Substack Notes 11.3
Holiday Season; Nov. 15th -
It’s almost 2025.
Just sent over an article to my editor about the decline of student literacy. You want to know why kids aren’t reading books anymore? Here is an actual statement from the National Council of Teachers of English.
Nov. 15th, 2024
It was a trivial incident in the grand scheme of things. At one point in the campaign, Kamala Harris had to decide whether to go on Joe Rogan — a show with 18 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Here’s why she didn’t: “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Jennifer Palmieri, an aide to Doug Emhoff, explained. (Palmieri later implausibly tried to walk that back, citing a scheduling conflict.)
There you have the core dynamic that has crippled the Democrats for the last decade. A tiny faction of usually young, well-educated, very-online social justice activists have been using the classic campus tactics of the far left to capture the interest groups and nonprofits that dominate Democratic policy-making. The weapon the activists use: classic internal accusations of racism/sexism/transphobia, empowered by staff revolts, Twitter mobs, and other social media. And then the Democrats, believing these groups represent actual public opinion, especially among minorities, take positions far outside the mainstream with scarcely any public debate — and become paralyzed when challenged.
Nov. 19th, 2024
The irony here is that Wright’s views on energy and climate, which he has expressed often and in detail, are largely consistent with the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The views of his critics? Not so much.
Wright acknowledges two fundamental realities — climate change is real and fossil fuels have enormous benefits:
The expansion of the global energy supply by adding fossil fuels has greatly improved the human condition; it also brought the risk of climate change caused by increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Wright’s plain vanilla views on climate change are consistent with the most recent IPCC assessment:
Human industrial and agricultural activity increases greenhouse gas concentrations and is contributing significantly to a warming trend that earth has experienced over the past 150 years. Total warming over this period has been about 1.3°C (2.3°F).
Wright pulls no punches when characterizing the state of public discussion of climate change, and he is not wrong:
Climate change discourse is unfortunately rife with false claims and alarmist proclamations from all quarters.
Nov. 21st, 2024
:“Science” has become spotlighting the medical opinions of activists with MDs and PhDs. For every expert that talks about how detransitioning barely happens and how transgender ideology poses no risk to vulnerable children, there’s at least one other expert being silenced behind closed doors for suggesting the complete opposite. What we deserve is medical/scientific professionals who relentlessly consider all rational medical and scientific data and opinions, and debate them openly. That is how we build a well-rounded and trusted scientific consensus—not by silencing naysayers and any of their nonconforming evidence.
No, we cannot just trust the science—it has not been objective and truth-seeking for quite some time!
As a civilization, we are running on the fumes of the accomplishments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. They gave us electricity, sanitary engineering, antibiotics, antisepsis, vaccination, rail transport, the airplane, the computer, and the theory of evolution by natural selection. We haven’t been back to the moon in fifty-two years.
It may sound triumphalist, but the contributions of Britain and the British diaspora to this era of innovation cannot be understated. All the innovations listed above can be credited, in whole or in part, to men of British descent born between 1700 and 1900: Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Joseph Bazalgette, Alexander Fleming, Joseph Lister, Edward Jenner, George Stephenson, the Wright brothers, Charles Babbage, and Charles Darwin. Note that Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins are also surnames originating in the British Isles. Modernity was disproportionately the creation of this particular ethnic group. Why it was the British, and not some other group, who gave the world this blessing and this curse is a question too rarely asked.
Nov. 21st, 2024
:Because it is popular in the pro-male and sometimes anti-female online ecosystem known as the manosphere, NoFap has been treated with suspicion in outlets like NPR. Sociologist Kelsy Burke of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has associated it with (what else?) white supremacy…
The tone of derision here is extremely telling. If practices of restraint have found favor with young men, why not try to extricate those practices from their manospheric setting and incorporate them into the Left’s aesthetic as well? Why not compete with right-wing NoFappers, instead of casting aspersions on them and further alienating badly needed voters? It makes no sense unless sexual self-control is, in itself, somehow threatening to the Democrat Party’s project as it is presently constituted. And this is where women come in…
The Fap/NoFap Election
Nov. 22nd, 2024
:Ukrainian personnel have neither the expertise nor the information to fire complex Western long-range missile systems. They are operated within Ukraine by NATO advisers, with targeting information from NATO satellites. The limited supply of these missiles (the United States have provided Ukraine with a mere 50 ATACMS, of which 44 presumably remain after Tuesday’s attack) and the formidability of Russian air defences moreover mean that these provocations have no hope of changing the course of the war. Even the Americans admit as much, confessing that their hope is merely “to send a message” to North Korean soldiers in Russia “that their forces are vulnerable and that they should not send more of them.” Biden administration officials also say they are emboldened by their belief that Trump’s election has reduced “the escalation risk of allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with U.S.-supplied weaponry,” because “Putin … knows he has to wait only two months for the new administration.” As often, doubting that one’s adversary will retaliate is itself highly dangerous and destabilising.
…
One of the most obnoxious consequence of NATO, is what you might call the Crazy Girlfriend Effect. Many European countries and no few German politicians, secure behind the American defensive umbrella, just revel in their bellicosity in ways they wouldn’t if they actually bore direct responsibility for their own security. They’re like a drunk girl at a bar who is confident that her boyfriend will handle whatever hostilities she provokes. It’s instructive to compare insane stories like this one to the tone taken by the regime-adjacent American press, which is often much more sober about the enormous risks we’ve assumed for absolutely no reason, even quoting experts who acknowledge that “we’re in an escalatory spiral” with “a dynamic of its own.”
Wrong. That number was painted for a reason. ONE answer is correct. Perspective actually changes very little.
Dec. 3rd, 2024
Remember Obama’s words, “We are sending the Syrian opposition non-lethal aid?” It wasn’t completely non-lethal, but it was nowhere near what Russia or Iran was sending Assad. In short, the US’s Syria strategy was heavily focused on humanitarian and civil society development aid—which was just enough to taint the Syrian revolutionaries as western agents who were fighting on behalf of America and “Israel.” So that made it legitimate to target us. It wasn’t just Assad who thought so, either—the so-called “anti-imperialist” activists kept spamming us on Twitter for the same reason. (They were only against American imperialism: Russian imperialism didn’t bother them.)
-Adnan Hadad
Dec. 12th, 2024
Dec. 15th, 2024
Other than the mythical white supremacist, probably no group occasions more disdain than incels.
We should keep in mind: the Taliban are mostly incels. So were the conquistadors. The muscle behind the French and Russian revolutions and the brutal colonial wars of 20th century Imperial Japan was mostly composed of incels.
Incels have probably originally explored most of the Earth’s surface and been the catalyst for innumerable wars and revolutions.
If young men don’t have a stake in a society’s future they become very amenable to burning it down and starting anew-and not in a progressive, utopian manner-and a job stocking shelves in a Home Depot or selling cars simply isn’t sufficient to give them that stake.
Without most men having the opportunity to gain wives and produce children our society will surely die.
Dec. 16th, 2024
:In prosecuting Trump, Democrats did him the favor of transforming him into an outlaw, a classic American type—Jesse James, Clyde Barrow, Donald Trump. He emerged from the courtroom a felon, yes, but a romantic one in the eyes of his supporters, a perception cemented by his bloody, fist-pumping reaction to a failed assassination attempt. As they say, you can’t buy that kind of publicity, and Democrats seemed more than happy to provide it. Their belief that lawfare could solve the Trump problem was a tacit admission that they could not compete with him in the voting booth, where it really counted.
Dec. 17th, 2024
I see the sad reality of schizophrenia-a disorder so terrible that even contemplating it makes people uneasy-through inmate letters every day.
Could there be a worse fate than to exist in this world, dogged by horrifying ideas and hallucinations and fearful thoughts? Add emotional emptiness and confusion and inability to reason and a profound depression and you have what is probably the gravest mental illness we know of. It accounts for 1-2% of citizens, as far as we can tell.
Lots of people pretend to have Tourette’s or Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID) or gender dysphoria.
No one pretends to have schizophrenia.
Merry Christmas to all of my readers!
Great collection of pieces! We appreciate the inclusion!