have no understanding of how power has shifted in this country, how it has been shifted from men’s clubs on Pall Mall to the cultural hangouts of the lanyard classes. The movers and shakers of the new establishment are less likely to ping their braces and say: “Sell, sell, sell!” than they are to tighten their keffiyehs and say: “Trans women are women.” Power wears geeky glasses these days. It wraps itself in the Pride flag. Its stomping ground is HR departments and smokeless local-council offices. Its mission is to manage the masses, especially our crude, unorthodox speech. If you see a posh bloke in a tweed blazer, that’s not “the establishment” – it’s a young fogey on his way to a wine bar. If, however, a lady with Su Pollard specs and a badge declaring her pronouns makes a beeline for you at work, it’s highly likely you’re about to be reprimanded for wrongthink. That’s “the establishment” to most people these days. There’s also an extreme defensiveness in these cries of “Farage is the establishment!”. There’s a reason you only ever hear this guff from people with cushy jobs in the media, law or, indeed, politics. It’s because these people can’t face the truth: that they’re the establishment now. They point a finger at Britain’s best-known Dulwich old boy to distract attention from their own cultural power that they doll up as rebelliousness. From those Remoaners who beat the streets to try to overturn Brexit to the keffiyeh classes who rattle their jewellery in effusive agreement with every literary darling who attacks Israel. That’s cultural clout in the 21st century. At some level, these people know Farage is more tuned in to the concerns of working-class communities than they will ever be. Where they look down at the Brexit-voting oiks as “gammon” whose brains have been turned to mush by too much tabloid-reading, Farage can hold a conversation with the everyday Briton. Indeed, a few months ago a poll found that a majority of Britons think Farage would be the most “fun” politician to have a pint with – and that Keir Starmer would be the politician most likely to skip his round. It’s simple: they hate it when Farage attacks “the establishment” because they know he’s talking about them."

Here’s the real reason why Labour’s never had a female leader – but no one wants to admit it - "The reason Labour has never had a female leader, I now humbly accept, is nothing to do with hypocrisy or sexism. It’s actually because the party has never had a woman who’s anywhere near good enough. Of course, given that Labour has been led by such titans as Sir Keir Starmer, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, I will inevitably now be accused of sexism myself. But in response, all I can do is ask: who should Labour’s first female leader have been? Should it have been, say, Diane Abbott (who stood in the leadership contest of 2010)? Would she have steered Labour to electoral triumph, with her effortless popular appeal? Or how about Rebecca Long-Bailey (who stood in 2020)? Would she have wowed the public with her dazzling charisma? Alternatively, perhaps Harriet Harman, who was the party’s caretaker leader on two occasions (2010 and 2015), while members debated which man should be given the job full-time. Could she have won back the working class, with her celebrated common touch? On the whole, I tend to suspect not. Anyway, the reason I raise this awkward subject is that, almost three weeks after Sir Keir announced his resignation, not a single Labour woman has put her name forward to be his successor. Why? Have the nasty sexist Labour men hidden the application forms? I suppose we shouldn’t rule it out. There is, however, a simpler explanation. Which is that Labour’s current crop of 186 female MPs know that none of them would have a cat’s hope in hell of beating Andy Burnham. And if so, they’re not wrong. After all, which of them would you pick? Maybe Rachel Reeves, the most unpopular Chancellor in history. Or Angela Rayner, who was forced to resign as deputy prime minister over her tax affairs (always an unfortunate look for a socialist). Or Bridget Phillipson, who this week argued that the taxpayer should bankroll free childcare for parents who are unemployed. Or Lucy Powell, who once suggested that mentioning the rape-gangs scandal was a “dog whistle”. Or Lisa Nandy, who once argued that male criminals should be placed in women’s prisons if they say they’re women, too. Or Dawn Butler, who once claimed that babies are born without a biological sex. Kemi Badenoch – the Tories’ fourth female leader – reckons she knows why Labour has no women capable of winning a leadership contest. “Every woman who is a Conservative MP has had to fight to get where she is,” she wrote last month. “We do not have all-women shortlists or quotas. We are made of tougher stuff.” This theory certainly sounds more convincing than the one put forward by Lucy Powell, Sir Keir’s deputy. She recently suggested that Labour has never had a female leader because of “our political discourse in this country”...
Taxpayers will be forced to fund the Clacton by-election, after the Government indignantly rejected Nigel Farage’s offer to pay for it out of his own pocket (or at least, out of Reform’s). A spokesman for the MHCLG (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) explained: “To maintain the independence and impartiality of the electoral process, the law is clear that the cost of running elections must be met from public funds, and not by candidates or political parties.” That may be so. But could that law be about to change? I ask because back in 2008, during the days of the last Labour government, the Tory MP David Davis did much the same thing as Mr Farage, by resigning to fight a snap by-election in his own seat. And one cabinet minister was so disgusted by this needless extravagance, he declared that Mr Davis should be made to foot the £80,000 bill himself. “I think there’s a bloody good case to be made for it,” thundered the then culture secretary, in an interview with the Left-wing magazine Progress. “Why should the resources at local level and national level be devoted to this? Why?” In case you’ve forgotten who the culture secretary was at that time, it was none other than Mr Andy Burnham. When he takes over as prime minister, therefore, will he reverse the Government’s decision, and accept Mr Farage’s offer? You never know. After all, the recent Makerfield by-election, and resultant mayoral election in Greater Manchester, could reportedly end up costing the public a combined £5m – which is a remarkable £4.92m more than Mr Davis’s by-election. So I’m sure Mr Burnham will be anxious to avoid incurring any more unnecessary expense."

Politics UK on X - "🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham has appointed Louise Haigh the rare role of First Secretary of State It was last held in 2021 and has seniority over all Secretaries of State. She has also been appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office"
Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "LEARN THE WORKPLACE RULES! Convicted of fraud and donate to Reform? That's bad. Convicted of fraud and appointed Secretary of State? That's good."
Convicted fraudster Louise Haigh stripped of oversight of fraud office

How the NGO-industrial complex corrupts UK politics - spiked - "The report recommends that all lobbying of government ministers, aides and middle-ranking mandarins – from WhatsApp chats to meetings at party conferences – is publicly declared on an easy-to-read database. Even those who don’t lobby the state for money would have to sign up to a register. That also goes for charities and pressure groups seeking to influence policy. The proposed new rules would hit Labour and progressive parties far more than the Conservatives, who have long been legally obliged to declare their contacts with advocates for the corporate world. Labour ministers and their departments constantly have their ears bent by the kinds of NGOs, pressure groups and the big campaigning charities that aren’t currently caught in the net, but they would be under the commission’s recommendations. If Amnesty International, the New Economics Foundation and the like want to continue setting up discreet workshops with Sir Humphrey’s top officials – or whispering in ministers’ ears about the beauty of open borders, wealth taxes or transgender activism – they would have to be open about it and have their meetings recorded for our benefit. This would come as a shock to the current progressive establishment, whose members have long acted as if the lobbying threat comes solely from billionaires and shills for multinational conglomerates. But this is both misleading and outdated. Today’s super-rich are more likely to fund a think-tank, or an international institute campaigning for a particular worldview, than to nobble ministers over an expensive lunch. When it comes to lever-pulling, these organisations excel most in covert influence. It is the charity-industrial complex – comprising many NGOs that are now sophisticated multimillion-pound transnational operations – that lobbies hardest... The boundaries between government and private-sector activity are now more fluid than ever. Many charities and non-profits are only nominally independent. In reality, they receive a large proportion of their income from the government itself, officially to help deliver a particular policy, but often to direct and apply it, too. Many such charities have a distinctly activist bias. There is not much difference between such organisations and lobbyists as regards their potential for influence on ministerial policy – they push for the policies they want and get rewarded financially... And what about public-sector bodies set up supposedly at arm’s length to advise ministers? The Ethics and Integrity Commission has airily dismissed any suggestion that they should be caught in the lobbying net. ‘Providing impartial, expert advice to government in the public interest is an integral part of their role and their governance’, the commission states. If only. The idea that, say, Natural England or English Heritage are just groups of well-meaning boffins offering the government impartial advice is absurd. Both organisations see it as their function to put pressure on the government to promote a particular interest, and have no hesitation in doing so. And that’s before you get to bodies like the Equality and Human Rights Commission or the office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, which have no compunction in putting pressure on government in matters often at odds with voters’ wishes – such as in strengthening the power of the human-rights lobby or banning the smacking of children. These may or may not be good policies, but we have just as much of a right to transparency from such bodies as we have from any other group set up to promote a particular point of view."

PeterSweden on X - "What a surprise. The new incoming British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has hired a former director at the far-left organization Hope Not Hate to be his Director of Political Strategy. Can you guess who has funded Hope Not Hate. None other than George Soros. This Hope Not Hate is known to not only work closely with, but even have antifa operatives write for them."

Burnham’s plan to ‘rewire’ politics will blow the fuse, warns Lord Speaker - "Andy Burnham’s plan to reform the House of Lords risks blowing a “constitutional fuse”, the Lord Speaker has warned. Lord Forsyth of Drumlean will warn the incoming prime minister against proposals to create a second elected chamber, thus “rewiring” Britain’s constitutional processes. Mr Burnham said last month that he wanted an “early change” in the House of Lords, and described an unelected second chamber as “quite scandalous”. He has backed plans to replace it with a “senate of the nations and regions”, a proposal first put forward in 2022, made up of elected representatives from across the country. In a rare intervention in a speech on Thursday evening, the Lord Speaker will question whether scrutinising UK-wide legislation should be done by regional delegates who face pressure from their own areas... Lord Forsyth will warn that having another elected chamber could result in a US Congress-style “gridlock”, where the upper chamber would “feel free to attempt to block or kill legislation”. He will add that local or regional representatives might feel pressure to “prioritise the needs of their own areas”, or have constituency work to deal with, unlike peers. Sir Keir Starmer finally succeeded in Labour’s decades-long attempt to abolish hereditary peers, but his successor has said he believes there are multiple stages on the road to reform."

Sadiq Khan is a terrible mayor – no wonder Starmer has given him a peerage - "One of the 26 is former MP Kitty Ussher, who in 2009 had to resign as a Treasury minister after being exposed as having dodged (albeit legally) £17,000 in capital gains tax by temporarily redesignating her main home for one month. Still, now she has a permanent role lording it over the rest of us. Ain’t life grand? While Ms Ussher is a relatively obscure figure, her fellow Lords nominee Sir Sadiq Khan is anything but. As a thrice-elected Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq is a familiar national presence – indeed an all-too-familiar presence for those of us who live in the capital and are not his biggest fans. The fact he has been re-elected twice might imply that he has been a successful mayor. He has not. All it shows is that London is a strongly Labour-leaning city. Although the Tories can win, they have to have an exceptional candidate to do so. That has not been the case since Boris Johnson in 2008 and 2012. Sir Sadiq’s record is the very opposite of successful. Take housing, an issue of immediate and pressing need. Khan began with a target of between 23,900-27,200 affordable home starts. When it became clear he was miles away from this, he simply cut the target by 22 per cent to 17,800-19,000 starts. Just last week, City Hall figures showed he had missed that too, with only 14,335 starts. But even that figure flatters him. In 2024-25 just 8,184 homes were actually completed in London, against an assessed need of 45,500 a year. More than 43,000 homes counted as “started” are unfinished. Then turn to crime. Knife crime in London rose by nearly 72 per cent between 2015-16 and June 2025. Khan boasts that it is now falling – down 7 per cent in the year to August 2025. Well, yes. But when you have presided over a 72 per cent rise, it takes a large degree of political chutzpah to boast that the latest figure is down by seven per cent. Shoplifting has more than doubled in over a third of London’s 32 boroughs since 2016. Over the whole of London, it has risen by more than 50 per cent in the last five years. And “theft from the person”, such as pickpocketing, has almost tripled since 2016. And we Londoners pay through the nose for this. The mayor’s share of the council tax bill was £276 for a Band D household when Khan took office in 2016. It is now £510.51: a rise of 85 per cent. Not once has Khan condemned the hate marches that now regularly bring much of central London to a halt and leave many Jews feeling that they are no-go areas. He has suggested that those who chant “from the river to the sea” are not anti-Semitic and has attacked the use of the label “hate marches”. And after the Chief Rabbi criticised the mayor’s call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza while Hamas was still in control, Khan went after him, suggesting the Chief Rabbi was motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice. Khan did later apologise, but only after a huge backlash. This kind of language is something of a theme for Khan. When some Londoners protested against his plan to expand the ultra-low-emission zone, he suggested they were “joining hands” with “the far-Right”. In most walks of life such a record of failure and incendiary remarks would be damning, even career ending. But in London politics, it means Khan is deemed as qualified to be handed a lifetime role as a legislator in the Lords."

Indians and Mass Migration

2026-09-08T17:29:00.000+08:00

Given how querulous they are known to be (see: Amartya Sen), this is definitely a flawed essay:

pagliacci the hated 🌝 on X

“wHy aRe tHerE iNdiaNs In pOrTuGaL?!” Because they are good slaves, you are not. I hate essay-posting but allow me a rare indulgence: To understand what is happening now, you need understand that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Why are there Indians in Kenya? Suriname? Fiji? Burma? Because Indians have always been the preferred servile class of elites. The evidence for this goes back hundreds of years. I’ve spoken about British colonial Burma before, and it is a great example of what this looks like. Even after extensive efforts to bring them to heel, the majority of the Burmese ethnic groups were far too resistant to submit to the British empire to be reliable labor. They refused to abandon their culture and ways of life to be slave drones for British pocketbooks. So the Brits started importing Indians to be their colonial administrators, preferring them as labor because they were easier to control and satisfy. By the 1940s, Indians made up almost 20% of the population of the entire country. Another great historical example of this is Suriname - a small country in South America that had been under Dutch colonial rule for 300 years. The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863, forcing colonial plantation owners to have to hire labor to do the work they had previously been using slaves for. But… they didn’t want to pay former slaves or Indigenous locals a living wage for the work. So what did the Dutch elites do instead? Import Indians. Today, Indians still make up 27% of the population. 27%. Of a tiny, obscure South American country. We could basically go through the list of every country with a non-negligible Indian population and the theme would be consistent: They were brought there by elites who needed a submissive, easily exploitable labor pool when local labor asked for better living conditions or wages. Why? Because Indians never did. They are a population that seems fully content with subjugation (even Marx noticed this). So it’s easy to see why they were such an ideal population for the intensive global expansion era of colonial empires. And it’s even easier to see why they are perfect subjects for late capitalism now. They are the culturally, psychologically, and physically ideal organism for the dominant system. There’s 1.4 billion of them. They are deeply socially stratified and so expect and even enjoy inequality. Their cuisine is cheap, meat-free slop. They live amongst trash and filth with no qualms. They don’t care about the environment. Their reaction to death and abuse is blank-eyed indifference. They are physically and spiritually malleable. They not only adopt and internalize the demands of the dominant system as personal ambition, they believe this servitude makes them better than everyone else who hasn’t. Absolutely IDEAL subjects. You, on the other hand, are not the ideal subject. You want to live in a high-trust society. You would shed tears if someone tried to cut down the apple tree you climbed as a child to build a data center. You want to see and experience beauty. You want your own space. You have an expectation that your living conditions will improve over time. You would not be content to live in a room with 10 other people, work 16 hours per day for pennies, and eat cheap slop. You are a liability. Just like the Burmese and Surinamese slaves were. And as we continue to crawl deeper into this late capitalist hellscape, you and your silly little needs will come into increasing conflict with those of the system. Thus, you WILL be replaced by people far easier to control and far less concerned about their own welfare or the welfare of everyone and everything around them. … Unless you do something about it. But the system has already locked-in that you won’t, and that you’ll just sort of fade into nothingness, distracted by meaningless comforts and terrified of the uncertainty of change. So “why are Indians in [wherever]?” Because you are about to not be.

Links - 8th September 2026 (Diversity [including University Admissions/the SAT])

2026-09-08T13:39:00.000+08:00

Steve McGuire on X - "Berkeley math professor: “Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates' chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.” Berkeley admitted 45% of applicants from a high school where nearly 94% of “students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.” It admitted less than 14% of applicants from a school where “nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5.”"
Steve McGuire on X - "Another Berkeley professor told the author: “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6…. The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”"
Timothy Bates on X - "Same in Scotland since ~2003. In one recent year, 100% (!!) of law school entrants at Edinburgh were selected from the bottom quintile of parental/postcode socioeconomic status. Zero chance for 80% of families and highly capable young people. Private education, home ownership, parental education sum to dwarf any remaining variance in leaving exams which have near 100% pass rates. Probably fine…"
Weird. We're told that high school grades predict college success better than SAT score

Jeffrey P. Clemens on X - "Thinking about this issue as an economist, I think an underappreciated dimension is that the absence of the SAT/ACT in the college application process is itself a cause of K-12 grade inflation. The absence of the SAT made grade inflation a more powerful lever through which high schools could increase the rates at which their students were admitted to highly ranked UCs. This made grade inflation more attractive both as a matter of strategy and out of genuine sympathy from high school teachers and administrators for their students. Of course, admissions in the face of fixed college class sizes is a zero sum game. So in the end, grade inflation becomes less a way to "give your students a leg up" and more a way to "avoid holding them back" once "everyone else is doing it.""

Jelani Nelson on X - "One motivation to ban SAT/ACT in UC admissions was to eliminate perceived bias against black and latino students. But the biggest shift by banning the SAT was a transfer of admit seats from Asian students to white: https://t.co/MUDsL2CSk1 E->F, rows 12-19."
i/o on X - "No, the main motivation was to eliminate evidence that could be used in lawsuits against UC when it engaged in anti-Asian and anti-white admissions discrimination. Since high school GPA is becoming increasingly uninformative as an indicator of intelligence, removing the most reliable indicator (standardized tests) was essential. Because the more colleges rely on measures that strongly correlate to general intelligence, the smaller the representation of blacks and Hispanics in their student bodies — that is, the farther the modern elite university gets from its main mission (to increase "diversity")."
Weird. The "experts" told us that high school GPA predicted college success better than the SAT

New York Post on X - "UC professors forced to teach 'middle school math' after SAT ban"
Liz4SF on X - "Zero common sense, let’s do away with SATs bc it’s racist. UC regents should all be fired, along with/ racist admissions committees, where Asian kid w/ 4.42 Weighted GPA & 1590 on SAT cant get u admissions to UC SD, UC SB, Davis nor Irvine “More than 500 professors signed an open letter saying they’ve been forced to teach “middle school” math in Calculus and other courses as incoming students are alarmingly unprepared for college-level coursework.”"
Weird. The "experts" told us that the SAT was useless for predicting college performance

Neetu Arnold on X - "University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students: “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics” “The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”"
John Loeber on X - "There are several interesting things going on here.
(1) The UCs were long known for their high standards, in particular UC Berkeley and UCLA as their flagships: in general, if you hired one of their graduates (especially an in-state student), you were getting a smart and ambitious employee. This contract is now broken. The signal doesn't work anymore. When the world updates for this fact, things get worse for them: out-of-state students will be less likely to want to pay the tuition, employers will be more skeptical, and they will have a harder time getting the best talent. This is a negative feedback loop. It's weird that this happened because organizations are usually much more self-preserving. Universities live and die by their reputations. Perhaps they thought that dropping the SAT and (this is the subtext) admitting students quasi-randomly would gain them political brownie points, but to what end? Looking back: what was the point of all this?
(2) The SAT was the final load-bearing beam in this entire system. High school grades used to mean something, but grade inflation has wiped this out. Application essays? A whole industry of ghostwriters and now AI has winnowed the signal to zero. Teacher recommendations? When they matter so disproportionately much, they'll be bought and paid for. (The failure pattern is the same: much like how the universities have sacrificed their long-term credibility for short-term gain, I'd wager that many schools and teachers have done the same.) Parents used to defer to teachers and schools as experts, but the competitive environment has made parents become forcefully involved -- threatening, cajoling, bribing to get their students ahead. Schools never had the resources to defend themselves against this. Many people -- especially those below the SAT median -- probably thought that they would be better-off in a world of no tests, that they'd be able to get some relative advantage. Nobody would know they're in the 30th percentile, and maybe they could sneak by and pass for 80th. That may have been so in the short term, but the price is becoming clear now: the whole system is broken. (This is frequently the case when people try to turn fair games into rigged or opaque ones: the people who think they're going to win because of their new advantage tend not to see the whole picture, and will overestimate their expected position in the new world.)
Maybe you were an activist parent and managed to help force the UCs to get rid of standardized testing. And maybe your low-test kid got admitted to Berkeley. And maybe they even graduated with a 4.0. But you can't keep stacking the Ponzi scheme forever, eventually you get the reality test: they can't get a job and now you're stuck holding the bag on the student debt. A pointless waste."

Meme - el gato malo @boriquagato: "the university of california dropped the SAT and the preparedness of STEM freshmen plummeted so precipitously that they were having to reteach middle school math. and from this you learn "we should drop the MCAT from med school?" this certainly seems likely to improve the diversity of poor medical outcomes..."
"Removing the MCAT Could Improve Diversity in Medicine I Opinion. TYLER HARVEY, PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCHER AND HEALTH EQUITY SCHOLAR"

Neetu Arnold on X - " Humanities professors unite w/ STEM faculty, demanding the University of California reinstate the SAT “We call for the UC Academic Senate and the UC Regents to give up the failed experiment of the last 6 years & return to including both the math & the verbal reasoning components of SAT/ACT as part of undergraduate admissions”"

Los Angeles Times on X - "UC Davis favored less qualified Black, Latino med school applicants, Justice Department claims"
i/o on X - ""claims" There has not been, to my knowledge, a single reasonably selective major university in the US in over a half-century that has admitted black applicants who were, on average, as academically qualified (measured by SAT/GPA) as white applicants. Not one."

Steve McGuire on X - "Columbia University has reinstated standardized testing for admissions — the last Ivy League school to do it. “Through a multi-year faculty review, it was determined that test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success.”"
Werner Zagrebbi on X - "Columbia had justified keeping test-optional with an unpublished study concluding that the policy "did not lead to a diminishment of the academic performance of admitted classes or the academic success of enrolled students"—sureeee! GPA-wise, non-submitters as a group correspond to the bottom 3% of the submitter distribution. About time."

Holistic Admissions Criteria Favor the Rich - "while it is true that children from the richest families have better academic qualifications than the population overall, it is not true that this fully explains their greater representation in the top universities. After controlling for test scores, the richest kids are admitted at more than twice the rate as the population overall. Notably, this admissions boost is found among the 12 Ivy-Plus schools analyzed in the study, but not at flagship public universities. Despite what some think, the overrepresentation of the rich at the top universities is not driven solely or even primarily by legacy preferences. According to the paper, after controlling for test scores, legacy preferences explain about 30 percent of the surplus rich attendees, while higher application rates, higher matriculation rates, better nonacademic credentials, and athlete preferences explain the remaining 70 percent. If you take application rates and matriculation rates out of the equation, leaving only the factors related to how universities make admissions decisions, legacy preferences account for 46 percent of the surplus rich attendees while better nonacademic credentials account for 30 percent, and athlete preferences account for the remaining 24 percent. A debate has raged for many years about how much weight to put on test scores versus grades and nonacademic factors. One popular view that has emerged on the left is that test scores should be augmented, if not entirely replaced, by more holistic considerations like personal statements, extracurricular activities, recommendations, and things of that nature. This view appears to be primarily motivated by the belief that such augmentation will benefit kids from poorer families. The alternative view is that these holistic considerations actually favor the rich more because the rich will tend to accumulate better recommendations, more extracurricular activities, and even better grades because they have more information and are more strategic about preparing a college resume. This study suggests that the alternative view is the correct one. When comparing students with similar test scores, every other consideration — including academic ratings (grades), non-academic ratings (extracurriculars), guidance counselor recommendations, and teacher recommendations — favors the rich, with extracurriculars and recommendations especially favoring the rich. If the goal is to eliminate the extent to which rich kids are overrepresented at top universities relative to their test scores, the study points to the existence of some fairly straightforward ways to do so. Legacy and athlete preferences can be zapped immediately. Non-academic factors like recommendations and extracurriculars could be hugely down-weighted or eliminated entirely. Other targeted encouragement could increase the application and matriculation rates of the non-rich. But this is really not the goal of top universities. These schools already have vastly more qualified applicants than they have seats. If they wanted to create classes that were more socioeconomically balanced, they could already do so from their current applicant pool. They choose not to because their goal is, in part, to run the nation's elite families through their institutions in order to increase their endowments and power in society... many people seem to be interested in these institutions because they think that they are important pieces of our higher education system when that just is not the case. According to the study, the 12 Ivy-Plus schools have an average admissions class of 1,650 and admit around 157 more rich kid than they ought to based on test scores alone. This means that, between these schools, there are around 1,884 seats being misallocated to the rich every year. By comparison, around 4 million kids are admitted at undergraduate institutions in a given year. The kids who are elbowed out by the 1,884 non-deserving rich kids still attend college, just at a 98th percentile institution, not a 99th percentile institution. The quality of the educational services they receive does not differ, though the prestige, status, and career opportunities made available by their institution does."
Clearly, since we know that standardised test scores just reflect socio-economic status, the solution is to let people in by a lottery

A Personal Case for College Admissions Exams - "Expensive test preparation basically consists of taking practice exams and then reviewing what you got wrong. This can be done inexpensively on your own and it's not clear that it actually increases scores all that much... Low-income kids are underrepresented at the top of the test-score distribution just as they are underrepresented at the top of pretty much any other indicator of educational attainment and academic ability. Being poor is disadvantageous in a lot of ways when it comes to excelling academically. But the top of the test-score distribution is not completely devoid of low-income kids. There are fewer of them than there would be in a random draw, but they do exist. For those kids in particular, the test is often the best and sometimes only way that they can prove their abilities and show that they actually are more capable than their richer peers... There is a reason why the scandals surrounding the SAT and ACT generally take the form of rich people paying a ringer to fraudulently take the test for their kid. It's because dim rich kids can't outcompete brighter poor kids in that specific arena."

Tyler Austin Harper on X - "I go back and forth re standardized tests, but like Matt I benefited greatly from the SAT/GRE as a working class kid. The rich are great at throwing money at every element of the admissions process, but it’s probably right that SATs are the most privilege-proof of the criteria."
Steve Sailer on X - "We need to invest in making the SAT/ACT more Tiger Mother-proof. There's evidence that the SAT before they started fiddling with it in 1995 was much better than it is now. Practically every change made since then to benefit the Diverse has instead rewarded Asian test preppers:"
Charles Murray on X - "More precisely, it rewarded systematic test prep, period, and it turns out that the people who work the hardest on test prep are Asian students and the white children of the affluent who want to get into elite schools. Want to know what the hardest-to-prep-for kind of question is? Analogies. Vocabulary is a close second. Yes, you can try to memorize vocabulary lists, but the real edge goes to young people who reflexively try to figure out what an unfamiliar word means when they encounter one. It's a strong signal of...you guessed it...cognitive ability. The College Board dropped both analogies and vocabulary."

Progressivism and the police - "In 2021, the Metropolitan Police recruited new officer, PC Cliff Mitchell, who they knew had previously been accused of raping a child. Part of the reason he was able to slip through vetting was because of the colour of his skin. Mitchell would later be convicted of 13 counts of rape, including six against a child... Mitchell was far from the only beneficiary. Of the recruits whose cases were reviewed and had their original vetting decision overturned, more than a fifth went on to commit misconduct or be accused of a criminal offence... there are only really two options at play: either the Met believes their vetting officers are racists, or the force is willing to lower its standards for ethnic minority recruits. Which is it? In a sign that this was not an aberration confined to the Met, a document issued jointly by the Home Office, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council in September 2021 pronounced the Panel to be “good practice”... In the decade following the Macpherson report, progressivism within policing progressed relatively slowly... It was the arrival in 2010 of the Conservative-led coalition government which placed rocket boosters under the diversity, equality and inclusion agenda within policing. Keen to present themselves as no longer the “nasty party”, with David Cameron having advocated a more loving approach to youthful miscreants in 2006... It was David Lammy’s review which would later lead to two-tier sentencing proposals that would have made it less likely for certain “disadvantaged” groups to be given a prison sentence after being convicted of a crime. As prime minister, Theresa May launched a government audit to “tackle racial disparities in public service outcomes”. The announcement included reference to her project as Home Secretary to reduce the number of black people who were stopped and searched by the police. It was also during this period that the institutions that would become the cultural homes of the diversity, equality and inclusion industry within policing were created... Several police forces started to show themselves willing to break the law in the drive to advance the cause. In 2017 an applicant to join Cheshire Police, who was praised following his interview as being particularly “well prepared”, was rejected because he was a white, heterosexual man. The Force claimed the Equality Act 2010, the last hurrah of the Labour government, gave them the right to do so under the “equal merit provisions”. An employment tribunal disagreed, declaring the approach to be unlawful and stating that the force approached the recruitment process with a “radicalness” that was “stark”. Thames Valley Police lost an employment tribunal because in 2022 it had passed over three white officers for promotion in favour of a female ethnic minority officer. One senior officer told another to “make it happen” despite being warned about the risks of not holding a competitive process. It is difficult to believe that these cases are rare exceptions. Such legal rebukes appear to have done little to stymie the careers of those involved. The acting chief constable at the time of the Cheshire case later went on to become the national programme director for the recruitment of 20,000 police officers by Boris Johnson’s government. At least one of the senior officers directly involved in the Thames Valley case has since been promoted. Neither was this isolated to merely internal issues — the progressivist agenda expanded into operational policing, too. The growth in the recording of Non-Crime Hate Incidents, which led to the police vigorously investigating incidents which Parliament had not prohibited whilst apparently ignoring burglaries and shoplifting, is perverse but was just one of the consequences of the new doctrine. Similarly, embedding in policing practice the prioritisation of certain “communities” above a focus on serving the wider public — with the secretive consultation of “community leaders” considered sine qua non in the planning of any operational police activity — was no less malignant. The recent West Midlands Police–Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal, which led to the departure of the force’s chief constable, demonstrates the disastrous consequences of such an approach... Post-BLM policing represents the ultimate victory of progressivism over any vestige of British policing’s traditions of impartiality and acting “without fear or favour”. It applies in every domain of policing — including who gets recruited, promoted, searched, arrested, prosecuted or consulted. No longer is diversity merely one consideration amongst several. Any disproportionality is considered evidence of discrimination. In some cases, it appears the pre-eminence of those from “under-represented” groups, whatever the impact, is considered a moral imperative. Any failure to demonstrate sufficiently enthusiastic levels of “allyship” by those in policing is deemed proof of an individual’s personal, and potentially racist, deficiency. There is little room for dissent, with those in policing who are ambitious to progress knowing they must acquiesce to the new rituals. At the heart of determining what is legitimate in the post-BLM policing world, alongside many of the most corrosive developments of the last two decades, are policing’s human resources departments. Detached from the realities of the operational frontline yet steeped in the doctrines of diversity, equality and inclusion these bureaucrats have become the internal arbiters of the “right values”. The diversity, equality and inclusion industry promised a fairer form of policing. What it has delivered is a weaker one. It can be seen on our high streets and in our villages, towns and cities that we now have a police force that is less confident, less capable and less trusted by the public... Most police chiefs over the last three decades have been one of a combination of enthusiastic supporters, sycophantic careerists or so weak in their opposition to the progressivist cult as to be irrelevant. The police do not exist to manage “community cohesion” or to perfectly represent society. They exist to protect it by impartial service to, and enforcement of, the law."
We are still told that the Tories were right wing and that DEI is to ensure anyone who is not a straight white man can get a job

Lydia Moynihan on X - "SCOOP: Woman who emptied Knicks trashcan on street— then stole it — fired from JPMorgan Chase, was DEI exec"
Matt Walsh on X - "Well obviously. One look at this woman and you knew there were only three options: unemployed, DEI executive, or government employee. She was the second, now she’ll be the first, soon she’ll probably be the third."
Matthew Williams on X - "She's a DEI exec, this is literally her job on a civilizational level."

Scott Robertson on X - "Carney: Canada is a mosaic, not a melting pot. And this is the distinction that matters. Because a mosaic doesn't dissolve or blend its pieces. Each is stitched to each and all the pieces hold all. And the beauty is in the arrangement, not in the blending."
Simen on X - "I hope people realize that this particular conception of multiculturalism, which has become predominant in the West as of late, is completely utopian. In fact, it is the latest great Utopian project to come out of the West (joining a long line of past failed schemes). First off, the analogy is flawed. A mosaic is the product of top-down work, not bottom-up spontaneous order from cultural anarchy. (This is important). Secondly, it is in the nature of things for people to blend together, and so the only way to preserve some “mosaic” fantasy is by reifying and propping up tribal delineations. Of course ethnic identity politics does some of this (as we’ve seen in the last decades). But to sustain it longer you need to reproduce something à la the Ottoman millet system (only woke). There are of course signs of such things going on, not just with extra-official religious courts, but by officially sanctioned and enshrined discrimination. Remember that the heart of Kendian Anti-Racism, which we saw guided British police into the Nowak case, is that to be “blind” to ethnic identities and treat people the same is bad. Hence you need to treat groups differently to have “equity”. But how is this working out? Does Britain look very stable? Meanwhile, the populist right — the reaction to this project — is surging like a tide across Europe. John Gray is good on this. Now, the entire idea is clearly a misunderstanding of the American project. America assimilates better than any nation on earth. Any particularism is as shallow as a puddle. There’s a reason America is the only great multicultural democracy to succeed, and that is because it assimilates intensely. Its “cultures” (except African American culture) are merely accessories. Irish Americans or Italian Americans are just American, which is obvious when they visit Ireland or Italy. The idea of turning dusty old nation-states, that have undergone centuries of nationalistic development, into a fantasy picture of New York City is clearly extremely… ambitious. It is also probably a liberal fantasy picture of imperial cosmopolitanism, but as indicated with the Ottoman example, this doesn’t work with liberalism. It’s amazing that a mere 30 years after Yugoslavia imploded into sectarian violence, the idea has suddenly become to build Yugoslavia from scratch, on steroids, only somehow make it work this time. “If only they were liberal and progressive like us, everyone would surely live in harmony!”. And bear in mind Yugoslavia at least had the idea of a unifying pan-nationalism. Mosaic multiculturalism has nothing, except the empty phrase “our values”. So to conclude, this project is intensely utopian, and I suspect it will turn out like all utopian projects, very badly. Then the Western elite and intellectuals will learn nothing, and it’s on to a new utopian project. This is what happens when you don’t know your own history of ideas."
Simen on X - "Partially I also think it’s because these imbeciles confuse multi-racial with multi-cultural. You can easily have a multiracial country through liberal nationalism, without it being “multicultural” in this utopian sense. Also, I am convinced most of these people envision multiculturalism as “more food”. I remember a classic NYT report from a terror attack where it said “the street was famous for its rich restaurant diversity” or whatever."

Tolerance of Islamism in Canada threatens LGBT rights

2026-09-08T09:23:00.000+08:00

Adam Zivo: Tolerance of Islamism in Canada threatens LGBT rights | National Post
The hostility many immigrants feel towards LGBT people is neither an abstract nor trivial problem

The greatest threat to LGBT rights in the West is not the “far right,” as some claim, but rather Islamism and insufficient emphasis on shared values. Yet, many progressives, including “queer” activists, refuse to acknowledge this reality and are inadvertently throwing gender and sexual minorities under the bus.

It should be intuitively obvious that when large numbers of immigrants arrive from largely homophobic countries, without being pressured to adopt Canadian values, they will often retain their homeland’s backwards prejudices. This is especially true if they live within ethnic ghettos that allow them to maintain parallel societies and resist integration.

There is ample data substantiating this hypothesis throughout the West, with Canadian research going as far back as the mid 2000s. However, studies into immigrant and Muslim homophobia largely dried up after 2020, when it became increasingly taboo to raise these kinds of social critiques.

One pioneering 2006 study, published by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, found that recent Canadian immigrants were 2.5 times more likely than native-born citizens to object to having homosexuals as neighbours (33.9 versus 13.3 per cent, respectively). Another 2019 poll conducted by Research Co. similarly found that, while 71 per cent of European-Canadians supported same sex marriage, approval was much lower among East Asians and South Asians (44 and 42 per cent, respectively).

Meanwhile, a 2013 study published in Comparative Migration Studies, which analyzed polling data gathered two years earlier, found that, compared to the overall population, Muslim Canadians were three times less likely to support same-sex marriage (21 vs 63 per cent), and roughly four times more likely to oppose any recognition of same-sex relationships (47 vs 12 per cent).

Another 2016 poll conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research found that only 36 per cent of Canadian Muslims believed that homosexuality should be accepted by society, while 43 per cent did not. For context: a 2013 poll conducted by the same institute found that 80 per cent of all Canadians believed society should accept homosexuality, with only 14 per cent opposed.

More recently, Canada’s 2025 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces found that support for gender nonconformity was noticeably lower among citizens who were foreign born, Arab, Black or Chinese.

European and American researchers have discovered similar trends in their own regions.

A 2016 poll by ICM Research infamously found that, within Britain, 52 per cent of Muslims believed that homosexuality should be illegal in the country — a shocking number, especially considering that only five per cent of the general population felt the same way.

Another 2022 study, published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, examined data gathered from 18,058 students in four European countries (Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands) between 2010 and 2013. They concluded that ethnic minorities were more homophobic than general society, especially if they were Muslim.

A 2021 study published by Migration Studies, another peer-reviewed academic journal, analyzed survey data from thousands of Norway’s secondary students in 2016, and found that homophobia was markedly higher among those with Middle Eastern or African parents, followed by those with Balkan parents. Almost a third of students with Pakistani parents believed that homosexuality is “never acceptable,” for example, while only 2.8 per cent of students with Norwegian parents felt similarly.

In the United States, the 2025 American Values survey found that only 37 per cent of Muslim respondents supported same-sex marriage, as opposed to 65 per cent of the general population, suggesting that the chasm between attitudes has not closed in recent years.

While some of these aforementioned studies found that immigrants and Muslims become more accepting of homosexuality over time, this was consistently described as a slow process that generally does not lead to an alignment with majoritarian values.

The hostility many immigrants and Muslims feel towards LGBT people is neither an abstract nor trivial problem, because it occasionally leads to violence.

The 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting, wherein an American Islamist killed 49 people at a gay club, is considered a seminal example, even if some later disputed whether the assailant was driven by homophobia. Unfortunately, it appeared to mark the beginning of a trend.

In 2022, an Iranian-born Norwegian man, described by police as a radical Islamist, committed a mass shooting at an Oslo gay bar, killing two and injuring 25 others. The next year, Austrian police arrested three Islamists who, having pledged loyalty to the Islamic State (IS), were plotting a jihadist attack against Vienna Pride. And then, in 2024, American officials warned that terrorists, instigated by IS, were possibly planning attacks on Pride events worldwide.

Earlier this year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that networks of young Muslim men — including many Islamic State sympathizers — have been fuelling a wave of anti-LGBT violence throughout the country. In at least 36 prosecuted cases, these individuals used dating apps to lure gay men into secluded areas, then brutally assaulted and humiliated them on camera.

In 2024, Berlin’s police chief made international headlines when she cautioned gay people (and Jews) to “be vigilant” when traversing certain Arab-majority neighbourhoods, due to high levels of support for Islamist terror groups. In a recent Swiss news story, a gay couple explained that they were leaving Berlin, their home of several decades, due to growing Islamist hostility, and said that a local Muslim had told them: “It’s good that you’re leaving, Islam will soon rule here.”

It’s clear that, when it comes to LGBT rights, integration efforts throughout the west need to be strengthened. This doesn’t mean that anyone should be coerced into accepting particularly contentious ideas (e.g. gender ideology), but it is reasonable to demand support for basic human rights — no misguided attachment to “multiculturalism” can negate this social responsibility or excuse barbarism.

Further, there needs to be more research on immigrant- and Muslim-driven homophobia, especially given the lack of recent data in Canada. It cannot be taboo to discuss or investigate this problem, which cannot be addressed until it is properly understood.

Unfortunately, many LGBT activists have chosen to remain wilfully blind, and have dismissed these concerns as “homonationalism.” The aforementioned surge in Australian assaults, for example, has been conspicuously ignored by major gay media outlets that otherwise cover hate crimes with great enthusiasm (especially those associated with Western conservative politics).

For many progressives and gay activists, homophobia isn’t worth discussing if the perpetrator does not fit their preferred profile.

The homophobic folly of banning ‘conversion therapy’

2026-09-07T17:08:00.000+08:00

A former recipient and opponent of conversion therapy explains how trans mania is the true conversion therapy and homophobic, gives another example of how trans mania took over the gay rights movement (with lies about the author, to boot) and documents another instance of the slippery slope between gay rights and trans mania:

The homophobic folly of banning ‘conversion therapy’ - spiked

"If the goal of legal bans on so-called conversion therapy – or in Britain’s case, a ban on ‘conversion practices’ – is to help end harmful treatments of same-sex attracted people, then these bans are not only failing, they are doing something far worse. They are codifying into law a new form of conversion therapy that medicalises away the same-sex attraction of minors before they have even matured into adult gay people.

I say this with the greatest remorse, because I advocated for these bans for years. I survived six years of psychiatric conversion therapy in the early 1990s. Since the late 1990s I used my story to fight for legal protections for gays and lesbians – and later, I thought, for trans people, too. I helped initiate Canada’s first municipal conversion-therapy ban in Vancouver in 2018 and testified before parliament in support of a national ban (Bill C-4) that became law in 2022. I believed these laws were necessary and just. But now I want to finally set the record straight...

There were early signposts that the movement to end ‘treatments’ of gay people was already heading in a direction I could never have imagined. One of the first occurred in 2006, while I was drafting ‘query letters’ for my memoir. These letters are pitches to publishers, in which writers routinely identify the likely readership for their book. I knew that gay, lesbian, and bisexual readers, among others, would be interested, so I was prepared to use the familiar acronym ‘LGB’. But then I noticed the letter ‘T’ beginning to appear in media and activist acronyms, turning ‘LGB’ into ‘LGBT’. I still understood ‘T’ to primarily mean ‘transexuals’, or those with profound, lifelong dysphoria with their sexed bodies – the sense of having been ‘born in the wrong body’. I knew this had nothing to do with sexual orientation, but with a sense of one’s ‘gender’. Like them, I had lived through a degree of body dysphoria as a child, something common among many who later grow up gay. The broader culture seemed to be conflating the two without much discussion or distinction. My unease with the conflation was personal. I could still recall how my psychiatrist had mistakenly believed that by changing my gender behaviour – what would later be called ‘gender expression’ – by decreasing my femininity and strengthening my masculinity, he could somehow awaken my dormant heterosexuality.

Ultimately, because my focus in 2006 was on ending all conversion treatments, I decided to include the full ‘LGBT’ acronym when naming the potential readership in my pitches. I pushed aside the twinge of discomfort I felt and marched forward with my goal: to use my story to help prevent others from enduring similar abuse.

A decade later, the conflation of sexual orientation and gender accelerated dramatically. In 2015, following the suicide of a 17-year-old ‘transgender youth’ (born male) who had been sent to Christian-based conversion therapy, US president Barack Obama called for an end to conversion therapy for both gay and transgender youth. Backed by the likes of LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, Obama’s intervention helped cement the two issues together in the public mind.

In late 2016, I sold my book to a press in California, with publication scheduled for the following summer. In anticipation, I began reaching out more broadly...

At that time, I still viewed ‘transgender youth’ primarily as kids who did not conform to traditional expectations for their birth sex – what would later be called gender-nonconforming. They were struggling with societal restrictions on expression, the same kind my psychiatrist had tried to ‘correct’. Many of them, I believed, would likely have grown up gay or lesbian if simply left alone.

My book was published on 17 May 2017. A few months later, the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee invited me to present my case at Vancouver City Hall. When the chair asked everyone to introduce themselves with their ‘preferred pronouns’, I was caught off guard. In 1980s dance clubs, nearly everyone bent gender norms, yet no one questioned their birth sex...

Another indication that the movement against conversion therapy was potentially heading down a dangerous path arrived in May 2018. At a library event to promote my book, I had arranged for trans activist Morgane Oger to interview me. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Oger about ‘trans surgeries on minors’. This was the first time I had heard the issue raised publicly. Oger responded that she was ‘not aware’ such surgeries were performed on minors. When the man pressed further, calling it ‘torture’, Oger grew defensive and evasive. The exchange left me confused and chilled. I had never heard of these kinds of treatments on minors. I told myself to stay focussed on my own story as a gay man – and on ending all treatments of anyone, regardless of age...

I travelled to Calgary for a panel discussion on their recently proposed municipal ban on conversion therapy. One of the other panelists was Kristopher Wells, then an associate professor at MacEwan University. Before the event, Wells took a call from community members concerned that the ban might lead to more minors undergoing ‘gender transitions’. On speakerphone in the boardroom, he responded firmly and repeatedly: ‘Minors do not go through gender transitions.’ I believed him.

Bill S-202 did not advance past first reading. However, on 9 March 2020 (the same week Canada began shutting down schools and non-essential businesses due to Covid-19), the federal government introduced Bill C-8, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). The bill would have made it illegal to force someone into conversion therapy, to subject a minor to it, or to advertise or profit from it. But for adults, the only prohibition was ‘forced’ conversion therapy, implying that a competent adult could consent.

It was around this time that media and online coverage of gender identity exploded. Almost overnight, the conversation around gender seemed to shift dramatically. Definitions of sex and gender became increasingly confusing. What I had long understood as ‘trans’ – a condition involving persistent gender dysphoria in adults that might, after careful evaluation, lead to medical transition – was now being reframed as simple self-identification at any age, including for minors.

I had heard the term ‘affirmative care’ before and assumed it simply meant affirming the existence of gay and trans people. Now I understood it meant fast-tracking minors toward ‘gender-affirmative care’ – puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and possible surgeries – with little or no gatekeeping. None of this made any sense to me, especially when self-identification could lead to permanent medical alteration of healthy bodies.

New terms and ideas that contradicted long-accepted scientific facts flooded the discourse. I kept encountering the slogan ‘trans women are real women’ repeated like a mantra, claims that biological sex was a spectrum or ‘assigned’ at birth, and that gender identity superseded biological reality. The more I watched and listened, my disorientation intensified. I wondered if I was missing something or if my own thinking was just faulty...

By late March, writing keynotes for my upcoming ‘LGBTQ’ events had become difficult. I no longer knew how to speak at gatherings that prominently featured the ‘T’. I wanted to remain true to what I had believed, stated and written for decades, but I could not support ‘gender-affirmative care’ for minors or self-identification leading to irreversible medical interventions. I was relieved when, in April 2020, all my speaking engagements were cancelled due to Covid travel restrictions.

The world outside felt like it was coming undone. The lockdowns brought isolation and fear. I worried daily about my 96-year-old mother. On 25 May, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, sparking riots and worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. The only unifying theme amid it all – the rise of gender ideology and the chaos in the streets – was a sense of everything coming apart.

My reading intensified that summer. Prominent voices in major outlets were openly questioning the very existence of a binary biological sex. Among the most cited were Anne Fausto-Sterling’s ‘Why Sex is Not Binary’ in the New York Times, Claire Ainsworth’s ‘Sex Redefined’ in Scientific American, Kim Elsesser’s ‘The Myth of Biological Sex’ in Forbes, and Allison Whitten’s ‘Untangling Gender and Sex in Humans’ in Discover. These pieces argued that thinking of sex as only male and female was overly ‘simplistic’, citing examples like intersex conditions, brain-sex differences, chromosomal variations, gene mutations and hormone irregularities. Claims that sex was a spectrum or merely ‘assigned’ at birth were everywhere. Encountering these arguments from so-called experts left me increasingly disoriented and unsettled...

As 2021 began, I turned to longer reading to understand the rapidly evolving claims around gender and ‘trans’ identities. I had bought Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage when it came out in 2020, but left it on my shelf for months, too nervous to open it. When I finally did early that year, it validated what I had already suspected. Shrier documented the dramatic rise in young people – especially natal females – self-identifying as transgender, sometimes as young as pre-pubescent children. In the UK alone, referrals for gender treatments among girls had risen by over 4,000 per cent between 2009 and 2018. Once labelled trans, minors were entitled to immediate ‘gender-affirmative care’ based solely on self-identification, with no gatekeeping or exploration of underlying issues. Suicide threats were routinely used as leverage against concerned parents. Any kind of questioning or exploratory therapy was now labelled ‘conversion therapy’.

Shrier laid bare the medical reality behind the euphemism: ‘puberty blockers’ chemically castrated minors, with risks including osteoporosis, loss of sexual function and near-certain infertility. Nearly all who started blockers proceeded to cross-sex hormones, which carried lifelong consequences including cardiovascular disease and cancer risks. Surgical interventions – mastectomies on healthy adolescent girls, phalloplasties, vaginoplasties – often resulted in severe complications, chronic pain and multiple revision surgeries. The more I read, the clearer it became that in no other field of medicine were patients, especially minors, allowed to self-diagnose and prescribe their own treatments.

Reading about the scale and speed of medical interventions on young females left me stunned. I wondered whether the sudden surge in girls identifying as trans and seeking to alter their bodies was a new manifestation of a much older pattern of female self-harm. I had engaged in self-harm myself during my youth as a symptom of earlier trauma and deep self-loathing toward my body during puberty. Questions like these led me to Marilee Strong’s 1998 book, A Bright Red Scream, which explored self-mutilation as a language of unbearable inner pain. The young females Shrier described – suddenly identifying as trans and pursuing hormones and various forms of surgical ‘cutting’ (mastectomies on healthy breasts, and in some cases phalloplasties) – seemed to belong on the same continuum as Strong’s ‘needle girls’ (young women in the 1880s who injured themselves by puncturing their flesh with needles) and ‘wrist-slashers’ (sudden waves of young women in the 1960s in Philadelphia and later in Massachusetts who cut their wrists). It seemed to me that behaviour once understood as pathological was now being rebranded as progressive ‘gender-affirmative care’, with surgeons and doctors doing the cutting on behalf of young women.

The same pattern was devastating young males as well. Many gender-nonconforming boys who would likely have grown up gay were being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Stories from male detransitioners – including that of Yarden Silveira, who transitioned at 15, underwent vaginoplasty at 19, suffered severe complications, expressed profound regret, and died by suicide at 23 in May 2021 – showed the medicalisation was not limited to natal females.

Reading evolutionary biologists such as Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, and Colin Wright in 2021 finally helped me articulate, even to myself, the simple, binary nature of sex – definable by gametes (small or sperm for males, large or eggs for females). Secondary characteristics and sex-determination systems (such as chromosomes) were consequences of sex, not its definition. Exceptions did not erase the binary. These and other sources confirmed what should have been basic: there are only two sexes; biological sex did not exist on a spectrum. Gender (behaviour, roles, norms) was far more variable, but gender was not the same as sex.

Kathleen Stock’s 2021 book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, helped clarify how the word ‘gender’ itself had shifted over time into four incompatible meanings – from a simple synonym for biological sex to a purely psychological sense of self-identification. The same word was now being used for entirely different concepts, creating widespread confusion. The word ‘trans’ had changed meaning just as dramatically. What I had understood in 2017 or earlier was no longer how it was understood in 2020 and beyond. Even my own earlier public statements supporting ‘trans youth’ could now be misinterpreted.

I began reflecting on my own past in a different light. The similarities between many of today’s ‘trans’-identified youth and the child I had been struck me forcefully. So-called trans healthcare was not just medicalisation, but medicalisation rooted in stereotypes: a feminine boy was now told he was probably a girl; a masculine girl was told she was probably a boy. The endless natural variations of male and female behaviour – including the well-documented link between childhood gender nonconformity and later same-sex attraction – were being pathologised and ‘fixed’ with hormones and surgery. Children with histories of trauma, like my own sexual abuse and body hatred during puberty, were being told their distress was gender dysphoria rather than receiving help for the underlying pain. If I had come of age more recently, I could easily have been labelled trans and set on a path of puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries.

Noah called before summer and asked me to join a small group of advocates working on new provincial legislation to ban conversion therapy in British Columbia. An academic called Florence Ashley, who I had participated with on a panel discussion a few years prior, would be drafting the bill, Noah said. When he sent me the draft, I saw Ashley had redefined sexual orientation as attraction to the ‘same gender’ or ‘opposite gender’, removing biological sex entirely. In meetings I argued that this made no sense for a law intended to protect gay people, whose orientation is based on same-sex attraction.

Between meetings, I called another group member, a gay man in his thirties. He repeated that he didn’t have an issue with the change. I asked if he had any issue dating someone who identified as a ‘trans man’. Without hesitation, he said he had no issue with it. I was stunned. I had always known that ‘trans men’ were still just biological females (and if attracted to men, were then also heterosexual), the same way that I never thought trans women were real women. They were biological males. How could someone be gay while being open to dating and sleeping with a biological female?

When I met continued resistance in the group, I withdrew. I supported bans on conversion therapy, but I had no interest in debating why erasing sexual attraction from the definition of sexual orientation was a bad idea. If they couldn’t see it, I was not going to try to explain it.

As 2021 wore on, my horror at what I was continuing to learn grew tenfold. Many nights I lay awake, ruminating on how children were being sexualised under the banner of ‘trans healthcare’, which to me looked like mutilation straight out of Frankenstein. If minors could consent to surgeries on their sex organs, what would stop arguments for minors consenting to sex with adults? This should have alarmed everyone, not just survivors of childhood sexual abuse. For gender-nonconforming minors who would likely have grown up gay, ‘gender-affirmative care’ was clearly a new form of conversion therapy – medicalising their bodies and appearance to match an internal feeling now called an ‘identity’. This approach felt completely antithetical to the earlier women’s and gay-rights movements, which had fought to free people from rigid sex stereotypes rather than reinforce them through medical intervention.

What I still did not fully see was how even the term ‘conversion therapy’ itself had become part of the problem. When I first began speaking out in the 1990s, I never reduced my experiences to a catch-all phrase. I simply described what had been done to me – drugs, ketamine injections, primal-scream sessions, aversion techniques – and why: to change me from homosexual to heterosexual. Later, when the terms ‘reparative’ and then ‘conversion therapy’ gained widespread use, I adopted them too, although somewhat nervously. Once a single phrase was used to describe these treatments, its meaning expanded dramatically—and so did the bans meant to end them. Those bans shifted from ending treatments aimed at changing sexual orientation to protecting, affirming, and enabling any claimed gender identity. In effect, a term originally intended to stop one form of intervention was stretched and inverted to enable another – ‘gender-affirmative care’.

Following a snap Canadian federal election in September 2021, the government introduced Bill C-4, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). On 1 December 2021, Bill C-4 was fast-tracked and passed unanimously in the House of Commons, which was virtually unheard of. On 7 December, the Senate also passed it unanimously, and on 8 December, it received royal assent and became law. I watched much of the process live, alone in my apartment.

In the days that followed I felt nothing – no excitement, no sense of victory. A few long-time advocates, including Noah, sent brief, polite congratulations. I didn’t reply. By then I sensed what the new law would unleash, but I could not yet fully sort it out in my head. The feeling of dread was palpable.

Beginning in January 2022, the full implications of the new law started to become painfully clear. By including ‘gender identity’ in the protected categories and providing an exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, the legislation effectively criminalised attempts to change sexual orientation while codifying and protecting medical transition for anyone claiming a gender identity. What I had understood for decades as conversion therapy had now been broadened to include any challenge to a person’s belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. The law I had fought for had, in practice, legalised what I saw as a new and more invasive form of conversion therapy.

Conversion therapy for sexual orientation historically meant attempts to change same-sex attraction – through lobotomies, drugs, aversion techniques or the kind of psychiatric regime I endured. The goal was to make someone heterosexual, or at least to silence their same-sex attractions.

Conversion therapy for gender identity worked in the opposite direction. By banning challenges to a claimed gender identity, the law effectively removed barriers to ‘gender-affirmative care’ – social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and in some cases surgery. What was called a ban on conversion therapy for gender identity actually increased access to medical treatments that could sterilise, impair sexual function, weaken bones and create lifelong dependence. It facilitated conversion therapy on sexual orientation.

The irony was stark. Youth who might otherwise have grown up gay or lesbian were now being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Because biological sex cannot be changed, it would be more accurate to say they had become mutilated homosexuals. Helen Joyce, in her 2021 book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, described these treatments as ‘postmodern gay conversion therapy’. The ban – and others like it that bundled sexual orientation with gender identity – had not ended conversion therapy. It had simply given it a legal sanction under a new name.

This realisation hit harder when I remembered the 2018 Vancouver City Council debate. Across hours of presentations and discussion, the focus was almost entirely on changing homosexuality. There was almost no meaningful reference to ‘gender identity’, even though the final bylaw bundled both together. Most people – including the politicians who passed the law – likely did not foresee how that conflation would play out. I had strongly advocated for these bans to apply to all ages, believing even young adults needed protection. What I did not yet see was how that all-ages language, combined with the bundling and the exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, would ultimately put minors at the greatest risk.

In 2022, Florence Ashley’s Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis was published. It was promoted as the first major legal and policy analysis of ‘trans conversion practices’. The foreword, written by Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on Protection from Violence and Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, celebrated Canada’s Bill C-4 as a landmark victory, and spoke exclusively about harms to ‘trans and gender diverse persons’. There was no mention of homosexuality, sexual orientation or conversion therapy against gay people – even though the bill had originally been crafted to protect them.

In the first chapter, Ashley defined ‘trans conversion practices’ as any sustained effort to promote gender identities aligned with one’s ‘sex assigned at birth’ or to discourage behaviours associated with a ‘gender other than the one assigned’. Any questioning of a self-declared trans identity, or hesitation around puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries, was labelled a ‘corrective approach’. I was surprised to see my own name in the index. Ashley referenced me alongside a publicly known trans-identified person, suggesting I had experienced a ‘conversion practice’ as a young adult and had ‘ostensibly consented’.

The claim was false on multiple levels. I am gay, not trans. I had always described my experience as gay conversion therapy (or conversion therapy of my sexual orientation). And in numerous interviews, essays and my book, I had explicitly stated that I never consented to my psychiatrist’s treatment. Ashley’s misrepresentation was especially striking given that we had previously appeared together on a panel and she had told me she was familiar with my work.

Early in the book, Ashley discussed ‘gender-creative’ children (whom she also called ‘gender-variant’, ‘gender-expansive’, or ‘gender-diverse’), noting that they ‘may grow up to be transgender’. At no point did she mention that these same children had historically grown up to be gay or lesbian. She framed historical ideas around gender variance entirely through a modern gender-identity lens. Her omission stood in stark contrast to earlier (and some of the first known) advocates for homosexuals like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who in the 19th century argued for the rights of same-sex attracted people – not to medicalise their bodies.

Ashley’s book was so deeply immersed in a worldview built on falsehoods – about biological sex, about notions of gender and gender identity, about who grows up to be trans vs gay – that even attempting to analyse it felt like speaking in a language that was not real. Ashley made painfully clear how thoroughly the language and logic of conversion therapy had been inverted. Where earlier advocates sought to protect same-sex attracted people from coercive change, today’s gender ideology often medicalised the very children the bans were meant to protect. What began as an effort to end harmful attempts to change sexual orientation had, in practice, enabled a new and more invasive form of conversion under the name of ‘gender-affirmative care’.

After stewing over the ban, Ashley’s book and the growing damage I saw gender ideology inflicting on minors, I finally posted my first public statement on the subject in April 2022. I wrote that I struggled with how conversion-therapy bans had conflated sexual orientation with gender identity, and that the two should never have been bundled together because their developmental trajectories are entirely different.

The response was immediate and hostile. Several users called me hateful. Advocates I had worked closely with on the federal ban called me out online. One long-time collaborator responded publicly within minutes, stating that bans on trans-conversion therapy were ‘every bit as important as bans on conversion therapy for sexual orientation’. His tweet felt like a public rebuke.

In another comment posted days later, I explained why I rejected the label ‘cis’, which was now commonly used as the opposite of ‘trans’. The term presupposed that a person had never struggled with gender dysphoria. As a gay man, I was often lumped into the ‘cis’ category, yet I had experienced significant dysphoria as a child. That discomfort later resolved as I matured and accepted my homosexuality. Like many other gay adults who likely experienced similar dysphoria when young, being called ‘cis’ felt factually incorrect and incoherent to me.

Responses from Florence Ashley and others were swift and critical. One former member of the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee tweeted that I was ‘undoing all that good’ and looking for ‘10 minutes of fame’. Her words stung. The last thing I wanted was fame. What I wanted – what I had always wanted – was to prevent further harm and to end what I now saw as a new form of conversion therapy.

In a Quillette essay published early June 2022, I publicly stated for the first time that combining sexual orientation and gender identity in these bans was a mistake. In a second Quillette essay later that year, I laid out my opposition to many of the core tenets of gender ideology. I rejected the idea that a person could be ‘born in the wrong body’, that biological sex was ‘assigned at birth’, or that a person’s sex could be changed through hormones or surgery. I did not believe gender identities could supplant biological sex, nor did I support ‘gender-affirmative care’, especially for minors. These beliefs were incoherent to me and ultimately erased my gay sexuality. I also rejected the label ‘cis’ as meaningless and the term ‘transphobia’ as so broad and elastic that it now equated simple disagreement or appeals to biological reality with hatred. The pieces drew strong reactions, including from some of the advocates I had worked with for so long.

A short time later, I removed pronouns from my social media profiles. I had previously included ‘he / him’, believing it showed support for trans people (under an older understanding of what it meant to be trans). But I now saw that displaying pronouns implicitly endorsed the newer idea that a person could change their sex or that minors should be affirmed in any self-identified gender.

In the wake of my essays, Noah contacted me directly. What began as a conversation quickly became confrontational. He accused me of spreading hatred, warned that my words could fuel violence, dismissed detransitioners as ‘like ex-gays’, and demanded I change my mind. I ended the call.

Several things became clear. First, many of those I had worked with had assumed we were all on the same side simply because we had fought together to end conversion therapy. We were all supposedly ‘on the left’. This was not true. I was on no one’s side. If I had been perceived as being on the left, it was only because the political left had historically fought for gay rights and free speech. With the rise of gender-identity ideology, the meaning of key terms had shifted dramatically. We had all been using similar language to mean very different things.

Second, the casual dismissal of detransitioners as being ‘like ex-gays’ was deeply misguided. Detransitioners had been labelled (or had identified) as trans, often gone through medical transition, and later realised it was a mistake – sometimes a catastrophic one. Their error was believing they could change their birth sex. In contrast, ‘ex-gays’ had started out same-sex attracted and tried to become heterosexual. Their error was believing they could change their sexual orientation. The lie for detransitioners was that they could change sex; the truth was accepting their natal sex. The lie for ex-gays was that they could change their orientation; the truth was accepting their homosexuality. Birth sex and sexual orientation cannot be changed. For those detransitioners who had transitioned partly to escape emerging homosexuality, their experience was, at root, another form of homophobia.

Over the past few years, I have watched with growing distress as detransitioners recount their traumas and women lose their hard-won, sex-based rights to ‘trans women’ (biological males), and are then penalised for even speaking up. Minors, who lack full agency and are easily influenced, have been the primary focus of this new gender ideology. Instead of conversion treatments imposed on adults who are gay or same-sex attracted, legal conversion-therapy bans now effectively force a different kind of change on minors by medicalising their bodies before they’ve had a chance to grow up and explore their sexuality naturally.

I still find it difficult to reflect on how much happened over so many years – decades of relentless effort, hope, crushing disappointment, public testimony, private pain and endless rewriting. Not to mention the psychiatric treatment I experienced, the consequences of which I still live with every day. Then came the slow, grinding realisation that the very thing I had fought so hard for had unintended consequences I could not have foreseen.

I am profoundly disturbed. I survived a brutal, coercive treatment to try to change my sexual orientation that nearly destroyed me. I poured my story into fighting to protect others from similar abuse – only to slowly realise that the very laws I helped champion were being used, in ways I could never have anticipated, to enable a new and medically sanctioned form of ‘conversion therapy’ on a much larger scale. None of this is simply intellectual regret. It is a deep, existential horror. I fought hard to stop one kind of harm. I never intended to enable another.

This reckoning did not arrive suddenly. Since 2023, I have been quietly working through these questions in a much longer manuscript. It was important for me to see everything laid out in one coherent, chronological document before saying anything of substance publicly. My current position is not a change of heart; it is more a statement of recognition about issues that were shifting almost daily, making them difficult to fully understand at the time. Until now, I was also scared – scared of being called transphobic, bigoted, or hateful, scared of losing friends and support. But children’s lives are at stake.

After two decades of fighting what I believed was the right battle, I am convinced that these laws need to be revisited. Legal bans on so-called conversion therapy, if they remain, should never conflate sexual orientation with gender. Any laws that do should be repealed or amended.

Thirty years ago, I began a fight to protect vulnerable young people like the one I once was. Today I am still fighting for them – only now I understand that the greatest threat is not always the one I once feared. Sometimes it wears a white coat and calls itself affirmation."

Clearly, the author is ignorant and doesn't understand how preventing TRAs from sterilising minors will result in gay people being lynched.

Of course, we are still told that minors do not undergo medical transition, despite the boatloads of evidence that they do.

In any event, even if you want to ban the traditional conception of conversion therapy for adults, this still runs up against the left's usual fetish for patient autonomy and non-interference in decisions made between healthcare providers and informed, consenting adult patients.

Links - 7th September 2026 (General Wokeness)

2026-09-07T13:08:00.000+08:00

Threads - "I do not understand the flippant morality of conservatives. Apparently they need free speech to harass Christine Wonsley, mother of Nolan Wells, but we can’t quote Charlie Kirk word for word without being fired. Apparently they need to protect kids from “the liberal agenda” but not from ped*philes and the Epstein files. Apparently they do not want Sharia law but are okay with a Christian nation where women are controlled, schools have mandatory religion, and citizens are disappeared. Apparently conservatives want a government to be fiscally responsible but they’re okay spending billions for war, Isr*el, ICE, and gold bathrooms. Apparently a movie with violence and language is “destroying family values,” but criticize it, then “you’re weak” and “woke” and “kids are too soft these days.” Apparently DEI means white folks with no credentials but not Black or Muslim with all the credentials. I do not understand conservative morality except that it has no facts, only feelings."
Weird. Left wingers used to be very clear that private companies couldn't violate your free speech. This also shows the left wing playbook - obsess over "credentials" instead of achievements, merit or even simply whether someone is making sense. Because it's easy to just award credentials to undeserving people using DEI and then proclaim they are immune to criticism

Alex Godofsky on X - "There's a certain kind of person who sincerely holds to, roughly, "Woke 1 was crazy, but if you actually said Woke 1 was crazy DURING Woke 1, that's very suspicious"."
Swann Marcus on X - "People get so mad at me for pointing out I was right about literally everything when I said leftist violence in 2020 would cause the homicide rate to skyrocket, destroy urban social order, and cause a pro-policing backlash Whenever I bring up all the people leftists murdered that year I get a lot of "oh, that again? Don't you know those murders were 6 years ago? Who cares about those dead teenagers? Don't you realize all those deaths leftists in 2020 were responsible for have nothing to do with leftist ideology in 2026? They definitely won't kill thousands of people this time!""

Ecological restoration is like ‘gender confirmation surgeries,’ trans river scientist tells Princeton students - "A “queer-trans-feminist river scientist” discussed research grounded in a “queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish” at a recent Princeton University-hosted event titled “Underflows: Queer and Trans Among Rivers.” The featured speaker, Cleo Wölfle Hazard (pictured), is a “queer-trans-feminist river scientist” and assistant professor of equity and environmental justice at University of Washington, Seattle, whose work focuses on “how queer trans feminist thought can transfigure ecological science as it’s used by Indigenous and non-Native practitioners in river management,” according to Wölfle Hazard’s university page. Princeton students enrolled in the environmental studies course “Field Seminar in Regional Environmental Politics” were required to attend, according to Jerry Zee, the professor, who introduced the talk... Wölfle Hazard compared “gender confirmation surgeries” to ecological restoration, arguing transgender bodies are similar to bodies of water. “When I pay my surgeon to cut my penis into a neo-vagina, I am moving toward myself through myself,” Wölfle Hazard said, quoting gender studies theorist Eva Hayward. “What if restoration was the watershed becoming more itself through these different cuts and scars that humans might enact with bulldozers and rerouting channels?” Wölfle Hazard asked... The event drew upon the speaker’s recent book, which explains “why rivers matter for queer and trans life.” The book’s “core argument” is that “in order to become more adept at centering justice, sovereignty, and adaptability, river sciences should engage with queer and trans theory.” The book offered “innovative ways” to “disrupt settler colonialism and new visions for justice in river governance.” Wölfle Hazard began with a land acknowledgement: “[I’m] grateful to be an uninvited guest on Lenape territory here in Princeton.”... “I’m still trying to figure out what I just heard,” one attendee, an environmental engineer who graduated from Princeton, said in the question-and-answer period while asking a question about infusing environmental science with liberal arts. “I’d give it a B-minus,” he told The Fix after the event."

Claire Lehmann on X - "“Intellectual life used to be fun,” Mr. Haidt said. “There’s an emergent community, from center left to center right, of people who feel politically homeless and are recognizing that the big division is no longer between left and right, but between people who are on the extremes, who are humorless and aggressive and deluded by their passion and tribalism, versus the middle 70 percent of the country.”"
"Great quote from @JonHaidt As @jonkay says, the first sign of a cultist is someone who has lost their sense of humour"
Meme - Cathy Young @CathyYoung63: "Indeed. One of the first signs of the rise of toxic "social justice" was the 2013 feminist freakout over this NYT obit (seen as downplaying Bril's achievements rather than using a twist to highlight them). The Times caved to the shriekers and rewrote it."
"She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. "The world's best mom," her son Matthew said. But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits."
Authoritarians have no sense of humour after all.

Meme - "MANILA *flattened in war, with impassive Jeremy Corbyn*
ROTTERDAM *flattened in war, with impassive Jeremy Corbyn*
WARSAW *flattened in war, with impassive Jeremy Corbyn*
HIROSHIMA *flattened in war, with triggered Jeremy Corbyn*
Jeremy Corbyn: "81 years ago, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima - a crime against humanity.""

Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 on X - "‼️JUST IN Canada sending 28 million dollars to South Africa and Rwanda for "gender-responsive Nature-based Solutions" to flooding."
Damn Poilievre wasting money for his by election that could've be used for healthcare!

The Lynchings That Aren't - "I guess that now, with the SPLC potentially sidelined from the business of inciting a race war, Pravda has to pick up some of the slack... Mississippi is now leading the country in turning around the literacy crisis in the black community, but that is not noteworthy to the media. Instead, the fact that black people are being fake-lynched is top of the headlines. It sure sounds bad that three black people have been found hanging from trees in the Southern state, and in human terms it certainly is a tragedy when people die by suicide or get murdered as if they were Canadians seeking healthcare, but none of this is caused by an outbreak of racial hatred from SPLC-funded Nazis or KKK members. More likely, it is a sad case of social contagion, where one incident sparks a series of others in people who are on the edge... The Left is deeply invested in the idea that America is filled with racists always on the edge of murderous outbursts of generalized hatred for minorities, when the fact of the matter is that the recent outburst of racial violence is aimed primarily at Jews and white people, inspired by hate campaigns the left itself promotes. It's now quite common to find leftists celebrating the violent deaths of prominent conservatives, or even screaming on camera about who deserves to be taken out next. While the media cheers it on or spins the story. "

The Lead CNN on X - "Police investigating after a Black woman was found hanging from a tree in Mississippi"
Sean Davis on X - "Her black boyfriend was arrested. You don’t hate CNN enough."

Michael Geist on X - "The replies to my posts about Canadian campus antisemitism read like a live enactment of its findings. The survey found 45% of Jewish students regularly encounter Holocaust denial; the replies pile on. Hate generated by calling out antisemitism overwhelms."

Plans to ban white swimmers from Berlin public pool trigger backlash - "The Volksbühne, a theatre in the city centre, was allocated €300,000 (£255,000) of taxpayers’ money to open a “people’s swimming pool”, which it initially pledged would be “open for all who are seeking to cool down in the increasingly hot Berlin summers”. But the Volksbühne advertised an event scheduled for Friday in which the pool would be open “exclusively to black communities” for six hours as part of a collaboration with the non-governmental organisation Each One Teach One... Elif Eralp, the Left Party’s candidate for mayor and the current front-runner in September’s election, defended the exclusion of white swimmers, saying: “On Friday, an association has booked the pool for its members legally. In doing so, the People’s Swimming Pool provides access for people who are frequently affected by exclusion and racism. Labelling this as a form of discrimination is very revealing.” Steffen Krach, the Social Democratic Party candidate, added: “One can debate the decision made by the [event organisers], but not at the expense of people of colour.” The event has since been cancelled, with the theatre complaining that it had become a “target of Right-wing and racist incitement”... After a spate of punch-ups and sexual harassment on hot summer days, Berlin’s swimming pools introduced a rule in 2025 that guests had to bring identification to be allowed to enter. In 2025 after a particularly violent incident, Friedrich Merz, the chancellor, blamed an “unbelievable lack of respect for women and police in particular cultural circles”, apparently referring to migrants from the Middle East."
If you are against racial segregation, you're racist and if you criticise it, you're right wing and engaging in "racist incitement"

The Democrats Can’t Just Laugh Off ‘Woke 1’ - The Atlantic - "Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made two striking remarks that seem related. First, she barely demurred when ABC News asked whether she aspired to run for president. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” she eventually said. Second, she tried to laugh off stances that progressives in her wing of the Democratic Party had taken in the preceding years: “‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she said, echoing a comment that one of her allies had made about the heyday of ideas such as “defund the police.” Ocasio-Cortez represents an extremely liberal congressional district in New York City. The fact that she is declining to defend—and indeed wishing to move past—these positions shows how radioactive they have become. If only things were so easy. Over the past decade, Democratic politics have been reshaped by an ideology centered on systemic oppression and the radical policies ostensibly needed to correct it. The most common name for it is “wokeness,” which attained its cultural apogee in 2020—after the murder of George Floyd brought millions of people out to the streets to protest police killings of Black people. The established institutions of the meritocratic elite were swept over by the movement’s force: Members of Congress were photographed taking a knee while wearing African-inspired kente cloth. Companies rolled out diversity, equity, and inclusion action plans and donated huge sums to Black Lives Matter and other racial-justice causes. Universities denounced themselves as complicit in systemic racism. Staffers at news outlets revolted against colleagues they deemed counterrevolutionary, and nonprofit leaders and corporate executives treated the books of the anti-racism gurus Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo as revelatory. The Democratic Party, ever more dominated by the college-educated, absorbed these influences and let itself be perceived as the party of causes such as rejecting law enforcement, abolishing ICE, and queering gender. Years after this collective effervescence passed, many ideas that once seemed weighty look flimsy. Cities that cut police spending reversed course after murders spiked. Elite universities built up large DEI bureaucracies to manage every oppression—yet embarrassed themselves in their inability to address campus anti-Semitism after the Israel-Gaza war began. But most members of the party’s elite apparently hope that the ideas from the period will simply recede from public consciousness, mostly through silence, without their needing to repudiate “Woke 1.” Some, however, have pursued other strategies, such as retconning: For example, Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor, remade herself as a leftist during her unsuccessful 2020 Democratic presidential campaign by, among other things, advocating for decriminalizing illegal border crossing. In 2024, she tried to revert to the center by prosecuting repeat offenders and restricting asylum, all while insisting: “My values have not changed.” Now Ocasio-Cortez is previewing a third strategy: laughing at past excesses. All of these avoidance strategies could fail. Woke 1 may be over, but progressives have not given up their attempt to take over the Democratic Party apparatus. Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America—who have proved ascendant in primary elections this year—still take radical positions. One DSA-aligned candidate who is expected to be elected to Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier, is a prison abolitionist who cannot bring herself to say that murderers should go to jail. The front-runner for the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin is Francesca Hong, a DSA-connected candidate who once criticized Thanksgiving for its colonialist associations. Although the DSA itself emphasizes economic policies, such as universal rent control and zero-cost health care, its national platform does not shy away from endorsing proposals widely seen as excesses of Woke 1, including paying reparations to descendants of slaves, “fully abolishing the police and prison system,” and granting amnesty to all immigrants regardless of status, along with an end to all visa caps and quotas. The rhetorical focus has shifted, but the support for old, unpopular ideas remains. Even if Democratic-primary voters were not endorsing DSA candidates, Woke 1 would still be menacing Democrats running for office, for a simple reason: Republicans will never let voters forget this. Republicans have presented themselves as the party of the common man against the party of the faculty lounge. Even as Donald Trump has, in so many respects, inverted what it means to be a Republican, anti-wokeness has worked to unify the party and has now become a core tenet of GOP dogma. By many accounts, the most effective campaign advertisement of the 2024 presidential election had the tagline “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Since that election, Democrats have broadly understood that public opinion is against them on many culture-war issues, particularly when it comes to sex-segregated sports. But only a few, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom and Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, have criticized trans women’s participation in women’s athletics. (Moulton, who is running in a Senate primary, has since walked back his remarks.) Most of their fellow Democrats seem to be waiting for the issue to blow over. Republicans have no reason to allow that. Ideas never die, but they can go dormant. The unwillingness to extirpate wokeness now may result in its resurgence later. The silence of conventional Democrats and the ascent of the DSA could make the party’s 2028 presidential-primary contest resemble the 2020 one. Then, candidates of all stripes competed to out-left one another, committing themselves to positions that caused their party electoral trouble for years. Should Ocasio-Cortez become the Democratic candidate for president, she may experience that painful lesson firsthand."
Of course, left wingers are now denouncing her for anti-black racism. Hilarious.

Meme - David Santa Carla @TheOnlyDSC: "White people commit so little crime that the biggest stories on X are a woman calling her stalker a slur and a kid stealing 2 Red Bulls."

Woke 1 was crazy. Woke 2 is worse and has already conquered Canada | National Post - "Woke 1 was rather ridiculous and provided great fuel for laughs and cheap entertainment across North America. However, Woke 1 implies Woke 2 is coming, and it will be far worse when it does. In fact, in Canada, at least, Woke 2 is already here, and the fact it is quieter is not a sign of weakness. Not only is Woke 2 turning the accommodation of Woke 1 into durable power, it is cycling in fresh causes post-pandemic. The second wave is being driven by the same people who insisted on gender-neutral washrooms, the relitigation of history, and the eradication of basic standards concerning appearance and hygiene. Now they are graduating from law schools and entering government. If Woke 1 was able to bludgeon the establishment into partial compliance, Woke 2 will complete the transformation as more and more inmates start to run the asylum. Woke 1 started in the mid-2010s, when the mediocre NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick was considered important for taking a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Alongside that came the rise of land acknowledgements and activist students ripping the gender signs off campus washrooms. The high-water mark of Woke 1 was the George Floyd riots and unrest of 2020, capped off by the first defeat of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. There is no question that Trump’s victory in 2016 and the ascendancy of right-wing populism in western politics saw a parallel eruption on the left. People learned to roll their eyes as institutional panic gave way to corporate sermons, renamed universities, and plans to spend billions on “anti-racism” strategies. However, this was still accommodation rather than full-scale transformation. Woke 2 will have different ideological pillars on the surface, but the same agenda of deconstruction. New bosses and department heads who will swap out rants about “privilege” for removing “barriers,” which, in effect, means curtailing the career advancement for straight, white men to the benefit of everyone else. This is already happening, but Woke 2 will cement it with more professional, less politicized language, rather than leave it as a short-term circus. Persuading the public is no longer the goal of Woke 2. Rather, it will be about controlling money and sinecures and deciding who and what receives grants, contracts, and licences. Canada is uniquely exposed because, unlike almost every other western country that experienced a non-left interlude, it has not had a federal Conservative government since 2015. For almost 11 years now, the Liberals have happily incorporated Woke 1 into the “big tent” and twisted government policy to suit it. Whatever changes Mark Carney has nominally brought to the Liberals, the imprint of Justin Trudeau’s zeal for Woke 1 is found in the qualifications for Canada Research Chairs, academic advancement, and grant-making. In fact, Canada exited Woke 1 ages ago and is already deep into the quieter, more effective and insidious Woke 2. The Privy Council Office’s 2026–27 plan says “Gender-based Analysis Plus” will be thoroughly integrated into the affairs of government, including mandatory assessments in cabinet committee documents and memoranda to Cabinet. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat is pushing through an expansive DEI plan for 2026–29, and Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy explicitly seeks a whole-of-government approach reaching housing, immigration, justice, health and employment. Canada and the United States both now host a powerful form of diasporic politics, in which North American money and political capital is looted in the service of foreign causes. This may represent less of a convergence than the U.S. catching up to Canada given Ottawa’s long history of pandering to ethnic voters, no matter which party is in-charge. Conversely, one of the most striking divergences between Canada and the United States is the decline of prominent Black American movements and initiatives that defined the previous wave. Woke 1 was deeply tied to racial tensions between Black and white Americans, especially regarding police conduct and the presence of controversial symbols like the Confederate flag. Woke 2 features less of that, and Middle Eastern affairs have instead come to dominate it, with Muslim Americans flexing their electoral power in cities like New York and swing states like Michigan. With no Donald Trump-type figure to smash the DEI initiatives of Woke 1, Canada has continued to entrench them while allowing Woke 2 to shape foreign and domestic policy. The cleverness of Woke 2 is that cabinet ministers and other officials will quietly normalize all of it and describe it in ways that sound responsible, lawful and eminently fundable to moderates. In lieu of a right-of-centre prime minister, Canada’s Conservative premiers have offered little more than skirmishes against either Woke 1 or Woke 2. There certainly has been no organized, large-scale counteroffensive. Alberta and Saskatchewan enacted meaningful parental-rights measures, while New Brunswick’s earlier Policy 713 controversy briefly became part of the same battle before its government was replaced by a Liberal provincial government. However, all of that resistance has been confined largely to schools, names, pronouns and parental consent. Nova Scotia’s own Progressive Conservative government, despite its name, has proudly introduced a whole-of-government Equity and Anti-Racism Strategy. With few exceptions, Atlantic Progressive Conservative parties never fail to make the first word in their names shine. Canada has undergone a steady laundering of controversial, radical left-wing ideas into neutral-looking administrative obligations. There has never been a federal election fought on these issues, and what voters never expressly approved or rejected can easily become the default setting of government. Woke 2 is already alive and well here in Canada, less a sequel to Woke 1 than its second act."

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the biggest far-left party in France, explains why the alliance between progressives and Muslims is necessary. “If you’re counting on white Christian workers to bring about socialism in France, it won’t happen. But our Muslim brothers and sisters will.” This is the same playbook being used by the left in all Western countries."

Academic with historic links to extreme group hired in the same Cambridge faculty as 'plagiarism professor' Jason Arday - "An academic with historic links to the now banned Hizb ut-Tahrir terror group has been recruited by Cambridge University to the same faculty as ex-professor Jason Arday. Dr Farah Ahmed wrote a chapter for a pamphlet published in 2002 by the group before it was proscribed, attacking 'western education' as a 'threat' to Muslims, it is claimed. The academic is now an assistant research professor at Cambridge's Faculty of Education – the same department that recruited Mr Arday, who has stepped down following a plagiarism row. During her time at Cambridge, she has also co-authored a How Islamic Is My School toolkit, which says the Islamic concept of education is in sharp contrast to 'gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications'. In 2023, she helped organise a conference on Islam, science and education to 'recognise the role of science as part of a wider modernist and colonial project', and to 'consider challenges' to the view that 'sees science as 'objective knowledge'... Dr Ahmed's chapter for the 2002 Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet 'Education and Identity' was republished in 2017. Hizb ut-Tahrir was proscribed in the UK in 2024. The Spectator reported that in the pamphlet, she wrote: 'The Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognise that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values.' She attacked schools' 'attempts to integrate Muslim children' as seeking to 'produce new generations that reject Islam' and added: 'if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.' She also wrote that the national curriculum is a 'systematic indoctrination' to 'build 'model British citizens' who will seek to actively take part in the implementation of the secular capitalist system in British society.' And she added: 'Naturally, such a system will not be suitable to the needs of Muslim students as the aqeedah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this.' Her pamphlet chapter also attacked British schools for teaching that 'polygamy or marriage under the age of 16' is 'archaic and discriminatory to women', and for telling children that 'democracy… is the only way that laws should be created.' Democracy, she said, is a 'corrupt tradition'. She also criticised how religious tolerance is 'primarily pushed' in religious schools, meaning that 'Islam is taught as a religion like any other'. English, she wrote, 'is one of the most damaging subjects' a school can teach. Fairy tales 'reflect secular and immoral beliefs, which contradict the viewpoint of Islam,' and Romeo and Juliet 'advocates disobeying parents and pre-marital relations,' she said. She also said science was a problem because in 'teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam'"
Time to ban Christian schools to protect secularism

Blaine Pardoe on X - "So let me make sure that I get this right. Wizards of the Coast is removing slavery from their reboot of the Dark Suns setting because it's problematic? They actually think that they are protecting us from fictional slavery, in a game based on imagination? My favorite part of this idiocy is they employed "sensitivity readers" as part of their process. What a stupid and completely worthless job! I'm glad I made the hop to Castles and Crusades for my next campaign. At least they aren't trying to protect me from fictional things! @trolllordgames"
Daddy Warpig on X - "Slavery is part of the Black experience and nobody else is allowed to write about it. It's "insensitive." There was a Chinese woman who wrote a Young Adult fantasy novel about a Chinese-inspired culture. It had slavery, because medieval China had slavery. She was destroyed by an online mob. Publisher disavowed her. Book was canceled one month before publication. These are the current rules in the mainstream of publishing culture. It's why I was able to predict this almost two years ago."

The Reality of "Settler Violence" in the West Bank

2026-09-07T09:03:00.000+08:00

Leah Zakh Aharoni | Facebook

For thirty years, I have raised my children in Judea and Samaria. If you ask people what the hardest part of mothering here is, they will guess it’s worrying about their safety.

They are wrong.

The hardest job, the one that keeps you up at night long after the kids are asleep, is teaching your children not to hate.

When you raise a family here, terror is not a newspaper headline. It is the physical landscape your children play in every afternoon.

My kids grew up playing in Gan Shalva, a playground named for Shalva Uzana, a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher murdered at the entrance to our community on her way to work.

They met their friends at Nethanel Square, named for 14-year-old Nethanel Riachi, gunned down in his school dorm alongside his classmate Avraham Setton.

Across from my children's grandparents’ house is Zalman Shlein Street. Zalman was a contractor who employed workers from Gaza in the 1980s. Every single day, he set a table and fed them dinner. He bought clothes for their kids. He sent gifts home to their families.

One afternoon, his own crew murdered him at the work site.

Almost every community in Judea and Samaria has its own version of Gan Shalva, Nethanel Square, and Zalman Shlein Street.

And then there is the Fogel family. In March 2011, in Itamar, two Palestinian Arab teens climbed a fence at night and stabbed to death Ehud Fogel, his wife Ruth, their eleven-year-old son Yoav, their four-year-old son Elad, and their three-month-old baby Hadas. Killed in her crib.

For six months after that night, I could not sleep. I would lie awake, getting out of bed a dozen times to check the locks, the window latches, the shadows outside. A hundred times a night, fighting off an armed intruder in my own mind.

And around all of this, the electric fence.

Almost every Jewish community in Judea and Samaria is surrounded by one. Sensors. Armed guards. Infiltration sirens that go off when someone climbs the perimeter. My children have run to safe rooms during infiltration sirens their whole childhood, the same kind of siren sounded on October 7.

We did not walk in the surrounding hills. We did not enter Arab villages. We did not stop at gas stations in the wrong areas. For safety and by policy, we lived inside a perimeter.

And during these thirty years, we have watched the neighboring Arab villages expand with no control, often stopping only at the fence.

You try to shield your children. You turn off the news. But trauma moves by osmosis.

It travels through school corridors, playground chatter, and the sudden, suffocating silence of a mother holding her breath.

How do you explain trust to a teenager when the school bus driver, who drove the special-needs kid next door every day for a year, suddenly became the gunman who walked into Merkaz HaRav and murdered eight teenage students?

You do not have an answer. So you tell them the only thing you know how to tell them.

For over thirty years, I have sat at my kitchen table having the exact same conversation with each of my children, over and over again:

"Mom, do all Arabs want to kill us?"

"No. That is not true."

"I hate them and want to hurt them back!"

"No. We do not use violence, and we do not hate."

"How do we know who to trust?"

"I do not know."

And then the hardest line of all, the one I had to repeat until my voice shook:

"The moment we start hating them, the moment we want to kill them just because of who they are, we become like them."

I did not fight that battle for three decades just to watch the world rewrite our history.

Today, a third generation is growing up in Judea and Samaria.

Young. Exhausted. Sick and tired of living in the shadow of fear. They carry decades of secondary PTSD in their bones. They watched their neighbors murdered. They ran to safe rooms during infiltration sirens their whole childhood. They walked to school past the square named after the 14-year-old boy shot in his bed. They grew up inside the electric fence.

For sixty years, Jewish blood in Judea and Samaria was treated by the international community as white noise. Nobody wept for our sleeping children. Nobody held press conferences for babies murdered in their cots. It was taken as an acceptable baseline: Arabs kill Jews, and Jews absorb the funerals.

The same international community that has spent sixty years using the words "apartheid" and "wall" and "confinement" to describe what Israel does never used those words for what we actually live inside.

The wire was around us. We were confined. We were behind the wall. And the world called us the oppressors.

Now this young generation is building open farms without fences. They are refusing to act like targets. They are standing up to defend their land. They are adopting Yosef Trumpeldor’s 100-year old slogan "Where the Jewish plow stops, the border begins." More often than not they are fighting off attacks.

And suddenly the entire global apparatus has found its voice.

Suddenly every diplomat, news anchor, and human rights group is screaming about "settler violence."

If you care about settler violence, I am asking you to do two things. Google "West Bank terror" today. See what comes up. It will be pages and pages of "settler violence" with hardly any mention of Arab violence.

And now ask yourself if you have ever heard of the Fogel family, Shalva Uzana, Nethanel Riachi, Avraham Setton, Zalman Shlein or any other one of the hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish victims of terror. Then ask yourself why.

Let me be unmistakably clear.

I am not ignoring or excusing Jewish civilian violence against Arabs. Those incidents happen. I do not support vigilante violence. I do not excuse lawlessness. I spent my adult life fighting to ensure my children never adopted the tactics of our enemies.

And as a society, Israel investigates them, prosecutes them, and condemns them. We investigate our extremists. They celebrate theirs.

What I am naming is scale, silence, and inversion, that decades of unceasing terror against Jewish children was treated as an acceptable baseline, while a fraction of a fraction of that violence in the other direction became the international community's obsession.

I will not sit quietly while a cynical global narrative converts sixty years of unceasing terror against Jewish mothers and children into a villain arc, while ignoring the generational trauma that brought us to this hour.

We raised a generation to value life in the middle of a war zone. We did our job.

It is time the world held itself to the same standard of truth.

Links - 6th September 2026 (2 - General Wokeness)

2026-09-06T17:45:00.000+08:00

Hunter Ash on X - "Hunger strikes are based on the premise that your hated enemy is so moral that they care if their enemy dies by their own hand, when the hunger striker themself probably wouldn’t care in the reverse situation. It’s an admission that your enemy is a better person than you."
Wilfred Reilly on X - ""If you don't give me what I want, I will KILL myself!!!" Same vibe. Ok..."

Meme - Mike Solana @micsolana: "you will never make me care about a hunger strike. mother fucker just eat!"

Sahalie Donaldson on X - "Mayor Zohran Mamdani defends his endorsements of Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, condemning recent attacks from Espaillat’s camp on the latter. “One thing I do want to make clear that I find unacceptable is the attempt to use the term Haitian as a slur,” he says."
Wesley Yang on X - "When minorities are openly racist toward other minorities, (which happens far more often than open racism by white people) the Woke simply claim that this a function of White Supremacy creating internecine rivalries between the races (and internalized self-hatred within minorities themselves) for the benefit of the White oppressor."

Meme - Ariel Troster: "This is inexcusable. Abandoning queer and trans kids when they government put the OCDSB under trusteeship and are calling the shots here. The school board is usually one of the biggest contingents in the Pride March."
"Ottawa-Carleton District School Board pulls out of Capital Pride parade. The OCDSB will not participate in this year's Capital Pride parade, drawing criticism from a trustee over the message it sends to LGBTQ+ students."
Taking part in Pride is obligatory, otherwise you're a bigot
Of course, left wingers would throw a fit if the government endorsed a political position they disagreed with. The cope is that pushing the left wing agenda is being a decent human being, and is not being political. Of course. Good luck if you support Jewish students, though, because that will become "supporting genocide"
Comment: "Not being in a parade isn’t abandoning anything. Unless you’re saying it’s a requirement as an ally to be in the parade and any group etc not is anti-lgbtqetc? If so, that’s exactly why they shouldn’t be a part of it , if it’s become some compulsory, pseudo-religious requirement"
"Good. We need to stop celebrating our differences and embrace our similarities. We need to stop placing people into divisive silos of hate and unite under one flag. People need to stop making their identity their personality. I wish you put half as much effort and time into economic issues as you do to Pride issues. Our city would be a lot more livable and affordable."

Alix on X - "Call a rich man broke, he'll laugh. Call a gym rat weak, he'll laugh. Call a genius dumb, he'll laugh. Call a libtard wrong and he'll argue until he's blue in the face explaining why you're a fascist. Fucking retard."

John Wright on X - "Nicklas Nilsson explains the difference between right-wing and left-wing people in spot-on text on Facebook:
"If a right-wing person is gay, then he is, and he doesn't care what others think. If a left-winger is gay, then he demands legal changes, protests against everything and everyone, and turns it into a political struggle.
If a right-winger is vegan, then he simply doesn't eat meat. If a left-winger is vegan, then he wants to ban meat, halt food production, and protest outside farms and chicken farms.
If a right-winger doesn't like guns, then he just doesn't buy any. If a left-winger doesn't like guns, then he tries to ban them, prevent everyone else from owning one, and hates those who do.
If a right-winger is worried about the climate, then he flies less, drives an electric car if it suits him, and sorts his waste. If a left-winger is worried about the climate, then he wants to ban fossil fuel cars, air travel, and meat for everyone else, protest outside factories, and demand that the state forces the change.
If a right-winger wants to give his children a good education, then he moves to an area with good schools, or chooses a private school, or gets involved himself. If a left-winger wants to give his children a good education, then he demands more tax money from everyone, equal results for all, a ban on charter schools, and protests against every inequality.
If a right-winger complains about his job or workplace.. he doesn't. He changes jobs or starts his own business. If a left-winger complains about his job – then it's the boss, the company, or the colleagues who are at fault. He demands collective agreements, strikes, changes for the whole community, and protests against the company so that it suits him.
If a right-winger is dissatisfied with his housing or rent, then he moves, renovates, or buys something else. If a left-winger is dissatisfied with his housing or rent, then he demands rent freezes, more subsidies, regulations for everyone, and protests against landlords and politicians.
If a right-winger fails with a business or an investment that goes wrong, then he gets up, dusts himself off, and tries again tomorrow. If a left-winger runs out of money on the 24th, then he blames the rich for having too much and needing to contribute more, blames the lottery win that didn't come home last week, and mutters that he has such damn bad luck.
If a right-winger sees this – then he sends it to a few friends for a good laugh. If a left-winger sees this – then he tries to argue against it, get it removed, and delete me from Facebook.""

Bachman on X - "Headline: cops kill man "in broad daylight", in front of "witnesses"
1st para: residents in "shock and anger"
2nd para: "historical trauma" from "officer-involved shootings"
Later on: man was "checking parked vehicles"
Finally: he stabbed a cop. Oh."

Madison police shooting victim identified as Corey Ruiz as protests continue - "With protests and demands for accountability growing louder in Madison, officials have identified the man who was fatally shot by a police officer this week. Corey Ruiz, who was in his 30s and a member of the Madison community, was killed Wednesday, officials said during a news conference Thursday. He was shot after he pulled out a knife during a struggle with four officers, police said. The news conference became heated, as Madison Police Chief John Patterson was interrupted by two protesters for about 20 minutes. One took over the microphone to condemn police brutality and demand the officer responsible be jailed... The mayor also called for answers about Ruiz’s shooting. “I want to be clear: It does not matter who you are or what your past is. You should not lose your life as a result of an encounter with law enforcement. That should not happen,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said Thursday, promising that the shooting will be “rigorously investigated.” Wisconsin public records show that Ruiz had 40 misdemeanor and felony convictions from 2009 to 2025. The crimes include robbery by force, strangulation, drug possession, vehicle theft and battery of a public safety worker, according to the records. It appears that Ruiz was most recently convicted of resisting law enforcement and drug paraphernalia possession, the records show... Ruiz pulled out a fixed-blade knife and injured an officer... Police said that a stun gun was used, but that it was ineffective. The officer who was injured with the knife then fired at Ruiz... None of the four officers who were detaining the man wore body cameras. Videos of the shooting were captured by bystanders and went viral on social media. One of them, verified by NBC News, appears to show officers holding the man as someone yells, “Let go!” Multiple shouts of “He’s got a knife!” can also be heard."
Predictably, left wingers are upset that he didn't manage to kill any police officers (not from a lack of trying) and are lying about what happened. Typical.

Meme - CaliRNG19 @CaliRN619: "Thug stabs a cop and his skinfolk are crying because they shot him. But...his rap sheet says he's white, so I'm not sure if the riots are on for tonight or not"
"Offender Detail
Name: RUIZ, COREY D
Race: WHITE"

Meme - Rachel Cheramy: "I know Corey personally - he was my ex - and he was abusive. His criminal record shows this isn't the first time he's chosen violence. He hurt me, he choked another ex, and he pulled a knife during a theft at Woodman's. He was always getting into trouble. This has nothing to do with race; it's about his behavior."

Fatal Madison police shooting lacks camera footage (aka "Why don't Madison police officers have body cameras?") - "frontline officers for the Madison Police Department are not equipped with them. Body cameras have been proposed in the city multiple times over the past decade, including less than a year ago... Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, said the WPPA has long supported the implementation of body-worn cameras across the state, including in Madison. "Body-worn cameras are not perfect, and no recording necessarily captures everything an officer sees, perceives, or experiences," Palmer said. "But they can provide critically important additional evidence and context. The absence of that evidence here underscores why the WPPA has long believed Madison officers should be equipped with this technology... The Community Policing and Body Camera Ad Hoc Committee rejected a proposed pilot program in September 2015 after community members expressed concerns about invasion of privacy and the manipulation of footage... The Common Council voted to implement the pilot program in 2022 and it launched in April 2024. For 90 days, officers on the city's north side wore the same Panasonic body cameras as Madison police's SWAT and motorcycle patrol units. Trial analysis showed that officer behavior didn't change while wearing body cameras and that reviewed footage did not lead to any added charges"
Time to blame the police for refusing body cameras

Meme - Smirkley @Smirkley: "I was told off for lumping liberals in w/ leftists, and classical liberalism & the left are indeed very different animals. But it's 2026, and they seem to believe similar things, at least according to Pew."
"Liberals and leftists split over money. % in each Pew typology group, ranked by gap
Diversity efforts made society fairer. Leftward Progressives 88%. Loyal Liberals 88%. No Apologies Right 1%
Violent crime is very big problem. Leftward Progressives 18%. Loyal Liberals 19%. No Apologies Right 65%
National effort to deport illegals. Leftward Progressives 0%. Loyal Liberals 3%. No Apologies Right 81%
People are too easily offended. Leftward Progressives 17%. Loyal Liberals 22%. No Apologies Right 89%
Raise tax rates on large corporations. Leftward Progressives 97%. Loyal Liberals 92%. No Apologies Right 21%
Billionaires are bad for the county. Leftward Progressives 82%. Loyal Liberals 61%. No Apologies Right 4%"
This doesn't stop commies fantasising about sending liberals to the gulags and/or guillotines over minor policy disagreements
The left wing agenda is all connected

Meme - Brad Polumbo: "The leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who infamously said "America deserved 9/11," has now mockingly framed a newspaper from the day after the attacks as part of his streaming set. I don't really have words for how grotesque I find that."
DSA Watch @DSA_Watch: "Hasan Piker now displays a framed 9/12 newspaper showing the Twin Towers in flames behind him on stream"
Clearly, he's just criticising his country and showing how much he loves it

American Debunk on X - "NYU Student explains to Nick Shirley why she would let rapists walk free This is an actual NYU student explaining, on camera to Nick Shirley, why she would prefer her own rapist remain free on the streets. Suicidal empathy.
Shirley: "Let's just say somebody who has raped a woman."
Student: "Totally."
Shirley: "Would you like them to be out in the street?"
Student: "I think my answer is yes. Even though that's a challenging answer to say."
Shirley: "So if you got raped, would you like your rapist to be out in the street?"
Student: "Well, let me finish, because I have been raped and they are out in the street, and I'm not sure them going to jail is a solution to whatever's going on inside their heart or even my own heart that contributed to that experience that I'm having. And I don't want more people to get raped, but I don't know for certain that going into a jail in the United States is going to shift anything inside of their operating system so that they'll make a different choice again."
Shirley: "Wow. Well, thank you guys so much for your time. And is there one last message you'd like to give to the people about potential the rise of communism or freeing the people inside the prisons?"
Student: "Just free yourself from the prison in your heart and then maybe we.""
What are the odds she hates men for supposedly being rapists?

Meme - ""Black's sold each other to slavery." Dumbass slavery has existed since the beginning of time however it was treated as a job. However the slavery white Europeans was pure wicked a..."
CEO of correcting Shion: "This mf be like:
Slavery done by Europeans: *hate*
Slavery done by non Euros: *love*
.: "Aww sorry my dude but slavery done by non euros was not dehumanizing so cope harder"
Left wingers just hate white people

Carlo Martin on X - (Translated from Spanish) - "🇬🇧 In some UK businesses, the penny dropped, and they found the solution to thefts by Africans, by hiring other Africans to beat them up and stop them from stealing, so they don't get accused of racism. They've gone back to the 19th century."
Marco I on X - (Translated from Spanish) - "In the 17th and 18th centuries, the owners of the haciendas would put one of the slaves to watch over the rest, offering them a club or a whip, because they knew that this way they got the most radical and bloodthirsty guard, to the point that they had to call them out for not being so cruel. The progressives are going to regret it when they discover what some are capable of doing against those of their own skin color if you just give them the right incentive."
Clearly, if black employees don't let other black people steal, it's internalised racism and they're Uncle Toms

Michael Shellenberger on X - "Germany was the powerhouse of Europe. Now, it is killing itself. Industrial output is 24% lower what it should be. Mass migration is bankrupting the state and destroying the culture. Thugs beat up reporters who dare ask questions. The Left manipulates guilt to destroy the West."
John Barton on X - "With the perspective of centuries, future historians may argue that WWII ultimately killed Europe by making it illegitimate to assert the idea of and act to protect national character, culture, & interests. Westphalia->west berlin, an epilog late 20th century, and that's it."

Germany’s Suicide Is A Warning To The West - "In my mind’s eye, present-day Germany resembles a large steamship that still appears to be sailing but has just run out of fuel. When the passengers realize what is happening, there will be anarchy aboard. We are, in that way, a warning to America and the rest of the West of what happens when a civilization decides to commit suicide. While I cannot predict the future, I cannot see how the catastrophe can be averted. The reason that our current trajectory seems hopeless dates back to an ideological problem that Germany has cultivated since 1945: guilt-based self-negation. Over the last 80 years, Germans’ natural self-identity, pride, and willingness to defend their country and culture have been suppressed. This suppression has spread and infected others. Not just in Germany but also in Sweden, France, Great Britain, and the United States, public spaces have become staging grounds for terrorist and anti-state brutality, the violence of rival gangs and ethnic groups, and the recklessness of left-wing mobs that fight any opponent of immigration. For the left, immigration is no longer a political question but a crusade for its secular religion of victimhood and salvation. This is where the extreme polarization and fanatical radicalism of the German government’s “fight against the right” efforts come from. As Paul Gottfried wrote in his 2021 book Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade, Germany today exemplifies “the elevation of antifascism to a state philosophy and program of mass reeducation”—with mass immigration as its most well-known consequence. Germany’s asylum system and its anti-fascist activism have combined as part of a state-funded industry in which more and more refugees are dependent on asylum seekers’ benefits while municipal budgets collapse under the burden of welfare spending. Germany’s 2026 federal core budget of €525 billion includes 90 billion of new debt. Combined with other debts (“Special fund”), the new debt amounts to close to 180 billion euros. Public-sector spending makes up more than 50 percent of Germany’s GDP, which means rich sinecures are up for grabs. But while Germany’s economic output is falling—a thousand industrial jobs are lost every month—asylum applications remain at high annual levels: over 106,000 by November 2025, plus 100,000 visas for family reunification. And NGOs and the German media want to ensure that the country continues on its current course. German politicians, meanwhile, attack “the right wing” as the country’s main problem even as they drive the country headlong into a brick wall. The right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has not yet been banned, but it is being denounced, paralyzed, and attacked in every conceivable way. In contrast, Antifa Ost, the notorious “Hammer Gang” of Antifa radicals that has attempted to murder German right-wingers with hammers, is regarded with public goodwill. The group has been branded a terrorist organization by the Trump administration for its attacks on cars, private homes, and members of Parliament, and it is probably only a matter of time before the first deaths occur. At the end of November, an anti-fascist street mob tried to prevent the founding of the new AfD youth organization Generation Germany in the city of Giessen. At least 25,000 demonstrators engaged in sometimes violent clashes with 6,000 police officers from all over Germany. Taxpayers finance both sides — the police and the anti-AfD NGOs —of these street battles. And things are even more absurd in the Bundestag. Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has only two items on his agenda: to ostracize the AfD and to avoid upsetting his left-wing Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who was himself a member of Antifa as a young man. Once a pompous-sounding conservative, Merz has broken all his electoral promises in his desperate attempts to placate the SPD and keep his coalition afloat. His constant contradictions are a symptom of his self-imposed dilemma. The SPD, in turn, feels emboldened by Merz’s weakness and has become increasingly radical. Among its demands is that Merz maintain the “firewall” against the AfD. When a CDU Bundestag motion to limit migration won a majority thanks to AfD votes early last year, a left-wing street mob of SPD supporters occupied CDU party headquarters. After that, Merz fell into line. The AfD is a parliamentary pariah. The other parties refuse to let their members perform basic parliamentary functions such as chairing meetings or heading committees. One assumes the intention is to ban the AfD or to find a pretext to suspend upcoming elections. It seems unlikely the AfD will ever be permitted to govern. Even AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, is said to be very skeptical regarding her party’s future. The same game is being played against right-wing populist parties in Paris, London, Vienna, Stockholm, Bucharest, and The Hague, albeit under different circumstances. President Donald Trump, too, faces ideologically motivated obstruction within the U.S. Congress and judicial system. This situation brings us to a sobering assessment: A decisive battle for the future of the West is being fought right now, both behind the scenes and on the streets. The violent Antifa mob is just one of many players in this game. Its advocacy for Muslim refugees (who comprise 76 percent of Germany’s immigrant population) coincides strikingly with the Islam-friendly attitude of European elites. Fighting Islamic Sharia law, femicide, and gender segregation will be just as much a part of the battle for the future as cracking down on terrorism, knife crime, and protection rackets that come with immigrant gangs."

The Drunk Republican on X - "Wokeness literally came out of nowhere. Just as race had largely become a non-issue over the course of the 80s and 90s, social science departments across the country began manufacturing cultural crises, complete with absurd terminology, out of thin air. Because without conflict the left can’t retain power we were suddenly bombarded with insane claims about “microaggressions,” “cultural appropriation,” and “intersectionality.” Peace was never an option, and with nothing to be mad about academics simply made a bunch of stuff up. Out of nowhere an entire movement was born, and it would sweep through our most hallowed institutions like a fire through Rome. Companies, universities, and government agencies would spend the next 15 years slaying imaginary boogeymen rather than accomplishing their stated missions. Corporations held struggle sessions; colleges illegally persecuted certain demographics when it came to acceptance; and governments of all stripes prioritized social justice over serving their citizens. It’s almost hard to remember how ridiculous it all was. They interrupted brunches with megaphones, put porn in elementary schools and, in the end, burned down entire cities. The price tag, in hindsight, was almost certainly enormous. How many qualified applicants were denied jobs, affecting the performance of the captured institutions? Would we have cured cancer by now? Touched down on Mars? We will never know because we were too busy ensuring that bisexual Filipino amputees could serve in combat roles! One can only imagine where we’d be if the last decade-and-a-half wasn’t stolen from us. And what did it accomplish? NOTHING! It was always doomed to collapse, of course, as it was nothing more than a pyramid scheme of oppression. But it hasn’t disappeared. Rather it has basically rebranded under the DSA. The left needs a struggle to survive and wokeness, which framed struggle in terms of race and sexuality, has fizzled out. But “eat the rich” has never been more in. Which is why we cannot allow the architects of these movements rob us of our rightful progress. Because the left doesn’t create, it only destroys. And perhaps nothing illustrates that better than our recent 15-year-long national nightmare."

Further Evidence for the Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle: Higher Pathological Narcissistic Grandiosity and Virtue Signaling Are Related to Greater Involvement in LGBQ and Gender Identity Activism - "The dark-ego-vehicle principle (DEVP) suggests that individuals with so-called dark personalities (e.g., high narcissistic traits) are attracted to political and social activism that they can repurpose to satisfy their specific ego-focused needs (e.g., signaling moral superiority and manipulating others) instead of achieving prosocial goals. Currently, research on the DEVP is still rare. With two pre-registered studies, we sought further evidence for the DEVP by examining the associations of pathological narcissistic grandiosity with involvement in LGBQ activism (Study 1) and gender identity activism (Study 2). Socioeconomically diverse samples from the USA (Study 1; N = 446) and the UK (Study 2; N = 837) were recruited online via the research-oriented crowdsourcing platform Prolific. Individuals completed the Pathological Narcissism Inventory as well as measures of involvement in activism. Moreover, we assessed different covariates (e.g., altruism), and potential correlates within the narcissism-activism relationship (i.e., virtue signaling, dominance, and aggression). In addition, we examined potential relationships between other dark personality variables (e.g., psychopathy) and activism. In both samples, higher pathological narcissistic grandiosity was related to greater involvement in activism. As expected, virtue signaling was consistently involved in the relationship between pathological narcissistic grandiosity and activism. However, neither dominance nor aggression was related to individuals' involvement in activism. The results did also not consistently support a relationship between higher psychopathy and greater involvement in activism. Overall, the findings help to further specify the DEVP."
Woke activism is about narcissism

DR POOL on X - "🚨 TERRIFYING: These are Muslim Imams in FLORIDA “I want the governor of Florida to be Muslim. I want Muslims in the House, Muslim senators.” “We don’t apologize about jihad. We are not afraid of jihad. Jihad is who we are.” Repel Islam, Florida!"
Islamophobia!

Inflation and "Greed"

2026-09-06T13:42:00.000+08:00

iFunny seems to have deleted the eggs chart, so I am posting a similar version and a related one on a dedicated post:

"Eggs US (USD/Dozen)
2016: *spike in egg prices* "Egg Companies Discover Greed"
2017 *drop in egg prices* "Greed Forgotten"
2018: *spike in egg prices* "Egg Companies Rediscover Greed"
2019 *drop in egg prices* "Greed Forgotten"
2020: *spike in egg prices* "Egg Companies Rediscover Greed"
2021 *drop in egg prices* "Greed Forgotten"
2023: *huge spike in egg prices* "Egg Companies Really Rediscover Greed"
2025 *drop in egg prices* "Greed Forgotten""

"Postwar greed spikes *high inflation in the late 1940s and early 1950s*
The good old days, when companies were generous *low inflation from the mid-late 1950s to the mid 60s*
The Great Greed Explosion of the 70s *high inflation in the mid-late 70s*
Gordon Gecko *slightly elevated inflation in 1990*
The Long Generosity of the 80s and 90s *low inflation from the 90s to the mid 00s*
extreme generosity in 2008 *deflation in 2008*
The return of greed *2022 inflation*"