Substack Notes 13.3 - Slaying Leviathan
Can it Be Done? Will it?
There are levels to our political awareness. On the lowest level we see the constant, ridiculous frenzy of legacy media figures, who have already manufactured at least three “constitutional crises!!!” in the past 3 months (by my count), despite none of them actually qualifying. Each ‘crisis’ passed quietly into the slipstream of public inattention. They’ve been memory-holed, within our infinitely distractable and emotional culture.
At a high level we have actual policy and legal battles: pro-bureaucracy and credentials and status quo and financial/cultural privilege on one side-against those things on the other.
At a higher level we have national and international trends: waxing populism, waning neoliberalism, the varied controversies and successes of religions and ideologies.
At the highest level we have the broad movement of culture and technology and demography.
It is quite possible to win a series of stunning victories on one of these levels and lose on the higher one. Kamala Harris, in her brief and strange (like a fever dream, in retrospect) incarnation as a presidential candidate and a (supposedly) sassy, relatable protecter of the bureaucratic power structure won the legacy media level… and lost the two higher ones. Remember how middle class her upbringing was? So she lost.
Similarly, Trump and his band of malcontents could win their policy battles, and even ride the national and international trends to ascendancy… and lose the ever-raging, muffled background struggle of technology and demography. To put it another way: what if the bureaucracy is stymied, and academia is reformed, and the cultural complex is razed and replaced, and the judiciary largely cleansed? BUT birthrates continue to fall, loneliness continues to increase, technological atomization continues to rapidly progress, and families continue to fragment? Who would win in that scenario? The bureaucracy would win. The bureaucracy wants us lonely, ill (but not TOO ill), insecure, and reliant on its organization for services and on its experts for opinions. The bureaucracy wants us to be a nation of vast and chronic social problems which can never be solved or even ameliorated, upon which it can feed like a vast and loathsome tick, indefinitely. If you want to imagine the progressive future, imagine a monstrous tick, latched upon and totally covering a human face, forever.
‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’
-George Orwell
Mar. 2nd, 2025
:President Trump has made it clear that he wants the Russia-Ukraine war to end as soon as possible, and he understands there is little appetite for more U.S. taxpayer funds being allocated to Ukraine. Unlike Ukraine, the Trump Administration views Russia as an adversary but not an enemy nation. Moscow is a well-stocked nuclear power, and the president is not interested in unnecessarily ratcheting up the chaos level with a nuclear power. Several policymakers in the administration have indicated a preference to peel Russia off from its close relationship with China. While the White House acknowledges Ukraine as a European ally, they do not consider Ukraine a top tier partner, given the lack of historic ties with Ukraine, the country’s minor standing in the world, its history of corruption, and the massively lopsided relationship in which the U.S. acts as a patron and gets little in return for its “investment.” The White House has a sober analysis of Moscow’s military might, and it simply does not at all buy the globalist internationalist World War II analogies consisting of Putin’s armies becoming capable of marching their way through Europe. For the Trump Administration, the war in Ukraine is a devastating tragedy. Indeed, a significant chunk of the fault lies with Russia, but the White House has *zero* interest in promulgating this conflict.
Mar. 10th, 2025
Conservatism begins with a simple thesis: humans are imperfect creatures. It does not deny, of course, their impressive powers of reason and imagination. But it reminds us that they are also fallible and often depraved, inviting us to consider the delight with which a child will pull the wings from a butterfly or torment a cat as proof. Few things are clearer or more incontrovertible to the conservative than original sin.
For this reason, conservatism contends that social order is both precious and precarious, always menaced by the destructive impulses of violence and rebellion. When achieved, order must be protected. Change must be slow. And human character, flawed but improvable, must be shaped and disciplined.
This requires the inculcation of salutary norms and precepts, as well as the restraint of behaviors that might stir our baser instincts. Thus, the promotion of civility is not merely an ornament of social life but a vital pillar of the civilizing process—and a cornerstone of conservatism. Charity, decency, decorum: virtues rooted in immutable ethical truths, unsullied by the whims and foibles of fallible men.
-Bo Winegard
Mar. 13th, 2025
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we can go all the way back to the halcyon days of 1993 when a young billy clinton stood by al gore… and spoke of a bold new plan called REGO (short for “reinventing government”) that everyone seems to have forgotten about:
“In 1993 President Bill Clinton initiated the National Performance Review appointing a private group to reform federal government eliminating ~100 programs, ~250,000 federal jobs, consolidating ~800 agencies.”
they even wanted to, gasp, “change procurement rules” and “change the personnel rules.”
utter that one today and you’ll be right in the “right wing extremism” bucket.
slap the word DOGE on this and advocate for it, and they’re throw you right off of “the view” yessirree bob they will.
i could go on and on, but i suspect you’re getting the point: damn near the whole of the current “progressive left” would refer to its own positions 15-30 years ago, even and especially the ones it pursued when it was in power, as “far right anti-democracy literally worse than nazi occupation threat to fluffy bunnies and all that is good and right assaults on america.”
Mar. 13th, 2025
Archive of Woke Repression
There’s a common experience for me when I make claims about repression or persecution or cancellation in the name of social justice: Leftists claim that it didn’t happen, or that it was rare.
I think there should be an online archive of woke repression. People could be tagged and details given. Obviously there wouldn’t be any way to verify any of the posted information, but it could function as a kind of one-sided ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ and it would confront the abusers with what they did and memorialize it for as long as the internet lasted.
I think many of those abusers are actually walking around today, effortfully forgetting the terrible things they did in the name of ideas which are now understood to be absurd. Have you ever heard of an apology being given for this wave of social repression? I have not.
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Statistics are not going to find cause. Finding, and demonstrating causal mechanisms, is going to find cause
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People with nothing of value to sell see no use in the marketplace of ideas.
Jonathan Rosen:
Art can’t be the lie that tells the truth in a world that cannot recognize lies.
Mar. 13th, 2025
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So their actual interpretation of all the Vance images is that MAGA people are trying to humiliate and demean JD Vance by playing with his image. Pushing right past this alleged explanatory category of “just funny,” which is apparently too implausible to even consider as a real thing, the piece concludes that Vance is being mocked as a sign that his “slightly forced and unnatural” political performance has made him unimportant: “But for a vice president who was picked with widespread support in his party, Vance, at times, has almost seemed like a fringe figure in Trump’s second term.”
He’s seemed like a fringe figure? Really?
The thing being analyzed at The Atlantic means literally, actually, precisely the opposite of what they think it means. It means that Vance is in the ascendant, and very much so.
The man who men don’t bother to do this to are the men they don’t give a shit about. The fact that JD Vance is suddenly everywhere, and suddenly being joked about obsessively, is not a sign that he’s becoming marginal to the right. For crying out loud.
Do you trust these “journalists” to explain or clarify anything at all?
“I don’t see anything coming from the universities other than outrage. They have a rendezvous with destiny and it’s here before they know it.”
-Victor Davis Hanson
Does admitting a role for genes in psychology put us on a slippery slope to the gas chamber?
Mar 14th, 2025
:World class headline. These international bureaucracies are held up as bastions of morality and righteousness by the liberal political class. But the reality is they’re riddled with major corruption, bias, inefficiencies, waste and even criminality. Despite the endless hissy fits about it among a commentariat who have an almost faith-like devotion to these organisations, it’s right that they are, at long last, being subjected to at least a degree of scrutiny. You can’t promote slaveholders, employ mass murdering jihadists etc, and expect the world to overlook it.
Mar. 14th, 2025
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Online mobs are the black ops of civilisation.
“I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64 [or] removing lead paint that lowers a child’s IQ by five points.”
Mar. 15th, 2025
:[Jamie] Reed also detailed how, in just a few short years, the gender industry exploded. When she first entered the field, her clinic saw around four new cases a month—mostly prepubescent boys. Within a few years, that number had skyrocketed to 50 or 60 cases a month, with 80% of them being teenage girls.
What changed?
"Guess what teenage girls have in common? They are absolutely susceptible to social contagion. This occurred right when COVID lockdowns happened, right when we stuck one of these in all of those teenagers' phones, and right when we saw all of these girls watching videos. We actually refer to it in the clinic as ‘TikTok Tics.’ They literally were parroting and coming into our clinic with the exact same storyline that they learned online about what it meant to be trans."
This is what Reed saw firsthand: teenagers absorbing a script from social media, walking into clinics, and being placed on an irreversible medical pathway with virtually no resistance.
She confirmed what critics of gender medicine have long suspected—the system wasn’t designed to protect vulnerable children. It was designed to funnel them toward transition as quickly as possible.
During this visit to the Irish Parliament, I heard something that made me shiver. Apparently, the monstrosity that is the Progress Pride flag has been permanently engraved onto a door in the building—a conquering army planting its flag at the heart of Ireland’s legislative power. But this didn’t come at the end of a war of words like the abortion referendum, where at least each side had a chance to make its case. Instead, this was the result of a silent coup—a war fought in whispers, behind closed doors, with no invitation extended to the enemy.
The Progress Pride symbol, highly contentious and despised by both feminists and many gay people, now stands as a victory banner in the halls where Irish laws are made. It represents an ideology that has suddenly become unquestionable, beyond debate. The battle, it seems, is over—and the Irish public didn’t even know it was being fought.
Mar. 17th, 2025
“If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.”
-P. D. James
(Picture - Statement by the ABA from ~2 months ago)
This announcement is an undeniable example of partisan framing and institutional activism (even of you agree with most of the claims-they’re all disputed and controversial, and political).
The same people who would claim that the ABA isn’t a captive to progressives will applaud statements like this.
Their ideological lens is so dark that they cannot see the middle ground, the independent tendency, the unbiased approach. A vast number of experts and professionals fall into this category. They’re so certain that they’re right that they feel no need to be careful, or kind, or fair.
Mar. 18th, 2025
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…the story of James Damore[:]
You might not recall his name, but you almost certainly remember his story.
Damore was the 28-year-old software engineer who, in August 2017, wrote a memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” in which he criticized his employer’s diversity policies, ideological homogeneity, and suppression of dissenting voices. The most controversial aspect of the memo was his explanation of the gender disparity among coders: He argued that it wasn’t merely bias that resulted in the underrepresentation of women in tech, but that men and women’s biological differences might play a role as well.
The memo went viral—and sparked a violent reaction among Damore’s Google colleagues. Said one: “You’re a misogynist and a terrible human. I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you.” Nearly every person in the country had an opinion on his memo.
Less than one month after Damore wrote it, he was fired. And, with the exception of a single, short-term stint at a start-up, he was banished from working in tech for eight years. “It became impossible to find a job,” he said. “Literally. I went to hundreds of places.”
Damore became one of the early victims of cancel culture, which reached its apotheosis in the summer of 2020 after the killing of George Floyd.
An early example of cancel culture, and an especially prominent case of collective feminine social aggression which found a scapegoat and used him to build their own status and satisfy their dark emotional urges.
The NIH has instituted a 15% cap to indirect costs, commonly referred to as overheads. This has universities squealing. Overheads are meant to offset the budgetary strain research groups place on universities, covering the costs of the facilities they work in – maintenance, power and heating, paper for the departmental printer, that kind of thing. Universities have been sticking a blood funnel into this superficially reasonable line item for decades, gulping down additional surcharges up to 50% of the value of research grants, a bounty which largely goes towards inflating the salaries of the little armies of self-aggrandizing political commissars with titles like Associate Vice Assistant Deanlet of Advancing Excellence who infest the flesh of the modern campus like deer ticks swarming on the neck of a sick dog.
A 15% overhead cap, if applied across the board, has an effect on the parasitic university administration class similar to a diversity truck finding parking at a German Christmas market. Thoughts and prayers, everyone.
Mar. 18th, 2025
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If Biden wasn’t giving his consent to these autopen-signed documents, then who the hell was? A key testimony is Speaker Mike Johnson’s, who alleges Biden couldn’t recall signing a recent executive order bearing his signature. It has been widely alleged and believed that Biden’s presidency was simply a third Obama term, with shadowy figures calling the shots to unravel Trump’s 2017-21 reforms and weaken America further. Trump’s call for a thorough investigation of this, if it gets the standard committee treatment, may only produce sternly worded letters but it will raise major awareness to the extent foreign and domestic special interests have been controlling American politics for years (even foreign governments you’ve been told are friendly to U.S. interests).
The human brain has two systems:
a non-rational system (which psychologists call “System 1”) and
a non-rational system (which psychologists call “System 2”)
Ideologies originate from the non-rational system, but they are expressed to others via the rational system.
Cluster B personality disorders are the foundation of almost all radical ideologies.
As long as the American upper class is dominated by Left-of-Center ideologies, the nation will be vulnerable to moral panics that grow out of the Central Moral Dilemma of the Left. As long as they preach the goal of Equality via our institutions, there will always be a new generation of uncompromising Leftists willing to shame the older generation for not creating Equality and living in hypocrisy.
Mar. 18th, 2025
:As a first generation, ESL immigrant I appreciate this.
Mar. 18th, 2025
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Most scientific research is of vanishingly small general interest: it is designed to appeal to scientific bureaucracies, not to the lay public ... by no accident, state funding for the arts has a similar effect on the arts that bureaucratic committees fund. Scientific research tends to be extremely slow, and its results uncertain; a researcher cannot guarantee that he will find anything interesting in a given amount of time, especially within the boundaries of short public attention spans. Finally, much scientific research is very expensive, particularly relative to the degree of public interest that it can generate: a facility such as CERN runs easily into the billions of dollars, but does the general public care enough about what colour quarks are for a billion people to agree to pay a dollar each to keep the charged particles colliding?
Many of these problems are not really problems with a crowdfunding model, but problems with the modern scientific culture, which has been warped by the imperatives of scientific bureaucracy. If a research team wants to conduct an extraordinarily expensive series of experiments, but cannot generate enough public interest to convince some fraction of the public to pay for those experiments, are those experiments actually worth doing? Is it ethically permissible to use the tax dollars confiscated from the public to fund a small number of people to develop what is essentially a hobby that no one really cares about? Conversely, if scientists had to obtain their own funding from an interested public, would this not realign scientific inquiry towards questions that people actually care about, as supposed to questions that provide bureaucrats with a cozy feeling of job security?
Mar. 18th, 2025
:Right now, the Democratic Party does not have a communication or messaging problem. The real issue is that its elite leadership does not want what most Americans want, because truly democratic reforms would undermine their own interests. The public wants robust institutions of self-governance—like competitive primaries that could challenge entrenched figures such as Nancy Pelosi or Jim Clyburn. But that level of internal democracy runs counter to the priorities of party elites.
All the talk of a “messaging problem” often just covers up political cowardice. As Orwell himself observed, much unclear communication stems from fear: we’re afraid to say what we think, and after a while, that fear erodes our ability to think clearly in the first place.
Freddie deBoer:
The New York Times’s war on psychiatry never ends. The paper that wants you to believe that you can cure schizophrenia with Zumba classes and that all psychotic patients can be controlled with a kind word has a dim view of conventional mental healthcare…
…in their effort to flatter the biases of their affluent urbanite liberal subscriber base, the Times exclusively fixates on patients who are utterly, comically unrepresentative of those with serious mental illness. In that regard, this latest piece truly goes to the next level. Delano, we’re told, is a Harvard graduate and former champion squash player - squash - who, as a child
stood out for her eloquence and charisma. She had grown up in Greenwich, Conn., where she was a top student and standout athlete. A relative of Franklin D. Roosevelt, she was presented as a debutante on two successive nights at New York’s Waldorf Astoria and Plaza hotels.
Greenwich, Franklin Roosevelt, the Waldorf and Astoria and the Plaza, fucking debutante balls…. It’s impossible that they don’t know how this all reads, and yet the piece does nothing to address the immense privilege here. There are desultory waves to the broader reality in the form of expert quotes, asking not to overgeneralize, and then those brief notes are drowned out by cheery talk about how Delano is now living her best life and helping others to live theirs by abandoning conventional psychiatric treatment - if they can afford to pay the $600 a month Delano and her partner charge for coaching, natch.
…the paper can’t stop publishing this sort of thing in general because it so perfectly flatters the biases of tony Brooklyn Heights creative-class millionaires who wax poetic about urban diversity before sending their kids to Miss Porter’s. If you’re the kind of cosseted wealthy coastal meritocrat who has utterly pruned your daily existence of exposure to the homeless and the criminal, then of course Laura Delano makes sense to you as some sort of avatar about what mental illness really is. And the alternative - going into the streets and into the subways and into the institutions and into the halfway houses and finding the grubby, sad reality of actual psychiatric crisis, the ruined lives and the broken people, the violence, the drug use, the unsanitary conditions, the total lack of basic human flourishing - is unpleasant for reporters to perform and unpalatable for audiences to read. So why bother?
Mar. 18th, 2025
I put no stock in religion. By the word religion, I've seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the "Will of God". I've seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves. And goodness - what God desires - [pointing at his head then heart] is here and here. And what you decide to do every day: you will be a good man… or not.
-Hospitaller, Kingdom of Heaven (film)
David Dennison has an excellent piece entitled “Why Americans don’t fear dictatorship”, and in that post he summarizes the phenomenon nicely:
The social justice gremlins forgot themselves. They forgot the number one rule of being an authoritarian thug: you have to leave your victims with something. You can’t take it all. If you do, they have nothing left to lose.
We saw this phenomenon play out in the recent election; everyone thought it was going to be a referendum on women’s rights, but in actuality, men proved to be the critical factor — specifically, the fact that Democrats have all but alienated them, instead adopting social messaging that has very little to do with their daily existence.
This pattern of behavior is stable across many different centuries, and throughout completely different parts of the world. This suggests the reasons for this behavior go beyond cultural mechanisms — rather, it’s at least partially a byproduct of biology and evolution.
Hell, we can even see the same patterns play out in other mammal species.
But this is territory that feminist think pieces will never truly analyze — rather, it’s a lot easier for them to sit back and pretend that patriarchy just spawned out of nowhere, that it’s this nameless faceless villain that needs to be destroyed. That way, they don't have to think too hard about the conditions that made it happen, or the role that they themselves are playing in creating the very thing they're supposedly trying to solve.
Mar. 19th, 2025
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Few Americans realize that when they pay taxes to support scientific research, a sizable portion of that money never funds a single experiment. Instead, billions flow into the coffers of universities under the vague banner of “indirect costs”—funds earmarked for lab upkeep, administrative overhead, and other institutional expenses. In February 2025, the Trump administration sought to upend this system by pressuring the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to cap indirect costs on research grants at 15 percent—a sizable cut from the current average of around 30 percent, with rates at elite institutions often much higher. The announcement was met with strong resistance, triggering lawsuits from 22 states and a coalition of universities, who cried foul over the potential $4 billion annual hit to their budgets. A federal judge has since halted the policy with a nationwide injunction, but the controversy has exposed a deeper issue: the public has little understanding of how their tax dollars, ostensibly meant for medical research, are actually spent.
My radical feminist friends in ‘gender critical’ politics were all purged from the progressive institutions a decade ago. Women that I know were cancelled for opposing men in women’s sports, prisons, and rape shelters, for objecting to ‘sex work,’ for questioning the wisdom of pediatric sex changes.
To name just one of them, Kara Dansky left the ACLU and wrote a whole book called The Reckoning that warned Democrats they were losing women like her. Democrats ignored her and they have lost women like her ever since.
Likewise, anyone who resisted the progressive cause du jour was subject to un-personing for any reason. J.K. Rowling became an ‘actual Nazi’ for funding a women’s rape shelter that refuses to admit men.
The reader is free to consult Bluesky for examples of the ‘toxic activism’ genre. From comic books to role playing games to video games to movies, the wokening of culture has been a complete creative disaster that chases out talent, rewards mediocrity, and bleeds away billions in venture capital funding. This has happened to Democrats, too.
Belief in the inevitability of a progressive generation misled Democrats into putting the young radicals in charge. Now they don’t know how to rescue their brand. The people who knew how to do that have all been purged, or else learned to be silent.
Mar. 20th, 2025
:The longhouse is the opposite of bromance, full of fake passive-aggressive cattiness. Its DNC.AWFL.PMC are overwhelmed. They cannot update their NPC chips fast enough to respond coherently. As soon as they cobble together copy pasta to retort Trump, Elon, JD, and battalions of memesmiths have fired off numerous other messages that make their heads explode. They have lost all sense of humor and can only passive aggressively snark from the sidelines. DOGE accomplishes in a day what used to take years. We are running AI, they are stuck on an analog IBM mainframe.
Mar. 20th, 2025
:Mark Lilla says,
The drop in trust in public institutions is not, in my view, that these institutions have become extremely less trustworthy, but that there’s been a rise in expectations because we feel we know everything about government because we could turn on a podcast and hear about it, that we don’t put ourselves in the shoes of real people who have to make real decisions under all the constraints I mentioned earlier.
He has just been talking about the pandemic. I feel more sympathy for the public than for the government figures. If the government figures were more humble, less controlling, and more apologetic for mistakes, then they would have my sympathy.
If we systematically infantilize adults then we will also erode the protections of childhood. That’s the final barrier for those who want to abolish all social norms and certainties. They want to, in effect, take the place of the group we now regard as vulnerable and worthy of protection: children.
The strategic genius of wokeness was that they were able to make their 20 side of the 80-20 issue seem like an overwhelming majority, using civil rights law and social media mobs. Abundance Democrats are a movement that somehow manages to make their own 80 side look like the 20 side.
There’s a positive relationship between disagreebleness and having a higher share in political economy. It’s no coincidence that unions, boomer environmentalists, and other special interests have so much control over the left. Speaking from experience at an operational, descriptive level, this is obviously true.
It’s not inevitable that Abundance advocates are agreeable. Some of my most important work was mobilizing Abundance-minded people in AI to agitate for clear red lines. Of course, it helps that AI Doomers who are over-the-top fraudsters, totalitarians, and two-faced liars even by the standards of modern politics. But believe it or not, the Abundance crowd struggles to condemn even them. The day Abundance Democrats are able to tell Gen Z and Gen Alpha that Ralph Nader has stolen their future for the luxury and virtue signalling of boomers is the day I’ll believe they have a chance at changing the Democratic party. I don’t expect that day to come soon.
The worst part of this is that boomer environmentalists are veritably some of the most vile, destructive, and selfish people alive. They have literally stolen my future and the future of those I love. They deserve all the insults I have to give and more. Boomer environmentalists deserve to be exiled from polite society. They have done more harm to this country than any number of twitter anons tweeting racial slurs.
Mar. 20th, 2025
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How to keep Africa poor:
1. Make business registration take 6 months and beyond
2. Charge huge tariffs on basic supplies
3. Require 44 procedures to file a form
4. Blame "capitalism" when nothing works
5. Ask for more foreign aid
Congratulations! You've mastered African governance!
Mar. 23rd, 2025
:Cultural commissars produce narratives. Fake news commissars repeat them. Political commissars legislate them. That is how our theater kid occupied government detaches itself from reality and manufactures its own. The counter-cultural revolution must build a flywheel that saves our civilization from this death spiral.
Netflix propaganda is insidious because it reaches far more people and becomes the basis for their understanding of the world. MSM reinforces it. They know exactly what they are doing with these provocations. Normies never see the real crime statistics on X/Substack, even though AI makes that information easily accessible. A Chinese filmmaker would never cast Indians to play ancient emperors, but the white liberal mind is beyond repair. Societies that desecrate their own histories and disrespect their own people have all but given up on themselves.
For a long time I’ve wanted to put together proof and pinpoint exactly why the field of Psychology is contributing to our poor mental health. Have a look!
“The influence of relativism is evident in academic institutions. Cambridge University, a leading authority in psychology education, openly embraces postmodernist relativism, cambridgeinternational.…
"No view in psychology is definitive.”
If no view is definitive, then contradictory theories can coexist indefinitely, no matter how unscientific some may be. This is why Freud’s thoroughly debunked theories—like the Oedipus complex and repressed memories—are still taught in psychology programs alongside behavioral neuroscience and cognitive psychology, as though all theories are equally valid.”
Mar. 24th, 2025
:Mark Carney has become Canada’s new prime minister. His only real competitor was the shrill Chrystia Freeland, who in addition to being as charismatic as nails on a chalkboard, was tarnished by her long association with Trudeau’s cabinet as his right-hand girlboss. No one seriously expected her to win, and she didn’t.
I don’t for a moment think that Carney actually values Canada’s heritage, or its founding peoples. He is in unambiguous alignment with the forces that want to dismantle Western civilization down to its foundations and plow the ruins into the burnt soil, with Anglo civilization first on the chopping block, and so far deepest into the deracinating meat grinder.
Canada will attempt to rebuild its military. The absolute current state of the Canadian Armed Forces is proverbial at this point. Decades of underfunding and social engineering have left it a pathetic, demoralized shadow of its former self. I’m skeptical that this can be fixed in a short time-frame. As it is, Canadians have no interest in serving, leaving the CAF (pronounced ‘caff’, for my American readers) unable to maintain even its atrophied size. As a result, a draft is already being floated in the national media, and there’s an active push to make it easier to recruit of non-citizens.
The military might tone back some of the woke stuff, while the aforementioned television shows celebrating the exploits of Canadian war heroes attempt to lure the white boys back. There will still be women in the combat arms, of course, and your career will still be ruined if you say a racism or a sexism, but the new line will be that maybe we were a bit harsh on the white guys, we’re all a team after all, let’s let bygones be bygones. All bullshit of course but they want those troops.
Mar. 24th, 2025
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…the US university system has become a pay for play cargo cult of fake degrees for fake learning for people whom it will never really benefit in any way. it’s just lake wobegon warehousing and credentialling building unrealistic hopes and debt levels.
we’re reaching a point where the whole affair has become outright embarrassing. the “democratization of college” whereby what was once an institution for the top 5% of humans has become one catering to a full 50% as some sort of daycare for dimwits lovechild with “rules for radicals” has turned universities into a joke and in increasingly unfunny one at that.
Freddie deBoer:
When people say DEI… they’re referring to a profoundly 21st century school of corporate identity progressivism. It’s a method of (appearing to) fight bigotry by raising the visibility of superficial diversity in the setting of the corporation, university, government agency, or nonprofit that’s implementing the DEI program; by instituting complex codes regarding language and symbolism that could potentially refer to identity categories; by rewriting the rules, in a corporate handbook or student code or similar; and in general by imposing a particular vision of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability that’s filtered through abstruse and obscure theories developed in humanities departments in the past quarter-century. Don’t think of old civil rights slogans like “Jobs & Justice,” think of terms like dysconciousness, centering, and misogynoir. Don’t think of sit-ins and marches, think of posters about Black excellence. Take civil rights in the most white-collar direction possible, anti-racism for the age of self-care, and you will have DEI.
Like liberalism in general, DEI is fundamentally a managerial philosophy - it’s built on the notion that injustice is ultimately a kind of HR violation that can always be remedied from above because the benevolent institution (corporation, nonprofit, etc) has unfettered power to respond to misdeeds. As a managerial philosophy, it exclusively seeks to reform institutions, never to tear them down, because it is the institution that is perceived to hold all power; indeed, managerial philosophies cannot comprehend of a world outside of the institution. There is no outside-the-institution, so therefore filling out form 51-J to report a Non-Consensual Triggering Event must be an effective remedy. This is part of why liberalism is so impotent in the present moment, because liberals cannot conceive of a vision of politics that isn’t fundamentally about asking Big Mommy to come spank the bad guys. And it’s why DEI is so bereft of solutions that could actually solve anything; you rewrite corporate handbooks and hold sensitivity trainings because your ethos fundamentally prevents you from doing things that might actually work. The institution can only conceive of initiatives that further the institution, but institutions are fundamentally part of the problem.
Mar. 24th, 2025
Jonathan Haidt:
What could cause such an international decline in learning? One plausible explanation is the arrival of the phone-based childhood, which, as we showed, arrived between 2010 and 2015. However, there is a related hypothesis that is more proximal to the educational decline: the sudden appearance of a laptop or tablet on every student’s desk. To be clear, the intentions here were good. In 2010, for example, the U.S. Department of Education recommended that schools provide every student with “at least one Internet access device…Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and technology-based software and resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered learning, and assessments that can improve learning in the ways this plan proposes.” But the outcome seems to be bad for most students—especially students who were already struggling.
Mar. 24th, 2025
:Large Democratic projects have drastically more middlemen than Republican projects. Democratic spending bills like the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the American Rescue Plan are by nature going to be more convoluted than Republican counterparts, because of each party's political coalition.
The problem is more acute in Left-dominated cities like San Francisco or Washington, D.C. For anything to happen, politicians must rise to the considerable task of appeasing all these interest groups, from social justice groups to unions to developer interests. “the inability or the unwillingness to choose among competing priorities — to pile too much on the bagel — is itself a choice, and it’s one that California keeps making,” Ezra [Klein] writes.
Mar. 24th, 2025
:it is… likely that most careers, or well, vocations, that it seems are lacking in interest today, are unwanted, undesired, and unchosen precisely because there’s not enough sight, knowledge, or positive talk right now going on about such things.
It’s not much of a novel claim to make, but if aspirations are mimetic, and not having such aspirations is because of a lack of mimetic example, an easy solution to the vocation crisis in the Church would be exposing the young more to religious vocation as a “normal” thing. LGBTQ…(?) activists know this. That’s why they go after the young so forcefully and predictably with their attempts to “normalize” such behavior within malleable young minds.
Paradoxically, it’s not that there’s something unpleasant and unappealing about the, well, “more liberal” and loose congregations. The problem is just that, along with being old, and seeming to be dying institutions closing off monasteries rather than growing, they’re too vanilla and too bland.
Where’s the glory in giving up marriage, family, and the world if you’re going to dress like the world, live like the world, listen to music like the rest of the world, and not really be all too separated from it in the way you live other than a much condensed Liturgy of the Hours, a few limitations, and living in a dying institution that’s glory days are, obviously, behind it? What are you aspiring to, if you were to desire it? Well, bluntly, to be part of something in decline and dissolution?
Mar. 25th, 2025
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If you actually get better, if you move from "I am traumatized" to "I am transformed," what happens to the multi-billion-dollar mental health industry? What happens to the self-help influencers who need you to keep scrolling for 5 signs your attachment style is ruining your life? What happens to the entire culture of victimhood, where status points are awarded for whoever has the most diagnosed scars?
Exactly. The system does not want you to transcend your suffering. It wants you to be emotionally aware just enough to recognize your pain, but not so much that you actually outgrow it.
Mar. 25th, 2025
:“But we do know some things. For starters, in most animal species, females are limiting for males,” I began.
“What is ‘limiting’?” Rosalie asked, pen poised.
“It means there aren’t enough of something, like females. In this case, it means that males could reproduce more if there were more females.”
“Why is that?” she pursued.
“Because the more matings any given male can get, the higher his chance of successfully reproducing. Increasing the number of matings a female gets, however, doesn’t significantly increase her chance of reproducing. From the males’ point of view, there aren’t enough females to go around,” I concluded. Rosalie had stopped writing, and was just looking at me.
“Consider humans, before birth control,” Jessica said. “A man who has sex with 20 women in one year has a chance of fathering 20 children; a woman who has sex with 20 men in one year can only become pregnant once.” This made more intuitive sense, and Rosalie nodded, and picked up her pen again.
“So,” I continued, “the asymmetry between males and females, regarding how many offspring can result from multiple partners, leads to similar ones in behavior and strategy as well.” Rosalie was writing furiously. “Because females are limiting for males, females are likely to choose among potential mates. Males, however—except for human males—are not usually apt to be choosy. Instead, males tend to compete amongst themselves, to impress females, or to control resources, like food, that females need.”
“So,” Jessica summarized, “costly traits like the peacock’s tail can be maintained in two ways: by female choice, or by male-male competition.”
“Male-male competition tends to be showy, with big or loud displays,” I said. “Male moose butting heads and antlers. Roosters crowing at each other. Male elephant seals viciously attacking other males who come near their harem.”
“But what about female choice?” Rosalie asked, intense. This she wanted to hear more about.
“Female choice is just as, if not more important, than male-male competition. It’s not as photogenic, though. That makes it harder to identify. Typically, females choose mates by approaching the one they’ve identified as their favorite, and making it clear that they’re sexually receptive,” I said.
“How do females identify their ‘favorites’? What do they look for?” Rosalie pursued.
“Females may make their choices based on some resource that the male is offering—a food source he defends, or paternal care he will give to his offspring.” I explained. “But more frequently, females seem to choose mates on the basis of their genetic quality…”
“How does a female recognize genetic quality?” Rosalie asked. “Humans can’t assess that, can we?”
Mar. 26th, 2025
:cults always reserve their most vicious vitriol for the apostate. it’s how they prevent defection. it’s just the mafia axiom of “now youse can’t leave” attached to tribal members who cultivate the sort of “longhouse” forced consensus culture that demands obedience.
but this current iteration is going to be a self-melting iceberg because contempt is a funny thing and a fickle one and it’s easy to step over lines and suddenly become its object.
the “hard left” is exploding in rage and cognitive overload led by its worst and least stable and being on (or having to defend) team crazypants will become increasingly unpalatable and untenable.
most of the left is not like this. most of them do not want this. they will seek distance from it as the whole center sees what’s going on and recoils isolating the hard left ever further.
Mar 26th, 2025
:…you will also notice that those who are more prone to anxiety, those who are more autistic, and those who are dealing with emergencies or traumas tend to lose their ability to engage with symbols and metaphor that aren’t already entirely habituated. The attempt to strip reality down to the studs in order to make it easier to manage is a way of turning a chaotic threat into something manageable—and it’s why people who spend long periods in emergency-mode tend to suffer a thinning of relationships, loss of meaning, depression, and develop inappropriate reactions. They’re doing the emotional equivalent of looking at the world through a protective squint, filtering out everything but the brightest lights, so that they can feel sure of seeing the greatest threats and protecting themselves from them.
These kinds of ideas, which are so prominent and pervasive now, didn’t even exist 100 years ago. They are a completely novel development in human society. As is the widespread empowerment of women, and the bureaucratization of every aspect of our life.
Mar. 27th, 2025
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One way to distinguish between a real crisis and a manufactured crisis is to see if people still care a week later. By that standard, we don’t have many real crises.
Remember that most of the ‘crises’ you see are distorted/manufactured/confabulated things. Why would the powerful invent crises? What are they trying to accomplish?
They’re attempting to protect the power structure, which they will not acknowledge even exists.
My goodness! What a list of wackiness. I have just two comments. (1) A sociopath is one that feels no compassion or guilt. (e.g. Joe Biden). (2) Leviathon is a concept that will never be fully realized - not even in communist China. Here in the USA, where we have led the world in insanity, in stupidity, in fear of tiny minorities of mentally disturbed freaks (e.g. Trannies). If there is to be a history, it will record the Obama/Biden years as the years when insanity and stupidity ruled the USA.
Great compilation as always James.