Links - 18th October 2025 (Inflation)

Catastrophic elite failure is destroying the economic foundations of the West - "Easy money has already convinced politicians that they no longer have a budget constraint and it is safe to turn on the spending taps. People’s QE, which started as a fringe hard-Left idea, is mainstream; many “experts” now argue that we should increase our “excessively low” national debt by at least 50 per cent.  Cheap money is even behind the rise of the woke corporation, including the emergence of an unproductive yet highly paid segment of the middle class devoted to virtue-signalling. Inflation, by damaging risk-free savings such as cash and gilts, has encouraged riskier investment in stocks and shares, helping big fund managers, especially those that operate tracker funds, to tighten their grip. Because these funds don’t seek to beat the market, they have embraced an alternative role as woke enforcers, forcing private firms to sign up to endless green and social targets.  Cheap money has also encouraged companies to pursue low-profitability projects and to become lazier and less efficient. This has empowered the worst kind of corporate bureaucrat, sapped the dynamism of many firms and encouraged them to self-indulgently put wokery before profits."
From 2021

Meme - "Our raise *woman with small breasts*
Inflation *woman with big breasts*"

Opinion | How Inflation Killed Bidenomics - "I started noticing in 2018 that economists I knew were receiving grants from the California-based Hewlett Foundation. These grants were part of an organized effort to develop an alternative to neoliberalism, an intellectual framework that Hewlett said had “outlived its usefulness.” Hewlett defined neoliberalism as a paradigm focused on free markets, limited government, maximum growth and individuals competing to improve their welfare. This paradigm, Hewlett argued, led to a mistrust of government, fear of public investment, drive for deregulation and preference for free trade. It became prominent after the stagflation of the 1970s, which undercut the credibility of Keynesian demand-side macroeconomic policy. Hewlett argued that more recent developments—wage stagnation, wealth inequality, and some negative effects of free trade—had weakened the appeal of neoliberalism. It was time to birth something new, and the foundation would be the midwife... The Biden administration, unsurprisingly, made significant departures from neoliberalism. The administration’s economic strategy included industrial policy, worker power, antitrust policy, a shift away from free trade, and a reorienting of fiscal and monetary policy away from capital toward labor. Several of these measures yielded tangible results, but the new macroeconomic policy proved fatal for the administration. The Hewlett report insisted that neoliberalism had hurt workers by focusing on inflation rather than unemployment. Why was it, the report asked, that after a long period of rock-bottom interest rates, inflation was “too low”? The report asserted: “If economic developments over the past decade show anything, it is that there is greater headroom for spending without causing undue inflation.” Governments, Hewlett argued, can spend more on efforts to boost demand “without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.” A few months later, Mr. Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan, a nearly $2 trillion stimulus package on top of the trillions the Trump administration had spent during the pandemic. Three years later, the consumer-price index showed a 20% overall price increase. The inflation over which the Biden administration presided dramatically undermined Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects. Some Democratic-leaning economists have argued that inflation was a global, pandemic-induced supply shock on which fiscal stimulus had little or no effect. To his credit, Jared Bernstein, Mr. Biden’s chief economic adviser, doesn’t take this easy way out. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he said the inflation of recent years “was exacerbated by strong demand, no question. So I’m not giving fiscal policy a pass.” The Biden administration’s fiscal stimulus was developed within the intellectual framework that the Hewlett Foundation helped create. In 2021 Mr. Bernstein told the Times that the American Rescue Plan’s purpose was to “run the economy with a little more heat”—that is, to set aside inflationary concerns in favor of faster labor-market gains. “We certainly got more heat than I envisioned at the time,” he now admits, but he adds that 20-20 hindsight was a luxury the administration couldn’t afford during the pandemic. What about 20-20 foresight, which inflation-wary dissenters such as former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers offered early in 2021? It was the responsibility of the president’s political advisers, and of the president himself, to weigh the risks of pedal-to-the-metal economic stimulus. Mr. Biden should have understood the risks of rising prices: He was already in his second Senate term when inflation undermined President Jimmy Carter’s administration. Despite presiding over a slow recovery from the Great Recession, President Obama comfortably won re-election. Ms. Harris wasn’t so fortunate. That’s because while unemployment disproportionately affects a portion of the electorate, inflation hits everyone—especially working-class Americans who can’t evade its effects... Hewlett was right about the need for alternatives to the economic policies of recent decades. But in a democracy, such policies must pass the test of public approval. Pretending inflation wasn’t a big deal didn’t and won’t."
Weird. We keep being told that blaming governments for inflation is wrong, fake news and misinformation

Meme - "The DNC learning that women buy groceries more often than they get abortions"

Private-label food got more popular thanks to inflation — but now it's here to stay

McDonald's $5 meal deal blamed for demise of french fry factory - "Boss Thomas Werner said that demand for fries is falling because of smaller portion sizes included in discount deals. Burger King and Wendy's have near-identical $5 meals too... around 80 percent of french fries consumed in the US come from fast-food chains"

PepsiCo Ups Snack Sizes as Buyers Push Back on Shrinkflation - "PepsiCo announces that popular snack brands like Doritos, Lay's, Ruffles, and Tostitos soon will contain 20% more product without a price increase. This move comes after years of frustration as customers noticed their snack bags shrinking while prices remained the same. PepsiCo, the largest producer of salty snacks in the U.S., confirmed the change according to El Economista, attributing it to shifting consumer behavior. As snack portions shrank, many shoppers began opting for cheaper alternatives or private label brands from retailers like Walmart and Costco. This trend had a noticeable impact on PepsiCo’s sales. In the third quarter of 2024, the company reported a 0.5% decline in snack sales compared to the same period in 2023, with snack volumes down by 1.1%, according to a report by Bank of America."

Did Inflation Save Us From 'New Progressive Economics'? - "President Joe Biden obviously was not the left's preferred candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary. But, as Prokop tells it, he staffed his administration with lots of ultra-progressive wonks and political operatives who wanted to overthrow the Democratic Party's perceived "neoliberal" consensus on trade and regulation in favor of aggressive anti-trust enforcement, proactive industrial policy, protectionism, and a massive increase in social spending. They basically got most of what they wanted, starting with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP)—a law pitched as a pandemic recovery bill that was stuffed full of progressive spending items. Now, however, depression is setting among the New Progressives. There's a good chance that no matter what happens in November, they'll see their influence and policy legacy crumble... they have only themselves to blame. Biden is historically unpopular. Voters give him extremely low marks for his handling of the economy, and they rank the economy as their number one issue. The president headed for defeat even before his disastrous debate with Trump. Polling has consistently shown that voters are mad about decades-high inflation and the cost of living specifically. Prices went up under Biden, voters got mad, and they stayed mad. Inflation didn't just happen on Biden's watch. His budget-busting American Rescue Plan—which dumped a bunch of monopoly money on an already recovering post-pandemic economy—predictably sent prices through the roof. At the time, "neoliberal" economists who'd held prominent positions in previous Democratic administrations, but had been largely replaced by the New Progressive types Prokop profiles, publicly warned that the ARP was too big and would generate lots of inflation. The New Progressives shrugged off these criticisms as reactionary snipping from careerists steaming over their loss of power and influence. But neoliberals turned out to be right. Progressive dismissals of their warnings ended up endangering their entire political project... While high inflation makes voters mad about the status quo, it also leads them to endorse dangerous policies to counter it. While Harris is not running as a progressive firebrand, she has been willing to endorse radical price and rent controls to deal specifically with the problem of rising prices. If she wins in November, it's possible she'll press for those policies—and we'll have inflation to thank for that too."
Left wingers just blame "corporate greed" instead

Americans Feel Poorer Because They Are Poorer - "Many progressives would chalk up the prevailing negative economic mood to poor messaging and flagrant disinformation. Conservative politicians and pundits, they say, keep telling their supporters that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have failed miserably on the economy, causing average Americans to conclude that the economy is far worse than it really is. If people stopped listening to this propaganda, reviewed the data, and trusted the experts, they would realize their good fortune of being an American worker and consumer in the year 2024. However, there's more to the data than meets the eye, much of it demonstrating why Americans feel their quality of life has diminished over the past few years. In general, the headlines for the jobs reports don't distinguish between part- and full-time jobs, public- and private-sector jobs, and American and non-American workers. According to columnist Jeffrey Tucker, most of the surge in jobs has been in part-time, government-created positions held by non-Americans. Even if this all contributes to a higher GDP, each of these factors take a toll on Americans and their communities. More people are working multiple jobs, indicating that the cost of living has gone up for everyone. I know a number of teachers who have to supplement their income by taking on seasonal retail jobs, driving for Uber, or conducting extra duties during off-hours. Many live far from where they work because they can't afford houses in urban areas and end up commuting for hours each day. Even five years ago, this was rare; now, it's pretty normal."

Bonchie on X - "Shirtless dude holding a beer takes this CNN reporter apart after she suggests he shouldn’t care about inflation. King stuff."
Stephen L. Miller on X - "CNN having a harder debate with a shirtless rando than with the Democratic Party nominee is just about perfect."

Inflation and the Common Knowledge Game - "For months now, Missionaries large and small have been saying that inflation is here and inflation is well-embedded. But when the most powerful Missionary in the world, Jay Powell, says that inflation is no longer “transitory” … well, now everyone knows that everyone knows that inflation is here to stay. And when everyone knows that everyone knows that inflation is here to stay, ALL businesses can raise prices to maintain margins without fear of competitive pressure or customer pushback...  At whatever point in time you think inflation will start to fade, you are being too optimistic."
From December 2021. Inflation fell a lot faster than he claimed it would

Think corporate greed is the leading cause of inflation? Think again - "Some progressives have frequently blamed corporate greed for fueling the high cost of living that Americans are fed up with.  Yet new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco casts doubt on the greedflation theory.  Economists at the SF Fed found that corporate price gouging was not a primary catalyst for the inflation surge of 2021 to 2022.  The Fed researchers did find that some companies exercised pricing power by raising prices above their production costs – a gap known as markups.  For instance, markups spiked for gasoline, cars and other goods in 2021. Likewise, there were increased markups for repair, general merchandise, laundry, personal care and other services, according to the Fed...  When zooming out and looking at markups across the economy, the SF Fed economists found little evidence that price gouging was the main culprit.  “Aggregate markups – the more relevant measure for overall inflation – have stayed essentially flat since the start of the recovery,” the paper concluded. “Rising markups have not been a main driver of the recent surge and subsequent decline in inflation during the current recovery.”   In fact, the SF Fed found that the path of collective markups over the past three years “is not unusual compared with previous recoveries.”  This runs counters to the argument from some progressives including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who for years has refocused the inflation argument on corporate greed.  “Right now prices are up at the pump, at the supermarket, and online. At the same time, energy companies, grocery companies, and online retailers are reporting record profits,” Warren said in December 2021. “That’s not simply a pandemic issue. It’s not simply some inevitable economic force of nature. It’s greed—and in some cases, it is flatly illegal.”  More recently, President Joe Biden has called out corporate greed as a reason prices remain high...   Although the paper did not directly mention corporate greed, shrinkflation or Biden, the research undercuts the argument that greedflation drove the early inflation...  Consumer sentiment, a metric closely tracked by the White House, unexpectedly tumbled to a six-month low at the start of May. It was the biggest one-month drop in nearly three years, a deterioration driven in part by concerns about inflation and interest rates.  Greg Valliere, chief US policy strategist at AGF Investments, said the White House is “desperate to blame someone or something for inflation.”  “Blaming greedy corporations is just looking for scapegoats,” Valliere told CNN. “There’s no prescriptions here that would have a major impact quickly, other than the Fed reluctantly raising interest rates – an option that, incredibly, isn’t out of the question.”   Many economists blame the recent inflation surge on more traditional factors, namely higher production costs linked to swings in demand and Covid-era supply trouble...   Last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that corporate profits contributed 41% to inflation during the first two years of the Covid recovery.  However, that same Kansas City Fed paper noted that this is not unusual and corporate profits contributed even more (59% on average) to inflation during prior economic recoveries."

William Watson: Uh-oh, Democrats. New research says Americans don’t want any inflation - "The inflation rate that Americans preferred on average? Just 0.2 per cent — one-tenth the official Fed target. In total, the researchers found, 83.47 per cent of respondents preferred an inflation rate lower than what the Fed is aiming at... What the research makes most clear, however, is that Americans really don’t like inflation. If you were running for president, having been vice-president to someone who had produced nine per cent inflation in 2022, and having yourself signed the cynically named “Inflation Reduction Act,” you should probably worry about that."
Unfortunately the article doesn't go into why inflation of 0% might not be a good idea

Meme - "CORPORATE GREED TIMELINE
Postwar greed spikes *high inflation*
The good old days, when companies were generous *low inflation*
The Great Greed Explosion of the 70s *high inflation*
Gordon Gekko *high inflation*
The Long Generosity of the 80s and 90s *low inflation*
extreme generosity in 2008 *low inflation*
The return of greed *high inflation*
A history of the times when corporations decided to be greedy, or generous, suddenly and for no particular reason."

How McDonald's became the villain of the inflation story - "In the national food fight over who is to blame for inflation, the casual-dining stalwart Chili’s has a new campaign that singles out one villain in particular: fast food. A new arcade-era-style promotional game pushing a deal involving its Big Smasher burger invites players to square off against “the evil Fast Food Syndicate,” which for years has “raised burger prices and lowered quality, even on its so-called ‘value meals.’...  the president of McDonald’s USA, Joe Erlinger, went so far as to publish an open letter pushing back on “viral social posts and poorly sourced reports that McDonald’s has raised prices significantly beyond inflationary rates.” He denied, for example, online chatter that the average price of a Big Mac is up 100% since 2019; it’s up 21%, he said, pointing to economy-wide inflation pressures.  Still, that’s a notable increase, and this week—in a sign that McDonald’s is taking the gripes seriously—it rolled out a new limited time $5 meal deal (joining a number of fast-food competitors offering value promotions). In addition, the chain announced new promotions tied to its app, most notably a Free Fries Friday offer running through the end of the year. Even this has been met with some skepticism: On social media, Mickey D critics argue that the company only wants to lure in-app users to collect data, and perhaps eventually implement a surge pricing scheme. This is largely speculation... the burger giant has been dogged by viral anecdotes of surprisingly high prices at some specific franchises—a $17.59 Big Mac meal, $5.69 for hash browns, and so on. Still, well into 2023, the company seemed able to shrug off such tales because it was among those whose customers were apparently willing to absorb higher prices; in the first quarter that year, same-store sales rose a robust 12%.  More recently, that’s changed. In a May survey of 2,000 consumers conducted by LendingTree, 65% said they’d been “shocked” by a high fast-food bill in the past six months. Nearly 80% consider fast food a “luxury,” and 62% say they’re eating it less. (Notably, 78% say they are concerned about the potential for surge pricing.) A separate Axios Harris poll, also from May, found trust scores for big quick-service brands including McDonald’s had fallen, and chalked up the dip largely to higher prices and/or “shrinkflation” (that is, smaller portions)... Olive Garden and other such chains seem to collectively sense an opportunity—partly because they offer a better experience for the money, and their prices have risen less than those in the fast-food category. “We turned up the heat on fast food,” Chili’s marketing chief said in a statement, noting that its Smasher Burger deal is year-round, not a one-off. And as the CEO of Applebee’s added, its burger deal isn’t something you “eat in a bag out of your car.””

This Canadian restaurant just lowered its prices. Here's how it did it - "A Canadian restaurant lowered its prices this week, and though news of price tags dropping rather than climbing sounds unusual, the business strategy in this case is not, according to experts in the field.  Kinton Ramen, founded on Baldwin Street in Toronto in 2012, lowered the cost of its ramen bowl by approximately $2 on Monday, from $17 to $14.99.  The answer to the obvious follow-up question – how did a local business bring prices down while food costs remain high? – is simple: franchising... The expansion, which now spans Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, Illinois and New York, has enabled the restaurant to negotiate with suppliers, according to Kinka Family Senior Director of Franchise Development, Karalyn White."

Americans Are Mad About All the Wrong Costs - The Atlantic - "it is the big-ticket, fixed costs that have had the most deleterious impact on family finances over time. These are the costs that are truly sapping average Americans’ ambitions to get ahead, and they are not going down. From the aughts until the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, inflation was essentially a nonissue in American life. The country was suffering from anemic growth and anemic demand: low interest rates, low productivity growth, stagnant wages, and high inequality. The only upshot, really, was that prices were stable and stuff was cheap... For decades, continuously high prices on big-ticket goods and services have been quietly eating away at American incomes and forcing families to make miserable financial decisions: to delay getting married, to give up the dream of a third kid, to settle in an exurb rather than a city, to put off starting a business.  First, and by far worst, is housing. When the real-estate bubble collapsed during the George W. Bush administration, residential construction cratered and never fully recovered. We are building as many homes now as we were in 1959, though the population has doubled... Second is the cost of health care. The United States spends 17 percent of its GDP on health services, nearly twice the OECD average, for no better outcomes... Third, child care... These obscene costs for working families do not translate into living wages for child-care workers, many of whom live in poverty... No wonder Americans report feeling like they just are not able to get ahead, no matter how much they are earning. In interviews, many folks tell me they simply do not believe that wage growth has outpaced inflation, or that wage growth has been stronger for low-income families than for high-income families, or that middle-class families are wealthier today than they were a few years ago, or that inflation has cooled off to unremarkable levels, despite all of those things being true... Washington has a huge range of options to increase demand in the economy. It can send families checks, amp up unemployment-insurance payments, and cut interest rates down to scratch. It has very few options to control costs and even fewer to increase supply, particularly because building homes, hiring nurses, and constructing new day-care centers would be inflationary in and of itself."

Opinion: Beyond the Bank of Canada’s rate hikes: The era of low interest rates is over - The Globe and Mail - "in the wake of the pandemic and amid the tensions with China and Russia, businesses are now shifting their supply chains to build resilience and reduce risk. Future capital investment will be determined by more than just the cost of production, including geopolitical risk and ESG considerations. This will raise prices and make it harder for central banks to control inflation. Moreover, the aging population across the Western world, including Canada, and the retirement of baby boomers has started to materially affect Canada’s labour market. Immigration will take some of the pressure off, but it will not solve Canada’s labour supply and skills shortages. There will also be more international competition for talent. Labour scarcity at home and abroad should raise the cost of labour, which will be passed along to consumers with higher prices unless firms find a way to materially boost productivity... during the pandemic, firms discovered the vulnerability of just-in-time inventory systems, in which goods are ordered from suppliers only as needed. Many firms could not meet demand from existing stockpiles. To reduce this risk, businesses may carry higher inventory levels, and this means more volatility in stockpiles as demand ebbs and flows. The greater inventory swings can add to economic volatility and, in turn, greater volatility in interest rates."
ESG has very real harms

Starbucks, McDonald's, Yum earnings show consumers pulling back - "It’s finally here: the long-predicted consumer pullback.  Starbucks announced a surprise drop in same-store sales for its latest quarter, sending its shares down 17% on Wednesday. Pizza Hut and KFC also reported shrinking same-store sales. And even stalwart McDonald’s  said it has adopted a “street-fighting mentality” to compete for value-minded diners.  For months, economists have been predicting that consumers would cut back on their spending in response to higher prices and interest rates. But it’s taken a while for fast-food chains to see their sales actually shrink, despite several quarters of warnings to investors that low-income consumers were weakening and other diners were trading down from pricier options... Restaurant Brands International’s Popeyes reported same-store sales growth of 5.7%."
Terrorism supporters were cheering and claiming their boycotts were responsible. But Popeyes is on the boycott list too

Apple stops selling iPhones and other products in Turkey as lira plunges - "People in Turkey have seen error messages as they attempt to buy iPhones and other products from Apple, as the country’s currency plunged.  Users were able to browse the Apple Store website but found they were unable to check out.  The problems come amid a historic 15% plunge in the lira the day before caused havoc for prices.  The currency slipped back towards its record low on Wednesday, driven by worries over broader fallout for the economy after President Tayyip Erdogan defended recent sharp rate cuts despite widespread criticism and calls for a reversal.  The lira has lost 43% of its value this year and more than 22% since the beginning of last week alone... A sales representative at an Istanbul Apple store told Reuters people were thinking of electronics as an investment as much as items to use.  “It is pretty surreal with the economy and all, but people see it as a store of value and flock to stores. They know they’ll be able to sell it a year later for more than what they paid,” the person said, requesting anonymity."
From 2021

Links - 17th October 2025

Ottawa-imposed 'airport rent' is driving up cost of plane tickets, think tank finds - "The average airport improvement fee charged on a Canadian domestic flight is $38, according to Westjet . This is twice the corresponding Australian fee and four times more than what U.S. air travellers pay on their tickets. Canadian air travellers also pay higher airport security charges and, indirectly, aviation fuel excise taxes than their Australian and U.S. peers. All told, MEI found that government-imposed taxes, fees and rent charges made up as much as 43 per cent of ticket prices along major domestic routes. “Reducing the cost of air travel is entirely within Ottawa’s control, because it is Ottawa that is driving prices up in the first place,” said Dagres. Dagres and her colleagues found that the government-levied charges on a Toronto to Montreal flight alone ($68) were enough to pay for a budget flight from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. This isn’t the first time that Ottawa’s ownership of airport lands has been tied to higher ticket prices. A Senate committee recommended in 2013 that Transport Canada make a plan to phase out rental fees and transfer ownership of airports to the airport authorities that operate them. “Many witnesses raised concerns that these rents do not take into account the differing state and value of airport facilities when they were first transferred to the airport authorities … Since the airport authorities are mandated to be not-for-profit entities, witnesses told the committee that these costs are recovered from users,” wrote committee members in the accompanying report. This recommendation was never followed up on, despite the subsequent spike in rent costs... Polls show that Canadians are largely dissatisfied with the quality and selection of domestic air travel. A recent Leger/National Post study found that half of Canadians are open to allowing U.S.-owned airlines to fly domestic passenger routes in Canada."
Time to blame greedy airline companies for high ticket costs

Jesse Kline: Air Canada strike brought to you by the Liberal government - "For years, the Liberals have worked to increase the power of Canada’s labour unions, and the monster they created is now coming back to bite them as Air Canada’s flight attendants walk off the job, grounding hundreds of flights... The contract between the airline and its flight attendants ended in March , but the union waited until the height of the summer travel season to walk off the job, in a move that has so far affected around 500,000 travellers. Thanks to legislation passed last year that banned the use of replacement workers in federally regulated industries, including air travel, the union knew the airline would have little recourse if its members hit the picket line... after Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu ordered the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to force the flight attendants back to work and send the parties to binding arbitration on Saturday, Mark Hancock, CUPE’s national president, tore up the back-to-work order and vowed to challenge it... The situation highlights the catch-22 the Liberals now find themselves in: their interventionist, pro-labour policies have reduced the incentive for unions to settle disputes at the bargaining table, forcing Ottawa to step in to alleviate the resulting political headache caused by major disruptions in markets that are dominated by a few large players. It’s a classic case of the state stepping in with Big Government policies to fix problems caused by other interventionist measures... the government should follow the advice of its own Competition Bureau, which released a report in the spring advocating for more competition in Canada’s airline market. To be sure, there have been some noticeable improvements in recent years. According to the competition watchdog, thanks to upstart airlines like Porter and Flair, market concentration dropped by 10 per cent between 2019 and 2023. But Air Canada and WestJet still account for between 56 and 78 per cent of all domestic passenger traffic departing from Canada’s major airports. This is a direct result of government policies that favour incumbent carriers, increase costs and limit foreign ownership and competition... New carriers are also constrained by airport procedures, which often favour incumbents. Smaller, secondary airports in major cities can provide consumers and airlines with more options, but are hamstrung by the size of their runways and legal restrictions that only allow one international airport in certain regions. A good example is Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport, which is often cheaper and more convenient than Pearson Airport, but was prevented from hosting long-haul flights when the Liberals kiboshed plans to extend its runway to accommodate passenger jets in 2015. Yet the biggest impediments to airline competition are the government’s restrictions on foreign ownership and its prohibition on foreign carriers flying domestic routes. In 2018, Ottawa increased the share of Canadian airlines that foreigners are allowed to own, but the Competition Bureau doesn’t think it went far enough. It recommends the rules be changed so that a single foreign investor can own up to 49 per cent of a Canadian carrier, and that the government create a new class of airline that can only serve domestic routes but can be fully owned by non-Canadians. The competition watchdog also suggests Ottawa start allowing “airlines from partner countries to fly domestic service within Canada.” This is an idea that was tried in the European Union in the 1990s and it worked spectacularly , leading to a 120 per cent increase in flights within the EU and a 400 per cent increase in routes served by at least two airlines between 1992 and 2008, according to European Commission data. Had something similar been implemented here, we could already be seeing foreign carriers diverting aircraft to Canadian routes to pick up the slack left by the Air Canada strike. For decades, Ottawa has chosen to maintain its protectionist policies, which only serve the interests of Canada’s two largest carriers. But if there was ever a time to institute substantive reforms, now is it. The election of U.S. President Donald Trump has forced Canadians to have a serious discussion about how to attract investment and improve our economy. Opening Canada’s airlines and airports to more competition would help attract foreign capital and make it less expensive for foreigners to come here and spend their money, and for Canadians to travel domestically (at the moment, it’s often cheaper to fly to another country than within Canada)."
Too bad left wingers hate competition and foreigners and love unions more than they love consumers

It's time to delete Tinder and Hinge: Here's the real reason why dating apps are dead - "if Spotify knows I’m experiencing a “dreamy, hazy Tuesday morning” then why can’t a dating app show me someone I’m compatible with? According to sociololist Dr Jennifer Lundquist, an expert in online dating, “most dating algorithms rely heavily on surface-level data” and this doesn’t put into consideration that people are attracted to differences, and they don’t work because they reduce romance to a formula that does not understand “chemistry, timing, or even nuance.”... Plus, there are other apps being used to meet people. Platforms such as Instagram, with its DMs and story replies, have become dating tools. People now meet via applications that weren’t even designed for it — even film platform Letterboxd has become a medium for flirting with strangers. The trick for straight guys is to put a Sofia Coppola movie in their top four and for the girls, a Paul Thomas Anderson flick. (Thank me later!)"
Feminists insisted men flirting with women was sexual harassment, so people had to move to apps

Catch ’em all but dump the fries. Pokémon fans leave McDonald’s Japan in massive food waste drama - "Piles of untouched Happy Meals littered sidewalks outside McDonald’s restaurants in Japan over the weekend, as frenzied customers scrambled to buy limited-edition sets with Pokémon cards. The promotional tie-up between McDonald’s and Pokémon ended just hours after it launched on Saturday as customers bought bulk orders of the meals to get their hands on an exclusive set of cards for resale, discarding the food entirely."
Japanese are becoming like Singaporeans?

Meme - "When u come over?"
"4:32"
"That's very specific. Any particular reason that time"
"If you think about it any time is a specific time. Like 4:00 is a specific time too. So it's no more specific than any other time"

Meme - "Anonymous participant: As a white woman I say Indian men are the hottest"
"Adam Yosef wants to post anonymously."

The instructions on this doormat are the best thing about it - "Important things you should know about your new doormat Warning:  Do not use mat as a projectile. Sudden acceleration to dangerous speeds may cause injury.  When using mat, follow directions: Put your right foot in, put your right foot out, put your right foot in and shake it all about.  This mat is not designed to sustain gross weight exceeding 12,000 lbs. If mat begins to smoke, immediately seek shelter and cover head.  Caution: If coffee spills on mat, assume that it is very hot. This mat is not intended to be used as a placemat. Small food particles trapped in fibers may attract rodents and other vermin.  Do not glue mat to porous surfaces, such as pregnant women, pets and heavy machinery. When not in use, mat should be kept out of reach of children diagnosed with CRED (Compulsive Fiber Eating Disorder).  Do not taunt mat."

Rita Issa on X - "Thinking about my friend who wanted to explore her bisexuality and finally plucked up the courage to go to an ‘introduction to beavers’ workshop at the lesbian camp at a festival we were at, and it was an ecologist talking about beavers (the mammal) for 90 minutes"

Meme - "THESE PICTURES OF HILARY DUFF GIVING A BLOW JOB AFTER GETTING PROPOSED TO ARE THE BEST THING ON THE INTERNET"

Meme - "Tight pussy is not for everyone. Side effects may include:
addiction
excitement
craziness
premature ejaculation
marriage proposal
unplanned parenthood
at times, death
Ask your doctor if tight pussy is right for you."

New York Post on X - "Florida man catches 87 invasive pythons in a month, awarded $1K through state incentive system"
null on X - "Interesting how a snake bounty system works in Florida but backfired in India, I wonder why"

Meme - "When was a kid, I kept wondering why Jessie & James chose to train Lickitung and Weepinbell, but now I understand.
James's Pokemon *Pokemon with big mouth*
Jessie's Pokemon *Pokemon with long tongue, with her lying down in front of it*"

Meme - "BY NOW, OUR MESSAGE SHOULD BE CLEAR. VOTE DEMOCRAT OR ELSE!" *Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton* *Buildings on fire and riots*

Meme - Bird 1: "HERE I GO ON THE DATING APPS AGAIN!"
Bird 2: "DEMI-SEXUAL ENM POLY, SWITCH, LF SAME"
Bird 1: "WHAT?"
Bird 2: "DEMI-SEXUAL ENM POLY, SWITCH, LF SAME"
Bird 1:
Bird 1: "WHAT?"

Meme - "If she doesn't know what time it is. She's too young for you, bro *Power Rangers*"

Meme - "HE PLAYED AS GENIUS WITH NORMAL HAIR *Human-looking Beast*
HE ALSO PLAYED AS GENIUS WITH TOO MUCH HAIR *Beast-looking Beast*
AND NOW HE PLAYS AS GENIUS WITH NO HAIR *Lex Luthor*"

Meme - "My girlfriend chose a work presentation over my mom's funeral, so I ended the relationship
I (29M) lost my mother to c*ancer two and a half weeks ago. She fought hard, but the disease had already spread too far. Her funeral was held earlier this week - one of the hardest days of my life. Before the funeral, I talked to my girlfriend (27F) and asked if she would come with me. Her response? She said she had a work presentation and a handover to complete, so she couldn't make it. I asked if she was seriously prioritizing work over supporting me during the worst moment of my life. I wasn't asking for much - just her presence, her support. I told her she could ask for a day off, use annual leave, even take a sick day. But she refused. She said I was being unfair and guilt-tripping her. That I'd have my family there anyway, so it "shouldn't be a big deal." But it was a big deal to me. The day of the funeral came. She didn't show up. I stood there, burying my mother, knowing the person I loved chose a PowerPoint over being by my side. Later that evening, when I got home, she asked how things went. I told her I didn't want to be with someone who couldn't do the bare minimum to support me when I needed her most. I ended the relationship. She accused me of taking my grief out on her and said she didn't do anything wrong. But in that moment, I realized something: When life gets hard, you need someone who shows up. And she didn't."
Clearly, a toxic manchild who hates women

Meme Windows 7: "DON'T FORCE ME TO INSTALL 10"
2025: Windows 10: "DON'T LEAVE ME"
"Do you use Windows 11 in your country?"
"/int/ernational reminder that no woman will ever look at you like this"

Meme - "The Missing Bell Brewpub
The
NAKED
truth about our
WAITRESSES
is they only
FLIRT WITH YOU
to get a better tip"

Meme - "When I find myself in times of trouble
Gordon Ramsey comes to me
Speaking words of words of wisdom
GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER"

Meme - "You call it trauma, I call it... SPICY MEMORY"

Indian Travel Company Advertises Latvian Women Are Available For Indian Men - "A Delhi travel company called Travel Breed made an advertisement saying that Latvian women are available to Indian men as a way to promote Indians to travel to Latvia. The advertisement, which now has been taken down, shows to be aiming at Indian singles by highlighting Latvia's gender imbalance. According to national statistics, Latvia has a higher proportion of women than men, with about 115 women for every 100 men.  The advetisement shows the caption:      Ever heard of a country where women outnumber men and are confident enough to make the first move?      Welcome to Latvia, one of Europe's most underrated gems -- not just for its eauty, but for its bold and modern social culture! Stunning streets, gothic charm, Baltic coastline, and...a twist in dating norms.      Latvian women are known to approach first, making it a destination that's fascinating beyond just travel guides!"

Thread by @SpencerJJoseph on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Ok, let's do this again.  Qatar For Dummies 🧵
1. Qatar is a tiny country with enormous wealth from oil and gas fields. Its 330,000 citizens make up only approx 10 - 15% of the total population, with the vast majority of residents effectively working as slaves ('migrant workers').
2. While residents can apply for citizenship after 25 years in the country, the process is rarely granted and citizenship is primarily inherited from a Qatari father.
3. All broadcasting outlets in Qatar are owned by the state, and most print media outlets have close ties to the government. Al Jazeera was established and is largely funded by the Qatari government to exert regional and international influence. Many privately owned media outlets are also aligned with the government or members of the royal family.
4. Qatar is a major foreign donor to US universities, influencing policy by contributing billions of dollars in recent decades. Some of these donations have gone towards establishing branch campuses of prestigious universities within Qatar, like Weill Cornell Medical College, Texas A&M University, Georgetown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
5. Qatar has been linked to multiple high-profile allegations of bribery or corruption in recent years. One case contributed to the downfall of the Democratic senator Bob Menendez in 2024. Another centred on a group of European parliamentarians in 2022 (Qatargate). Qatar has also faced longstanding allegations surrounding its successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
6. Several influential media figures in America are now believed to be in the pay of Qatar, and numerous lobbying and public relations firms in the US have been employed by Qatar to advance its interests and improve its image. Some of these firms have engaged in actions that have drawn legal scrutiny, including allegedly concealing their work on behalf of Qatar, according to federal prosecutors. Two former Republican political consultants, for example, admitted to deceiving the Justice Department about their lobbying activities for Qatar and concealing their efforts to influence US policy in the Middle East.
7. The Qataris are State financiers of jihad. The country is the world’s leading funder of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Qatar is a patron of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and hosts high ranking operatives from Hamas, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. It is also closely linked with the new (formerly al-Qaeda) government in Syria.
8. Qatar has acquired major brands, real estate and financial assets across The US & Europe. Qatar's acquisition of assets in the US focuses in particular on energy infrastructure and real estate through investments by QatarEnergy and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). Major energy investments include a $10 billion stake in ExxonMobil's Golden Pass LNG terminal and an $8 billion investment in the Golden Triangle Polymers plant.
9. Benjamin Baird’s investigation exposed the full scope of Qatar’s American enterprise : $33.4 billion into businesses and real estate; $6.25 billion to universities; $72 million to lobbyists. This includes QIA's 9.9% stake in Empire State Realty Trust (which owns the Empire State Building), a $700 million office tower in Long Island City, New York, and the $250 million Conrad Washington D.C. hotel.
Qatar is also a major player in European real estate and finance. It is a stakeholder in European financial institutions, including a 12.7% stake in Barclays bank, minority stakes in Credit Suisse Group and Deutsche Bank, and a 10.3% stake in the London Stock Exchange Group.
Reports and government statements from The US and UK have highlighted Qatari fundraising for extremist groups in Europe between 2004 and 2019, some of which had ties to ISIS and radical preachers.
Note : Qatar makes annual contributions to The UN of $100 million + and has co-sponsored 80%+ of anti-Israel resolutions since 2017, per UN data.
Additional note : Russia and Qatar maintain a strong and growing partnership across various sectors, including political, economic, trade and cultural areas."

George won't finish the series but not because he can't : r/freefolk - "I see people saying things like "he doesn't know what he is doing" and "he has far too many loose ends". I don't know if we read the same books but the books clearly shows the old man is smart and capable.  He won't write because he has no motivation to do so. Yes he is smart but he has a perfectionist side in him and it will take years and years of dedicated work. He struggled almost his whole life and now he has a huge amount of money and probably small amount of time to spend it.  So if it isn't money, what is left? Legacy? HBO left a huge pile of shit on his legacy and keep shitting on it with the new filler series. Conclusion for the series? We want it as readers, not him.  No guys. Instead of sitting in a room for years and writing a book like he did for a living for his whole life, George will travel the world, try to breed dire wolfs, participate in movies and games projects and whatever he enjoys."

Meme - George RR Martin: "YOU WORKED ON LORD OF THE RINGS FOR 16 YEARS"
JRR Tolkien: "I WAS A FULLTIME PROFESSOR AT OXFORD. I DID LORD OF THE RINGS IN MY SPARE TIME. WHATS YOUR EXCUSE?"

Meme - Mrs. Information @stephillipss: "Ass inflation is real  What was considered a nice butt in the 70’s was a plump, yet modest accessory. It looked cute in jeans- think Jackie Burkhart  Post modern ass is not only blatantly large, but it’s all-consuming- loud, uncouth. Still it is acclaimed.  We’re living in a time"

Police helicopter targeting cocaine crops downed by drone - "A Colombian drug gang used a drone to shoot down a helicopter transporting police officers targeting cocaine crops, killing 12 officers on board, the nation’s president said.  The attack in the northern region of Antioquia on Thursday came just hours before a truck loaded with explosives detonated near a military aviation school in the south-west city of Cali, killing at least six people and injuring more than 60.  Gustavo Petro, the country’s president, blamed both attacks on dissident members of the now-defunct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)."

The British state must trust its people - "A cynic might think that this non-committal approach indicates a Government more comfortable with maintaining a tight grip on the flow of information in controversial cases, rather than in trusting the public to behave responsibly when given access to the truth.   As the Southport riots among other events demonstrated, however, the maintenance of an official information vacuum creates room for rumours and misinformation to spread, sometimes with tragic consequences. And as we have seen, also, with the attempts to cover up the grooming gangs scandal, and the mass airlift of Afghans into Britain, that the long-term effect of this approach is to utterly destroy trust in the state institutions engaging in these efforts.  This is all the more so given the apparent willingness of agencies to release information when it can assist in shaping a narrative. When a car crashed into crowds in Liverpool earlier this year, Merseyside Police decided to disclose that the arrested man was a white British national. Indeed, this same willingness means that non-disclosure of available information is now taken by some as an indication of a non-white British background... Ultimately, however, the principles of democratic government demand that citizens are kept informed and that the state acts with their consent, rather than attempting to reshape public opinion to its liking."

Links - 16th October 2025 (Trans Mania: Graham Linehan)

The police are further to the Left than Owen Jones now - "If you’d have told someone 20 years ago that the police would become the most dangerously politically correct institution in Britain, they’d have scarcely believed you... Since then, we appear to have emerged into a parallel universe. Everyone in the British establishment suddenly believes in free speech and is denouncing Linehan’s treatment. Keir Starmer, with one eye on Washington, has told the police to focus on policing the streets rather than the tweets. Wes Streeting has suggested our speech laws should be reviewed. Even Owen Jones, cancel culture’s answer to Mary Whitehouse, has criticised the arrest, albeit while beating up on the poor bloke for being “beyond awful”.  Of course, this lot have often been deathly silent as scores of gender-critical women have been cancelled and harassed by the police for daring to advocate for their sex-based rights. (Though Streeting, to his credit, has been on more of a journey.) Even so, with the ignoble exception of new Green leader Zack Polanski – who has been on the airwaves this past 24 hours supporting Britain’s Poundshop Stasi to the hilt – the response to Linehan’s case among the faux-Left elite has been remarkably more reasonable. This tells us something about the state of the police, who have tumbled much further down the woke-authoritarian rabbit hole than many still realise. The explosion of speech-related arrests – the fact that police in England and Wales are now feeling the collars of at least 30 people a day for saying offensive things online – is as much about the zealotry of the cops as it is about what’s on the statute book. They often go well beyond what even our outrageously illiberal laws require. Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested at their home in Borehamwood in January, after they got into a protracted, largely online row with their daughter’s school. They were arrested at home, in front of their daughter, had their devices seized as if they were drug dealers or terrorists, interviewed and held for eight hours, and investigated for five weeks, only to be told that Hertfordshire Police would be taking no further action.  Or take the case of feminist Kate Scottow, who was arrested in 2018 for causing “needless anxiety’ to a man she dared to call “he” on social media. Shockingly, that case even got as far as a conviction. It took a subsequent appeal for our supposedly world-leading criminal-justice system to realise that, as of yet, it is not actually a crime to accurately describe someone’s sex. Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley claims that officers have been put in an impossible position by overly broad legislation. Following Linehan-gate, he too is calling for the law to be changed. But the truth is the police have been going out of their way to crack down on dissent and protect the public from hurtful words, even if it means letting a few burglaries and assaults slip. Non-crime hate incidents – the dystopian practice whereby cops secretly draw up lists of “hateful” speech or conduct – weren’t ushered in by an Act of Parliament, but by the College of Policing quango. In 2014, it published guidance instructing officers to automatically record reported “hate incidents”, “irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element”. Long derided as the armed wing of bigotry, police in recent decades appear to have made the most perverse over-correction. Rather than treat everyone fairly, they have concluded the best way to burnish their image is to act as the personal goon squad of brittle, identitarian activists, and become willing participants in the brainwashing offered by groups like Stonewall. They seem to have come to the conclusion that Britain’s sexual or ethnic minorities desperately want to be protected from offence, rather than actual crime. Now the authoritarian consequences of this woke glow-up are plain for (almost) all to see."
Two tier policing is a myth

Why has the Left abandoned free speech? - "This remarkable example of police and judicial overreach and disregard for free speech drew widespread condemnation, much of it from the Right and centre-Right. The government has also condemned the arrest but supported the laws under which it happened – surely an unsustainable position.  On the Left however there has been some support for Linehan’s arrest, most notably from the newly elected leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski. It seems from this and other incidents that support for free speech is now definitely Right-coded while the advocacy of censorship and regulation of speech and expression is clearly Left-coded... One reason perhaps is that the establishment is always hostile to free expression and the cultural Left is now the establishment. Arguably we have had a religious transformation, in which Christianity has been replaced by a kind of identity politics as the “public doctrine”: offences against it count as blasphemy to be punished.  Another major reason is a transformation in the concept or category of the Left. Its central meaning used to be an economic doctrine of egalitarianism and economic collectivism – which was compatible with classical liberal ideas about expression. It now has become a cultural doctrine. It is founded on ideas around identity, and the need to criticise subordination and domination. Since language and speech are held to play a key part in this, they can and must be regulated."
The right support freedom of speech. Therefore freedom of speech is bad

Britons can no longer honestly say we live in a free country - "If the police really had no choice but to make an arrest – a well-prepared and therefore time-consuming arrest in the case of Linehan, since he was cuffed as soon as he landed in Britain – they would have no choice but to arrest the legions of burglars and shoplifters who commit their crimes undeterred.   They would also lack the discretion to make other choices that prompt accusations of “two-tier justice”. In Epping for example, the police escorted professional agitators to counter locals protesting against the asylum hotel. But in London, officers stopped a Jewish campaigner walking through an anti-Israel march route to “prevent disorder”.  Just as they did with activists of other kinds, police forces  have chosen to enter the culture wars – siding with, funding and receiving training from the trans activists at Stonewall – and the consequences are clear.   But police culpability does not let the Government off the hook. Forces may choose to exercise their powers in these inappropriate ways, but they should not be free to do so, and if the law is abused it must change.   The explanation for forty-year-old laws suddenly being used to attack free speech probably reflects a change in police culture, especially among chief constables, the politicisation of police training, and the widening scope of the law encouraged by prosecutors and judges. Laws like the Equality Act and Human Rights Act, and the creep of so-called “non-crime hate incidents”, have also played their part. It is not good enough for the Prime Minister to blithely claim we do have free speech, or we do not have blasphemy laws, or deny the existence of “two-tier justice”. The buck stops with him, and if we want to preserve our right to free expression we need drastic change."

Green leader Zack Polanksi is a menace, but his deputy worries me most - "Ali declared that Israelis “are not victims, they’re occupiers”, and urged the world to “support the right of indigenous people” to “fight back against occupiers”. Now, I don’t know about you. But personally, I wouldn’t hail the single bloodiest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as a “fightback against occupiers”. Nor would I argue that the proscribed terrorist group Hamas had the “right” to perpetrate it... Polanski said it was “proportionate” to arrest the comedy writer, because his tweets about trans people were “totally unacceptable”... If Polanski thinks it’s fine to arrest someone for posting something offensive on social media, does he think his own deputy should have been arrested, too?"

Trans activist ‘threatened to sue police if they didn’t investigate Linehan’ - "He said: “I think [trans activists] get great joy out of destroying peoples lives.  “Just getting me into this seat is an end in itself. It is almost irrelevant if I get convicted. Putting me through this is enough. They are sadistic.”... Linehan told the court that he had been promoting the gender-critical movement for more than 10 years and trans activists had “made his life hell”. He said the campaign, which he felt he had a “moral duty” to pursue, had cost him his family, his friends, his career and led to him leaving the UK permanently... The comedy writer accused police of working on behalf of trans-activists and said he had received credible death threats but “nothing was done about it”.  He said: “They don’t understand the issue and they believe everything trans activists say to them … I don’t think there is a conspiracy. I just think a lot of institutions have been captured by trans ideology.”  Earlier, the court heard that the Metropolitan Police initially dropped the investigation into Linehan but reopened it after Ms Brooks threatened them with legal action... The comedy writer said: “Police in the UK have become a sort of errand boy for these men.” Linehan said that the pro-trans movement was “very male, abusive, sadistic” and filled with “dangerous” men. He said that he had “always had a thing about bullies” and he thought Ms Brooks was “disgusting” for allegedly bullying women.  He said he viewed Ms Brooks, who he referred to as a man, as being a “young soldier in the trans activist army” and described the teenager as a “snide misogynist”.  He told the court that Ms Brooks, who he refers to as Tarquin, had been harassing people anonymously online and in person before he began posting about the activist.  He denied his social media posts amounted to a campaign of harassment and he only wanted to “destroy” Ms Brooks’s anonymity.  “I was trying to inform people as to the activities of a dangerous activist,” he added... He claimed that the “violence and toxicity” in the gender debate came entirely from the pro-trans side.  “No one from our side has ever sent a rape threat, a death threat or anything like that”, he said."

How Graham Linehan went from comedy star to woke enemy number one - "It is important to remember that Graham Linehan doesn’t even live in the UK any more. So fed up was the creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd with what he saw as the hostile censoriousness of British show business, after years of being an outspoken opponent of transgender activism, he recently moved to America to try to resurrect his career... Linehan has been one of the most high-profile, and total, victims of cancel culture in recent years. For the best part of a decade he has been unable to work in comedy – a field in which he was once at the top – as producers, actors and former friends all fled from his side in the wake of controversies he stirred up online. Linehan’s marriage broke down and he was left scrabbling for any kind of income... This is the story of how a comedy genius rose from inauspicious beginnings to reach the very top of his chosen art form, only to crash back down to earth and face the wrath of the law because of how he expresses his deeply held beliefs... It was while being treated for testicular cancer, in 2018, that Linehan started to engage with the growing discourse about transgender activism. While still high on morphine, he sent out a now lost tweet – he would later say he could not remember exactly what it said – about trans people that quickly made things toxic. One of the first replies he received was: “I wish the cancer had won.”... Linehan lost almost all of his income as a result of being, in effect, blackballed by the mainstream show business world... One of the most galling things for Linehan has been the fact that Mathews and Hannon have failed to come out and publicly defend him. It has also meant that there is little prospect of the Father Ted musical he has co-written seeing the light of day any time soon. He has been offered cash to step away from the project – which he thought would serve as his pension – but refused on a point of principle... Some tried to retrospectively cancel Linehan’s work in the light of his new-found activism. Channel 4, for instance, removed an episode of The IT Crowd from its streaming service in 2020 after it was criticised for a storyline in which Matt Berry’s character unwittingly dates a transgender woman and gets into a physical altercation when he learns the truth... Some of Linehan’s attempted comebacks have not worked. He was due to take part in a gig at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but it was cancelled by the venue, Leith Arches, because his views on the trans debate did not “align with our overall values”. After a number of other venues turned him down, he ended up performing outside the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood.  Linehan has also claimed that he was offered the chance to direct Only Murders in the Building, the hit Disney+ comedy starring Steve Martin, but that was revoked because of his outspokenness...   It is notable how few people in show business have put their heads above the parapet to come to Linehan’s defence. “I thought this would be over in a few months and someone would step in. I really did think as soon as people heard what’s been happening to children, all my friends, satirists, comedians, progressives, people who marched against the Iraq war, lesbians, gay men, they’d all come rushing to my aid,” he once said.  “And no one turned up. Just no one turned up. All I got was dirty looks, people ghosting me. I joke that I used to know no one from real life, only people from the media. Now I know no one in the media and I’m friends with social workers and doctors and the Tavistock whistleblowers.”... Despite Linehan’s many woes, he is in the process of mounting something of a TV comeback. He has moved to Phoenix, Arizona and written a new series, Tenure, that is being produced in partnership with Andrew Doyle, the comic and GB News host, and Saturday Night Live alumnus Rob Schneider."

The failures that show the Metropolitan Police has its priorities all wrong - "Scotland Yard has the highest knife crime in the country, with 182 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument per 100,000 population over the year to March 2025, Ministry of Justice figures show... The Met recorded a record-high 26,602 sexual offences over the year to March 2025, up 10.2 per cent on the previous year and 80.6 per cent up on the 14,729 logged over the year to March 2015... Police data show the Met clocked a record 102,466 personal thefts, like bag or phone snatching, over the year to March 2025 – equivalent to almost one every five minutes of every day.  Despite this, the Met charged just 459 of such offenders over 2024-25. That’s a record-low charge rate of 0.4 per cent, equating to just one in 223 of the perpetrators.  Some 93,123 investigations were closed without a suspect being identified over the year, more than ever before... Labour told shopkeepers not to place “high value” items close to store entrances, to try to combat shoplifting, despite official figures showing nearly 800 reported offences going unsolved each day. In London, the Met has seen the number of offences rise at a faster rate than any other force outside London, other than Durham, over the past 10 years. The force has struggled to adapt to its increased workload, with just 5.9 per cent of offences resulting in a charge over the 12 months, in what is the lowest rate in the country. In contrast, the Met is leading the way in prosecutions like that of Linehan.  Of last year’s 28 cases where an individual was charged for “using words intended to stir up religious or sexual orientation hatred”, the Met brought forward seven of them... The force has been heavily criticised for the different approaches policing social media to “physical crime”... Mr Miller, who won a free speech High Court battle following a visit from his local force after he tweeted about transgender rights, added: “They have got their priorities entirely wrong.  “And it comes from the top. This comes from the College of Policing, chief constables and a succession of home secretaries.  “We are now living in a Britain where law is secondary to the enforcement of a political ideology.” Susan Hall, leader of the London Assembly Conservatives, said the arrest over “hurty words” was “utterly ludicrous”.  “I’m sick to death of people checking our words as opposed to our deeds,” she said.  “We are being told that the Met is £260m short in funding. I would suggest they spend this dealing with people who have committed physical crimes.”  She continued: “Writing things that may offend people are a completely different category to gang wars and shoplifting.”"

In the year 2000, one man foresaw today’s woke tyranny. If only we’d all listened - "In an essay published all of 25 years ago, long before the term “woke” entered everyday usage, the great conservative writer Theodore Dalrymple supplied a succinct analysis of what was then known as political correctness. PC, he explained, works by “forcing [people] to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question… Without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship.”  As must now be obvious to all but the most blinkered of liberals, the age of woke is far more tyrannical than the age of PC. Yet the above words ring truer today than ever. The main reason that woke propaganda exerts such influence over our society is that, even though most people know it’s nonsense, all too many of them go along with it, because they’re scared of what might happen to them if they don’t. So, instead of saying what they think, they say what they think they should think... This, coupled with the arrest of Mr Linehan, makes the Left’s hysteria about Donald Trump look all the more pathetic. In May, the Left-wing British comedian Stewart Lee said he wouldn’t play any gigs in Trump’s terrifyingly authoritarian America because he feared that he’d be “locked up”.  Four months on, I’ve still to hear of any comedians being arrested in the US for having Left-wing opinions. Only in Britain, for not having them."

Graham Linehan’s arrest has proved JD Vance right: Britain has a free speech problem - "Lord Young – founder and general secretary of the Free Speech Union – is quite right to say it “beggars belief” that Linehan was “held for 16 hours for making inappropriate jokes on social media”. That the Prime Minister felt free to maintain this is a nation with free speech under these circumstances also beggars belief. Perhaps, as Lord Young suggests, “the police should now arrest Sir Keir Starmer for knowingly spreading false information when he told JD Vance we don’t have a problem with free speech in the UK”."

Graham Linehan’s arrest is a humiliating new low - "The result is a system that pours completely disproportionate effort into investigating behaviour which many believe should not be criminal at all, with 30 arrests made each day for offensive online messages. At the same time, police forces have failed to solve a single burglary, personal theft or recover a stolen bike in 30 per cent of neighbourhoods in England and Wales.  Sir Keir appears to share this view, with his spokesman saying the police should concentrate on issues that “matter most to their communities”. The question now is whether he intends to do something about it."

Retired police officer questioned after using trans woman’s male name - "A retired police officer was visited by her former force over social media posts “deadnaming” a transgender activist, The Telegraph can reveal.  Cathy Larkman, who served with South Wales Police for more than three decades, was shocked when former colleagues turned up at her door near Port Talbot on Sept 4.  The former superintendent said police informed her that the home visit was related to a handful of social media posts about a transgender activist named Freda Wallace.  Ms Larkam had called the activist Fred, using the “dead” male name of the now transgender woman, and this act had been reported to the police... It is believed that Ms Larkman was reported by a disgraced transgender police officer named Lynsay Watson – a figure with a history of urging the authorities to pursue criminal investigations of people who are critical of gender ideology... Ms Larkman has raised concerns that police forces have become “ideologically captured” and too “weak and willing” to do the bidding of activists.  Darren Millar, the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, said on Saturday that gender-critical views were the norm across most of the country and that they should not be the subject of police scrutiny."

Meme - Natalie B @Nat_freespeech: "Do you not think that two years is long enough? Shouldn't there now be a fresh voice on federal board?"
Ian Bristow @IanRBristow: *Cartoon: 'Shut the Fuck Up TERF' *blue haired 'girl' pointing pistol*
Camilla Tominey @CamillaTominey: "Just to confirm the person who tweeted this is a Lib Dem councillor in leafy Berkhamsted. Again: these people aren't progressives. Like the Greens they are the least tolerant people in the UK right now"
TezzAlap @TezzaLap: "Also, five armed police haven't turned up at his office to arrest him for incitement to violence. Funny that, isn't it?"
It's only incitement to violence if you're "punching down"

Liberal Democrat councillor suspended over ‘violent’ pro-trans tweet - "A spokeswoman for the campaign group Liberal Voice for Women said: “This misogynistic and threatening post is symptomatic of a wider culture within the party where this kind of abuse is normalised if it is done in the name of ‘trans rights’.  “This has been going on since 2018 and party leaders have done nothing about it despite us drawing their attention to it on many occasions.  “Until there is a change in attitude from those at the top of the party, young activists will continue to do and say things like this and continue to bring the party into disrepute.”"

Will I be arrested next, after Graham Linehan? - "If the Met is stalking airports for anyone who’s published a discouraging word about the, to me, deeply disturbing social obsession with transgenderism – even former UK residents who’ve fled Britain’s accelerating illiberalism, as both Linehan and I have – then I am at risk of arrest and detention if not imprisonment should I dare to hop another flight to Heathrow from my new home in Portugal... Rudely, I dare to misgender – meaning that I accurately identify the sex of – both the spiteful nutjob in Minneapolis and another trans murderer in Britain, who stabbed his husband with a samurai sword 50 times. (I still hew to the dated notion that journalists’ first loyalty is to factual truth.) This ‘mis’ identification alone could bring the cops to the end of my jetway in Terminal 5...   Oh, no! Someone out there might find that view offensive! Which is all it takes to be prosecuted for ‘hate speech’: one person who says he or she is hurt. (This sense of injury is reliably a pose. Feigned trauma is a weapon. For lefty activists, the real experience of seizing on a sentence that can be wielded to devastate an opponent is one of glee.)... I won’t be the only American who reads about Linehan’s arrest and thinks twice about ever again setting foot in the UK. Is this what the British state wants? For even tourists who’ve ever ventured an online opinion outside the Overton window’s slit of progressive orthodoxy to decide they can’t afford the risk of visiting a country that arrests and imprisons people for their opinions? Does Britain really wish to court a reputation as an oppressive pariah in what was once traditionally designated ‘the free world’? Though isn’t it interesting how that expression has fallen out of fashion.  The British state is not only policing what views we may express – it has also advanced to policing our feelings. Isn’t the criminalisation of ‘hate speech’ really aimed at the hatred itself? The state regards our very emotions as its business. We’re only allowed to feel nice things. We can only express warm and cuddly, fuzzy-wuzzy emotions like perfectly unearned ‘respect’. Perhaps more controversially than the tweet that recommended, with obvious comedic intent, punching men who invade women’s single-sex territories ‘in the balls’, Linehan wrote of trans activists on X: ‘I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.’ He said the H-word. Is it illegal to hate a political faction? Is it illegal to hate anyone personally who has one or more ‘protected characteristics’, the very statutory existence of which violates the bedrock democratic principle of equality under the law? Is hatred itself now an arrestable offence?   I am not a ‘transphobe’ per se, because I am not afraid of these people, which is literally what the word means. But I do fear, and hate, the trans contagion, which has maddened the Western world and demanded its citizenries humour their compatriots’ delusions – thereby cultivating a mental universe that departs from factual reality, the textbook definition of insanity. We have institutionalised insanity. I hate that, too. I hate that we are being bullied and blackmailed by a small number of malicious crossdressing men – who do not represent all of their so-called community – into elaborate social and linguistic contortions to indulge what is commonly a sexual fetish.  If these same people had contributed to the end of my marriage, made me veritably unemployable after I’d occupied the heights of my profession, and intimidated my colleagues into dropping a West End Father Ted musical that would have been a lucrative tribute to perhaps the most hilarious television series ever made about Ireland, I think I would, yes, hate these people as a collective. Were any of them known to me, and known to be personally responsible for some of this destruction of everything that I held dear about my life, I think I would probably hate them as individuals. We have the word ‘hate’ for a reason. It is a normal human emotion – fierce, difficult to control, not always rational or attractive, and taking a host of forms. Brief bursts of loathing can be preceded by repentant sheepishness; a simmering, backburner antipathy can last for years. But sometimes hatred can be directed righteously towards people who deserve it. There, have I done it now? Tempted the Met? Should I send them my itinerary with BA in December? I wonder if everyone on social media in Britain were to post ‘I hate anyone with protected characteristics’ all together on the same day, we might send the coppers into a frenzy that ends in meltdown, the way tigers turn to butter."

Graham Linehan's arrest is a turning point | The Spectator - "The hoo-ha over free speech being trampled on has always seemed exaggerated... But there are moments when the penny drops and you realise you are wrong. Today has provided one of those moments...   Criminality is evolving every day in this sphere. Increasingly, giving offence is being taken by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service as prima facie evidence of criminality. The other side of this coin is that taking offence is seen as legitimate grounds for a complaint... Trust in the police is at an all-time low. In October 2024, 52 per cent of adults told YouGov that they had no confidence in the police to tackle crime, compared to 39 per cent in October 2019. What the police don’t now do – tackle crime – is just one aspect of the collapse in trust. Allied to that is what the police do now do – such as arresting people over social media posts which merely give offence to someone. It’s of a piece with what is seen on the regular hate marches, where they stand and watch when there are calls for the murder of Jews (such as the widespread ‘globalise the intifada’), but only spring into action when a counter-demonstrator turns up, saying that they are likely to provoke a breach of the peace.   What we are seeing is the congruence of two dangerous developments. First, is the idea that giving offence is something which should be banned. The government’s current move towards adopting a definition of Islamophobia is part of this, and has rightly been labelled by Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Muslim anti-prejudice group TellMAMA, as introducing a blasphemy law by the back door. Similarly, the onward march of the trans ideologues may have been stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of ‘woman’, but the ideology has already taken hold of many institutions and spaces.  Which leads to the second development – the police’s capture by this and other ‘woke’ ideologies. Linehan describes how in his police interview a police officer mentioned trans people: “I asked him what he meant by the phrase. ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’ I said: ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.’   This is the nub of it. The police, supposed guardians of the law, have become players in the activists’ capture of the institutions. It is not that they are no longer concerned with crime, but that they are redefining what crime is. It is terrible that Linehan should have had to go through this. But if it wakes more of us up to what is happening in Britain, his arrest will have served our country well."

Police chiefs tell Home Secretary: change law so we can stop policing tweets - "The Home Secretary must change the law to stop officers unnecessarily policing tweets, three of Britain’s top police chiefs have urged.  The senior officers have written to Shabana Mahmood claiming that public order laws set the criminal bar so low that online comments are being recorded and investigated – and it should not be their responsibility.  They are also understood to be backing calls by Sir Andy Cooke, the HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, to scrap non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in order to protect free speech.  The plea has been made by Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Police Commissioner, Gavin Stephens, chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), and Sir Andy Marsh, the head of the College of Policing, which sets standards on police practice and behaviour. It comes amid growing anger at police intervention in social media spats. Scotland Yard came under fire last week after sending five armed officers to arrest Graham Linehan, the comedy writer, over comments he posted on X... An NCHI is defined as an incident that falls short of being criminal but which is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person with a particular characteristic.  They were introduced in 2014, some 15 years after the Macpherson report – prompted by the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence – recommended them."

Meme - J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling: "Context: this trans-identified man and public fetishist has been illegally entering women's single-sex spaces, gleefully posting pictures of himself doing it and remains untroubled by police visits."
Sophie Molly @SophieMolly_OFF: "I have known about the plan to get Graham arrested for a while. It's great when a plan comes together. Thanks to my friends in the Underground Trans Mafia."

At the risk of being arrested, I suggest Met chief Mark Rowley is a total muppet - "A rattled Sir Mark has hit back saying he wants Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary, to change the law so police are not obliged to record or investigate complaints when there is no evidence that the suspect intended to cause real-world harm. Officers, he says, should be given more discretion to “use common sense”.  At the risk of being handcuffed for causing “distress”, “alarm” or “anxiety”, I say: “Sir Mark, you disingenuous muppet, you!” It’s perfectly clear that the police have discretion to ignore complaints, even crimes, if they want to. Let’s see now:
Phone theft – ignored.
Shoplifting – essentially legal.
Carjacking – we’ll send you a crime number.
Burglaries – help yourself, lads!
Sexual harassment, child gang rape – er, sorry, cultural sensitivities.
For Sir Mark to claim that his officers were unable to use their common sense and ignore a complaint from a notorious trans activist about the Father Ted creator is to insult the public’s intelligence. Baroness Emma Nicholson nailed this weaselly dissimulation in a delicious letter to Sir Mark in which she unpicked the Commissioner’s logic with a glittering bodkin so lethal it could have been wielded by Jane Austen. She disputes that Linehan’s “F--- ’em” tweet was an incitement to sexual activity nor that “Punch them in the balls” (advice given by every mother to a daughter encountering a male predator) was to be taken literally. “If your officers can identify one phrase as not meant literally,” she wrote, “surely they ought to be able to do that with the other and dismiss the complaint.”  You could cut your hand on the Baroness’s scorn. She goes on to accuse the Met of allowing itself, to all appearances, to be “exploited as tools” by former police constable Lynsay Watson, a long-time Linehan trans antagonist. Dismissed for gross misconduct by Leicestershire Police, Watson is a serial litigant against several forces and institutions. “Were your colleagues wary of being added to the list? Were they simply ignorant? Or are they, as you assert, mere automatons impelled to act unthinkingly once their buttons are pushed?” Baroness Nicholson enquired innocently.  Her closing salvo has entered the annals of political satire: “Instead of blaming Parliament for your officers’ inability to think for themselves intelligently, perhaps you might firmly tell them, please, to stop being stupid.”... Alas, humour, although still legal at the time of writing, offers very little protection against the prevailing Orwellian madness. Mock the police as much as you like, for ridicule is the least the dolts deserve, but they continue to arrest 30 people every day for offensive online messages... Look at the video, currently doing the rounds on social media, of an officer and his three colleagues apparently arresting a man for calling someone a “muppet”, commonly an expression of playful exasperation... The pattern is always the same. When the police want to behave like social-justice activists they demand “operational independence”. When they get found out suddenly they want “guidance”.  None of this is by accident. The stretching or misinterpreting of legislation that was intended for genuinely threatening scenarios to intimidate or criminalise people for expressing legitimate opinions is deliberate policy. It is presided over by one of the worst, most un-British bodies in Britain: the College of Policing... According to one senior officer, the College sees its role as promoting and supporting equality and diversity, and “supporting difference”. Entirely captured by transgender activists, the College brainwashes police officers to spout slogans like Maoist cultural revolutionaries – “Hateful and offensive! Hateful and offensive!” Anyone who hopes to climb the career ladder must be able to demonstrate their fidelity to progressive, Left-wing ideas, no matter how bonkers they may be. Only last month, the College issued guidance on female genital mutilation (FGM) which stated that “transwomen, with or without a gender recognition certificate” are just as threatened by FGM in the UK as “women and girls”... It was the College of Policing that came up with the Kafkaesque non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) which supposedly allowed police to collect information on “hate crimes” that could escalate into more serious offences. In practice, they have been a mallet to free speech.  The police have not been afraid to weigh in on petty grievances and private matters of morality. Not afraid and not qualified. But online thought crime is one of the police’s few growth areas, a way of ushering in a progressive utopia, so why bother asking complainants about their motives?  “The police now think their main purpose is not to uphold law and order but to protect certain identity groups who have been designated victims of historical injustice by the wokerati,” says Lord (Toby) Young, founder and general secretary of the Free Speech Union. “And not just protect them from ‘hate crime’ but from hurty words too.” While Young accepts that the original intention may have been benign, “police have allowed themselves to be turned into the paramilitary wing of the radical progressive movement”... I took a look at the statutory code of practice for the recording of NCHIs which became law in June 2023 under sections 60 and 61 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. As well as stipulating a proportionate, common-sense police response, it states that the terms “subject” and “complainant” should be used, not “suspect” and “victim”.  Funny, then, that the two policemen who came to my door last Remembrance Sunday told me, when I asked who my accuser was, that they were to be known as “the victim”... “There is no doubt in my mind that they wanted to make an example of you, Allison,” says my senior source in that wokest of forces. Because, like Graham Linehan and the thousands of others they hound and arrest, often over the sum total of nothing, our two-tier police targets people like me who apparently have the “wrong” views, while anti-Semitic posts are excused as “in the heat of the moment”."

Links - 15th October 2025 (Diversity)

The White Man Who Pretended to Be Black to Get Published - "A young poet pretended to be ‘a gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,’ and wrote intentionally bad poems. He says he got 47 of them published... He has pretended, he said, to be Dirt Hogg Sauvage Respectfully, author of poems such as “non-b god or: what deity would be a TERF?,” as well as Adele Nwankwo, a “gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,” who has published dozens of comically bad poems in a wide array of indie literary magazines across the Anglosphere in the past three years, including one about a lesbian WWE-style wrestler... In April, the man behind these identities came clean, writing on Substack that he’d “assumed a series of ‘attractive’ pen names” to “test the limits of the poetry industry and just how much buffoonery it was willing to permit in the present day.” He claimed he’d spent two years tricking editors into thinking that his pronouns or skin color were less “regular” than they actually are; and in that time, he said 47 of his intentionally bad poems had been published in numerous indie literary magazines.  His name, he wrote, was actually Jasper Ceylon... Several years ago, the man calling himself “Jasper Ceylon” was trying to break out as a poet, writing under his real name—which I’ll share in due course—and he noticed that certain journals had what he described as “really weird, and quite specific requirements”:      “I just was not in the demographic they would even consider accepting in some cases. They were openly advocating on their websites for the voices of the disenfranchised and all of this stuff. I’m like, Wow, it would probably be a lot easier to get in if I had some sort of connection to one of these identities.”  Ceylon is far from the first person to argue that English-language publishing is overrun with what my colleague Coleman Hughes calls “the new racism”—that is, instead of giving everyone equal opportunities, regardless of the color of their skin, editors actively perceive certain races as worthier than others. (This view of the publishing industry has been disputed.) Nor is he the first person who’s attempted to expose it. In 2015, Michael Derrick Hudson, a middle-aged white librarian in Indiana, saw his poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” rejected by publishers 40 times. This inspired him to try submitting it under the pen name Yi-Fen Chou. After that, his poem was promptly published and included in that year’s annual Best American Poetry anthology. When he was found out, Hudson was accused of “yellowface.”... Ceylon told me he was inspired by various literary hoaxes, including the 1943 Ern Malley hoax, where conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart published many, many parodies of modernist poetry, to make fun of a genre they found superficial and stupid. He also mentioned the more recent so-called Grievance Studies Affair, where the academics Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose published a number of bogus papers in academic journals between 2017 and 2018—including one that claimed dogs engage in rape culture, and another that included passages from Mein Kampf rewritten in modern jargon. They, like Ceylon, were trying to prove that in their intellectual sphere, you could get anything published if its politics were progressive, even if it was bad... “I spoke to the head editor at the publishing house for the [first] novel, and they dropped the project because I was a white male author”... His name, he told me, is Aaron Barry... Barry claims he’s concerned for the future of poetry. “People can’t engage with it,” he said. “They’re almost intimidated by it, or they’re just confused by it. And this exclusionary attitude only contributes to that further. It’s a shame.”... White, who’d edited Barry’s debut novel, pulled Femoid off the shelves. “He told me I was a terrible person,” Barry said. “He said, ‘I haven’t published a white male author for two years because I don’t want to deal with you guys, and if I had known you were a white male author I would not have accepted the book.’”... Australian writer Matthew Sini, who interviewed Barry in the guise of Jasper Ceylon on his literature podcast Getting Lit, told me: “Ceylon’s project reveals a growing rot at the heart of publishing.”  “Vogueish privileging of increasingly arcane identity categories,” he said, “not only hurts the arts in general terms, it hurts budding artists, especially those who are from ‘marginalized’ groups . . . The soft bigotry of low expectations quite often cosigns these writers to an embarrassing spectacle of publishing undercooked and poorly constructed work. The Echolia Review project has proven that identity fetishization in the poetry world literally comes at the expense of the art form.”"
Weird. Left wingers keep telling us that DEI is not about lowering standards, and only racists think that

The Vanishing White Male Writer - "It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.   And then the doors shut.  By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man. Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total). “The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience"... The more thoughtful pieces on this subject tend to frame the issue as a crisis of literary masculinity, the inevitable consequence of an insular, female-dominated publishing world. All true, to a point. But while there are no male Sally Rooneys or Ottessa Moshfeghs or Emma Clines—there are no white Tommy Oranges or Tao Lins or Tony Tulathimuttes.   Some of this is undoubtedly part of a dynamic that’s played out across countless industries. Publishing houses, like Hollywood writers’ rooms and academic tenure committees, had a glut of established white men on their rosters, and the path of least resistance wasn’t to send George Saunders or Jonathan Franzen out to pasture. But despite these pressures, there are white male millennial novelists. Diversity preferences may explain their absence from prize lists, but they can’t account for why they’ve so completely failed to capture the zeitgeist. The reasons for that go deeper. All those attacks on the “litbro,” the mockery of male literary ambition—exemplified by the sudden cultural banishment of David Foster Wallace—have had a powerfully chilling effect. Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them. Instead they write genre, they write suffocatingly tight auto-fiction, they write fantastic and utterly terrible period pieces—anything to avoid grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America... the social and political environment in which a white male novelist, in an article bemoaning the disappearance of male novelists, is forced to say the world doesn't need more male novelists, seems like it might be fertile ground for a work of fiction. White male boomer novelists live in a self-mythologizing fantasyland in which they are the prime movers of history; their Gen X counterparts (with a few exceptions), blessed with the good sense to begin their professional careers before 2014, delude themselves into believing they still enjoy the Mandate of Heaven (as they stand athwart history, shouting platitudes about fascism). But white male millennials, caught between the privileges of their youths and the tragicomedies of their professional and personal lives, understand intrinsically that they are stranded on the wrong side of history—that there are no Good White Men. "
Of course, he doesn't consider that discrimination is a possible explanation. It is notable that the proferred explanation assumes everyone must write about themselves, and that empathy is not possible and/or that all pieces must be politically relevant
We still get told that DEI is about ensuring "minorities" are treated the same as white men

Wesley Yang on X - ""Not one single white American born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in the New Yorker" I'm a bit surprised that this statistic didn't even have to be qualified by "straight."
I found this Buzzfeed listicle from 2015 still online, though they've removed all the photos of the people making comments like this one by Franny Choi telling straight white males in publishing "Sit down and let us abolish you."   They said what they were going to do and did it, with no exemptions for gay white males."

Charlie Kirk on X - "Why are young men the most conservative they've been in decades? Because they grew up under liberalism, and they know its only unifying principle is constant anti-white and anti-male discrimination.  Need proof? Not a single white male born after 1984 has published a work of fiction in the New Yorker, America's most famous literary magazine. Did they all forget how to write? Of course not. They're being kept out because of their race and sex.  The left assumed young men would simply embrace being dispossessed and hated. They were wrong."

Opinion | The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone - The New York Times - "Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.  I see the same pattern in the creative-writing program where I’ve taught for eight years. About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female. When I was a graduate student in a similar program about 20 years ago, the cohorts were split fairly evenly by gender. As Eamon Dolan, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, told me recently, “the young male novelist is a rare species.”  Male underrepresentation is an uncomfortable topic in a literary world otherwise highly attuned to such imbalances. In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” The public response to Ms. Oates’s comment was swift and cutting — not entirely without reason, as the book world does remain overwhelmingly white. But the lack of concern about the fate of male writers was striking. To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead. I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction"
I like how men need to be included not primarily because hating men is bad or that statistical underrepresentation is bad (that only goes one way), but because it will help push the left wing agenda and help women

McKinsey’s Diversity Fog - "Last year, McKinsey & Company released a study purporting to demonstrate that corporations with more diverse leadership—more women and racial minorities in executive positions—were also more profitable. The consulting behemoth’s findings were consistent with those of its previous three diversity studies, in 2015, 2018, and 2020, each of which had been cited across industries and government institutions as proof of the supposed financial benefits of race- and gender-conscious hiring policies. Now, a new paper raises questions about McKinsey’s methodology and suggests that its advertised findings may have gotten the causation backward: financial success may lead corporations to embrace diversity efforts, rather than the other way around... journalist Christopher Brunet flagged a paper in the March 2024 issue of Econ Journal Watch, a biannual publication edited by George Mason economist Daniel Klein that publishes article-length responses to other economists’ errors. The paper, written by accounting professors Jeremiah Green, of Texas A&M, and John R. M. Hand, of the University of North Carolina, addressed the first three of McKinsey’s four-installment series of diversity studies. Green and Hand sought to test the replicability of McKinsey’s findings. Could another set of researchers, using the same data, come to the same conclusions? Since McKinsey refused to turn over its numbers, Green and Hand had to reverse-engineer the firm’s 2015, 2018, and 2020 datasets. The results were startling: Green and Hand couldn’t replicate the results of McKinsey’s first three studies, which monitored the profitability and executive demographics of an undisclosed group of S&P 500 firms and claimed to have found a positive correlation between diverse leadership and firms’ performance... Green and Hand not only were unable to replicate the studies’ findings; they also found that each of the three studies had analyzed the data backward. Instead of looking at a firm’s diversity policies in the years leading up to a given year’s financial performance, McKinsey had reviewed each firm’s financial performance in the four or five years leading up to the year in which its researchers snapshotted their executive demographics. In other words, according to Green and Hand, the positive correlations that McKinsey researchers observed may have reflected “better firm financial performance causing companies to diversify the racial/ethnic composition of their executives, not the reverse.” Wouldn’t this methodological problem have been obvious to McKinsey researchers? Apparently, it was. Buried in the firm’s 2018 study, its researchers concede the possibility that “better financial outperformance enables companies to achieve greater levels of diversity”—in other words, that more profitable firms may pursue diversity-hiring policies as a result of their profitability. McKinsey’s public presentation of its results, however, has not been so nuanced. As Green and Hand record, Dame Vivian Hunt, a McKinsey managing partner and a coauthor on each of the firm’s diversity studies, claimed in 2018 that “the leading companies in our datasets are pursuing diversity because it’s a business imperative and driving real business results”... Despite these methodological concerns, major corporations and government entities have cited the McKinsey studies to justify antimeritocratic hiring practices... The hyping of these McKinsey studies reflects progressives’ inability to grapple with or even admit the existence of tradeoffs. They do not consider their preferred programs to be the best of a set of imperfect options; rather, their policies represent definitive advances that come with no corresponding downsides. They don’t see the debate over diversity-hiring programs, for instance, as being between inclusion, on the one hand, and meritocracy, on the other. They think that firms can hire candidates at least partially for reasons having nothing to do with those candidates’ qualifications and not suffer any corresponding drag in performance. It can’t be that diversity-hiring programs correct for past injustices and are worth their inherent costs—a straightforward and honest (if misguided) argument—it has to be that diversity programs actually make corporations richer. Progressive proponents of decarceration do the same thing. They may want to make the normative case that America’s legal system is wholly unjust and ought totally to be torn down, but they feel compelled to make an instrumental case as well, one that denies the most obvious tradeoffs of their preferred policy—that it would free murderers and other dangerous criminals. So they insist instead that arresting and incarcerating criminals actually “makes us less safe.”"
Commentary on previously linked study. Left wingers don't care about correlation not meaning causation or non-peer reviewed studies when they push the left wing agenda. This is related to the moralistic fallacy too

Meme - "Well yeah you can't leave anything in your car or leave your garage door open for 30 minutes and there's stabbings all the time but have you had an authentic street taco?"

CEO of German software giant SAP defends scrapping women's quota - "The chief executive of the German multinational software firm SAP has defended his company's decision to abolish a quota stipulating that at least 40% of its workforce should be women, citing the company's competition in the United States... SAP's recent decision to scrap various diversity targets has caused discontent among its workforce and some shareholders. In addition to abolishing the overall women's quota, women at SAP will no longer be specifically promoted to management positions at certain levels... Since taking office in January, the administration of US President Donald Trump has advocated for diversity, equity and inclusion programmes in government agencies and businesses to be scrapped, arguing that favouring certain groups puts others at a disadvantage and is harming a skills-based selection process - without presenting any evidence... "We operate large parts of the US government's software and technology, which insists on these requirements," he said."
Obeying the law is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda
If a company had a quota for men or white people, the media wouldn't be claiming there was no evidence that this was bad

Peter MacKinnon: U.S. Supreme Court's DEI decision has lessons for Canada - "The United States Supreme Court is seen to be sharply divided between conservative and liberal jurists so it is noteworthy when it speaks with one voice. In Ames v. Ohio, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a unanimous decision that is viewed by some as resetting the diversity, equity and inclusion debate. Marlean Ames is a heterosexual woman employed by the Ohio Department of Youth Services, initially as a secretary, subsequently promoted to program administrator and applying in 2019 to enter management. Her application was unsuccessful when the department instead hired a lesbian and demoted Ames from her administrative position — restoring her to a secretarial post — and replacing her with a gay man. Alleging discrimination because she is straight, she sued under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, unsuccessfully at trial and in the circuit appeals court, but successfully on appeal to the Supreme Court. Justice Jackson observed, with emphasis, that the Act makes it unlawful “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge ANY INDIVIDUAL, or otherwise to discriminate against ANY INDIVIDUAL with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin.” That Ames was a member of a non-gay majority did not affect the result; “the law’s focus on individuals rather than groups (is) anything but academic.”... It is individuals who have equality before the law and it is individuals who must be protected from discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin... Taken along with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling affirmative action unconstitutional, it is clear that the United States and Canada part ways on issues of equality, discrimination and affirmative action. Their laws on these subjects are similar: the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment, and Canada’s Charter Section 15(1) and its equivalent in provincial human rights codes, guarantee equality before the law and protection from discrimination based on immutable conditions. But here the similarities end. The unconstitutionality of affirmative action and the emphasis on individual rights in the U.S. stand in marked contrast with the extensive practice of affirmative action and emphasis on group rights in Canada. The American experience has lessons for Canadians; we, too, need to reset the DEI debate. Although some group rights are recognized in our Constitution (e.g. Indigenous peoples and minority languages), they do not mandate special treatment apart from their specific texts. The issues here are broader and more fundamental: do we see affirmative action, sanctioned by Section 15(2) of the Charter, as an exception to a general rule prohibiting discrimination, or does its extensive practice in our public institutions suggest that the exception is becoming the rule? Should we re-emphasize individual rights as a unanimous Supreme Court did in Ames v. Ohio? Is DEI a benign practice or an ideological cover for discriminatory practices? If we do not face these questions, test them in our courts, and develop a social consensus around them, differences among Canadians that we have seen to date will pale beside those to come."

Cambridge University ‘discriminates’ against white job seekers - "Guidance issued at the world-leading university advises departments to “try to ensure” that at least one candidate from “under-represented groups” is invited for every interview.  The “diverse recruitment framework” further encourages recruiters to readvertise positions if the longlist of candidates “is not diverse”, such as if it is all white or male.  The guidance, currently in use at the university, also says interview panels should be “diverse both in gender and race” and composed of individuals who have taken training courses in equality, diversity, inclusion and unconscious bias.  Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Exeter and the director of the Committee for Academic Freedom, said the policies were “tantamount to discrimination against white applicants”.  He said: “This is one of the worst cases we have come across of EDI interference in what should be a purely academic process.  “Favouritism towards women and non-whites demeans them, and encourages the very prejudices it is intended to overcome.”... The framework advises academics that recruitment panels should not be made up entirely of “white males” or “people with a particular career track record”... members were told “don’t worry about it” when they raised questions about the policies’ legality. The source said: “I joined the committee, wanting to see what was actually going on and maybe prevent things from going off the rails.  “When I got there, I discovered it was already off the rails.”  The source added: “If you criticise it, you’re just seen as a bad person.”  They went on to claim that they had witnessed colleagues from backgrounds that are not under-represented – such as white people and men – being actively discouraged from applying to positions because of their race or sex... Prof David Abulafia, the professor emeritus of Mediterranean history at the University of Cambridge, said the guidance was “arrant nonsense”.  He said: “The sheer fanaticism of the bureaucracy at Cambridge and the craven submission of academics to their arrant nonsense spells the end of a once great university.”  Prof John Marenbon, a philosopher and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, added: “Academic appointments should be made solely on the basis of academic merit. Academics who do otherwise betray their calling.”  The university’s diversity “plan for action” includes a target to increase ethnic minority applications to “academic and research posts to 8 per cent or higher” and “for professional services roles to 30 per cent”."
DEI just ensures that anyone who isn't a straight white male can get hired

Rob (No FBPE please) on X - "No MI5, MI6 or GCHQ internship if you're white. "We’re confining the applications for this internship to those within this demographic [Black, Asian, mixed heritage or ethnic minority background] due to a current underrepresentation in our workforce." The THIRD year in a row."

Kyle Becker on X - "Mayor Brandon Johnson just boasted about preferring to hire black people to run Chicago because they are "the most generous race." This is blatant racial discrimination and Americans should have no patience for it."

RAMZPAUL on X - "I live in an area with 0 diversity. People don't bother to lock their doors. The local store does not lock their merchandise. Life is wonderful without diversity."

TMU doubles down on race-based admissions - "Toronto Metropolitan University remains committed to medical school admissions through “equity pathways” (admissions streams for Black, Indigenous and other equity deserving groups) though it has developed a vocabulary that obscures their discriminatory impact: “excellence, inclusion and innovation;” students “from the community, for the community.” But according to TMU vice-president and dean of medicine, Teresa Chan, the university remains “committed to admitting a majority of students through equity pathways.”     It would at least be informative to hear an explicit acknowledgment that the policy discriminates against white applicants, but no, there is no mention of discrimination and its prohibition in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario Human Rights Code; it is as if these provisions do not exist or matter, or do not apply to TMU. How did we get here? This is an important question in the Canada of 2025 and in no area is it more troubling than in the practice and acceptance of discrimination we would have thought unimaginable in the not-too-distant past: race-based admissions processes; race-based hiring of professors and others; race or gender requirements for researchers who receive grants from federal agencies; requirements that job applicants disclose how they would support DEI initiatives that focus on identity; university spaces set aside as lounges only for students of colour. In part the answer lies in Orwellian newspeak that substitutes ambiguous or superficially inoffensive language — as in the TMU vocabulary — for the explicit recognition of discrimination that at one time we would have heard. In part, too, the answer lies in affirmative action that extends well beyond what might have been anticipated when it was protected in Section 15(2) of the Charter.    It is past time that we reaffirm the primacy of the first principle of non-discrimination in Section 15(1) of the Charter and its equivalent in provincial human rights codes, and require a strict interpretation of the scope of affirmative action under Section 15(2). In the United States affirmative action was accepted after a century of post-Civil War discrimination against Blacks, but what were seen as its excesses led the Supreme Court in 2023 to declare it unconstitutional. That will not happen in Canada but we should not tolerate the extent of discrimination undermining Section 15(1) that we have seen in recent years. But for TMU there is a remedy at hand. The school’s discriminatory admissions led Ontario Premier Doug Ford to demand that it educate qualified individuals regardless of their race or background. He should see its continuing commitment to admissions through equity pathways as unwillingness to accede to his demand, and his government should impose appropriate consequences upon the school, including withdrawal of funding until it abides by the principle of non-discrimination."

Ford demands TMU's new med school educate qualified students 'regardless of their race' : r/ontario - "These spots are so competitive anyways the admission cutoff is just arbitrary. An "affirmative action" admission that got in with only a 98.8% grade average isn't going to be a worse doctor than someone who got in normally with a 99% GPA.  Besides, the current admissions system at most med schools is heavily biased towards people who could afford to take summers off and pay thousands of dollars for MCAT prep courses - not the people who are actually the smartest or hardest working"
Another example of the left wing cope - it doesn't matter if you don't take the best, as long as you take someone good enough.