Jonathan Kay on X - "This is wild. Beth Davies, the $219K/year (white, “settler on stolen land,” she/her etc) chief librarian of a BC library, set up a special human-rights carve-out that allows her to racially discriminate in the hiring process for positions *except* (wait for it) her own …."
Meme - "white people scared to sit next to a Muslim on a plane but then do shit like this *lying with tiger*"
Ironic. Left wingers are the ones who claim that women choose the bearHow the left fell out of love with Scandinavia - "Back in the 2010s, it was rare to hear a bad word said about Scandinavia... Among a broad spectrum of hard-left to centre-left politicians, the Nordics were lauded as model states – as fair, practical and successful countries that were doing something right. Merely mentioning these nations would invoke a sense of ‘hygge’ (a Danish word loosely translated as ‘cosiness’, as just about every magazine and Sunday supplement insisted on informing us)... Sweden, Denmark and the like seemed to have a special appeal to any left-wing politician accused of being too ‘radical’. US senator Bernie Sanders, who twice came close to bagging the Democratic presidential nomination, regularly cited the Nordic welfare states in order to contrast his model of leftist politics with the despotic regimes bearing the socialist banner... His left-wing ally, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has also described her politics as most closely resembling ‘what we see… in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden’. Defenders of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn would similarly insist that his programme for Britain would have been mainstream in Scandinavia. Whether Scandinavia is actually ‘socialist’ or not (it obviously isn’t) is now largely a moot point. For the left now sees something rotten in the state of Denmark… and in Sweden, too. These days, you are more likely to hear the Nordics cursed as pariah states than hailed as model, near-utopian nations. Strikingly, this is despite the fact that what once piqued the left’s interests in Scandinavia has hardly changed in recent years. In 2025, Denmark was ranked the second-happiest nation on Earth. Sweden and Denmark remain egalitarian and wealthy, boasting standards of living above the OECD average. And, most importantly, they retain their generous welfare states and high levels of government spending, with top-class public services to go with it. Not coincidentally, these are some of the very few European countries where the established, legacy centre-left parties have not been totally obliterated (although they have not totally escaped the populist tide, either). Yet Denmark has strayed from the club of the anointed on one key issue: immigration. It has dared to defy the commandments of the EU, the UN and the NGO-ocracy. It has instead listened to the concerns of the people. Predictably, this has led to charges from an outraged global left that Denmark is now ‘far right’, ‘undeniably racist’ and operating ‘on an ethno-supremacist logic’. The so-called Danish model for migration began to emerge after the 2001 elections, in which immigration and integration played a central role. The Social Democrats, widely seen as too soft, lost power for the first time since 1924. Yet there is now a cross-party consensus in favour of tighter border controls. In Sweden, the 2015 European refugee crisis not only boosted the populist Danish People’s Party – it also pushed the left to adopt a tougher line. Benefits to new arrivals were cut, rules on family reunion were tightened, and refugee status went from permanent to temporary. In fact, many of Denmark’s most contentious policies – from offshore processing of asylum claims to ‘ghetto laws’, which allow the state to demolish apartment blocks where ethnic enclaves have built up – were pioneered by the Danes’ current Social Democratic prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. The Danish model has a lot going for it, practically and politically. Asylum claims are at their lowest in 40 years. YouGov polling shows that Danes are far more satisfied with their government’s handling of immigration than any other European public. Frederiksen has managed to stay in power for six years – bucking the EU-wide turn against the left... As you may have guessed, there is a degree of hysteria in the left-wing loathing of the Danish immigration model. Denmark has not suddenly become a closed society. One in six people currently living in Denmark is either a migrant or a descendant of one. In fact, the raw numbers of new arrivals has not even gone down, with annual new residence permits actually quadrupling in the past two decades – ie, in this supposedly wicked era of Danish nationalism and xenophobia. What has changed is the composition of migrants, with a far higher proportion arriving for work and education than for asylum. Arrivals are selected, in other words, for who is most likely to contribute to and integrate into Danish society... Essentially, Denmark is asserting its right as a democratic, sovereign nation to have a border. And it seems this alone is enough to send the Western left into apoplexy. Denmark may be today’s ugly duckling, but the recent turn against Scandinavia arguably began with Sweden. And, once again, this was because it put its faith in the people and rejected a global consensus among elites. When the Covid pandemic hit in early 2020, and most of the world was entering lockdown, Sweden held its nerve and kept its economy and society open, with minimal restrictions... With the pandemic long behind us, we now know for certain there was no basis to this Swedophobic screeching. Far from driving its citizens into an early grave, Sweden actually experienced a far less severe increase in mortality than many other European countries that had long and strict lockdowns. Plus, as well as taking far less of an economic hit, Sweden also avoided the social devastation wrought by those unprecedented restrictions on everyday life. A rare win-win scenario, you might think. But clearly not in the eyes of a left that seemed to relish lockdown for its own sake, and which no longer cares much for liberty or the prosperity of ordinary people. That the left has fallen out of love with Denmark and Sweden says far more about the left than it does about these supposedly wayward nations. It speaks to a left that has abandoned any commitment to self-government by a sovereign people, and has instead embraced globalism, technocracy and authoritarianism. Denmark is loathed because it has allowed the public to intrude on the debate over immigration. And Sweden was scorned for trusting the people to use their judgement. It is the d-word – democracy – in Scandinavia’s social democracy that today’s left can no longer tolerate."
Meme - "That extra-dimensional monster will attack us soon. Do we have a plan?"
"Yes, of course, Dr. Stromm says he has something important to tell us."
"Alright Dr. Stromm let's hear your brilliant plan."
"I'm gay."
"Motherf-"
Meme - Will from Stranger Things as Clint Barton (Hawkeye) from the MCU in Captain America: Civil War Airport Battle: "I don't like girls."
Black Panther: "I don't care."
Meme - "IF NETFLIX WROTE THE SCRIPT
Samwise Gamgee: 'This is It
Frodo Baggins: 'This is what?
Sam: 'The part I tell you l'm gay for no reason"
Meme - "Mike's basement doorknob switches sides from season 1 to the epilogue? #conformitygate"
Josh Billinson: "Imagine spending a decade making a TV show and then the fans hate your ending so much that they spend the next week picking apart every minor production mistake you've ever made to try to justify their conspiracy theory about a secret alternate ending"
Woke robbed the West of its artistic soul | The Spectator Australia - "The demise of Stranger Things was not quite a Games of Thrones level of disaster, but it came awfully close despite $400+ million being spent on Season 5. It follows a pattern of initially exceptional shows deteriorating over the years into stinking heaps of barely coherent, poorly written, indulgent Woke drivel obsessed with pushing ‘the message’ instead of telling a good story. True Detective serves as another example, as do the legendary series of Westworld, Sherlock, and Altered Carbon. The same thing happens to movie franchises. Consider one of cinema’s best, Jurassic Park, devolving into the utter tripe of Jurassic World Rebirth. Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien became the dreary Alien Earth. Everyone’s favourite Indiana Jones turned into the unwatchable Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny. Star Wars jumped the space shark, killing off Harrison Ford’s Han Solo before the final instalment of utter trash The Last Jedi. The cultural empire of Star Trek starring William Shatner transitioned into the laughable Star Trek: Discovery. And maybe the biggest downgrade can be awarded to the Lord of the Rings, easily one of the most successful book-to-movie triumphs, which somehow spawned the cringe-inducing TV series Rings of Power... The pattern of failure in the entertainment industry is extraordinary given how much money is thrown at the product. Maybe it’s our fault, the viewers, for showing up to give objectively dreadful films like Avatar: The Way of Water over $2 billion or Transformers: Age of Extinction $1 billion at the box office. Why do we do that? If studios release an AI film with AI actors and AI scripts and we pack out cinemas for the sake of curiosity, that’s what Hollywood will keep making. For an industry full of champagne socialists, they certainly govern their arts based on the worst aspects of unconstrained capitalism which has well and truly exchanged competition for a handful of film studio and streaming service monopolies... Even if you haven’t been watching Stranger Things, you probably saw the ‘I don’t like girls’ meme floating around this week where Will, one of the original children (now grown up), spends an excruciatingly large amount of the runtime telling a room full of characters that he’s gay. Something we knew from the first episode ten years ago. Gayness was presented as Will’s superpower which allowed him to defeat the monster who turned out to be another person with a traumatic childhood... There are hundreds of review articles and videos that detail every nauseating Woke plot device that slowly chipped away at the show’s dignity and turned its characters into billboards for progressive indoctrination and self-congratulatory moralising. All of that is true, but Stranger Things was ruined by two other major problems. This first is nostalgia. Stranger Things immediately gripped audiences because it embraced the pre-Woke era of the 1980s when life in the West had reached its peak. This matters. Look at the audience pattern… In the 90s, audiences felt all-powerful. They were the world’s geopolitical superpower and they had been comfy and safe in their civilisation for many decades. Naturally, they were fascinated by the fictional destruction of the empire. Their centrepiece landmarks being destroyed by terrorists, natural disasters, or aliens. The 90s became the age of the disaster blockbuster. The stalking ground of Michael Bay. Our heroes were bad arse men beating the shit out of bad guys. Intergalactic diplomacy via the fist. Think Will Smith in Independence Day when he punches an alien’s lights out with the quip, ‘Welcome to Earth!’ That’s another ruined franchise. We’re all doing our best to forget Independence Day: Resurgence. The shine wore off landmark destruction when the Twin Towers fell. Suddenly, the demise of our Western empire was real, and we didn’t seem to have any Bruce Willis characters to punch out the baddies. Just a whole lot of dopey politicians and bent bureaucrats rubbing their hands together as society stumbled. Today’s audiences don’t want to see their cities destroyed because our civilisation is in a real-world state of decay. We’re dying. We feel unsafe. Our minds are regressing back to better times when we still knew who we were as a people. We don’t find entertainment in reality. This is why audiences loved everything about living within this recreated 1980s world of Stranger Things. It wasn’t just latchkey kids riding their bikes at night, playing board games, or making mixtapes. There was a sense of personal independence that some of us remember living, while young audiences longed for the possibility of a life unmonitored by helicopter parents and an overbearing government. How refreshing when the biggest threat to society came from the Russians and a shady secret lab instead of the constant scourge of Islamic terror and Nanny State busybodies. The socially cringe parts of the 1980s the show creators sought to repair later were met with rejection by the audience. Viewers were not seeking a fix. They desired immersion to give their brains a rest from the painful suffocation of the 2020s. This loss of nostalgia started going wrong in Season 3, but by Season 5 we were watching modern sensibilities smashed into the past and it felt repulsive. Putting actors in dated clothes does not sell authenticity any more than Channel 5 casting a black woman as Anne Boleyn. Having lost its warmth, the next thing Stranger Things sacrificed was its fear factor... has Woke truly ruined the entertainment industry (and if so, why?) Or do we have a generation of writers who, like first time authors, don’t understand how to write an ending?... I’m not sure what causes the cascade of failures that plagues modern entertainment, only that it keeps happening. I don’t know about you, but I’m being pushed back toward books and away from over-hyped shows. The centrepiece of a civilisation is the art it creates. We are not building beautiful architectural works. There are no extraordinary churches or public buildings which stretch the imagination of the human mind. When was the last time a work of art drew people from across the world to stand in front of a canvas in awe? What music do we write now that can move the soul? Where are the works of fiction which will define our era for the next thousand years? It’s as though Woke robbed the West of its soul."
The push to have Canadians hear a 'slavery' acknowledgement at events - "Just as Indigenous land acknowledgements become a ubiquitous aspect of Canadian life, activists are attempting to normalize a second acknowledgement that would similarly precede every single speech, meeting or public event in the country. This was on view at the City of Toronto’s official Remembrance Day ceremony. After a standard land acknowledgement mentioning the various First Nations whose traditional territories overlap with the City of Toronto, attendees were also asked to acknowledge “those who were brought here involuntarily; particularly those brought to these lands as a result of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery.” While Toronto does indeed sit atop land that used to be Indigenous, the historical claims in the slavery acknowledgement are less accurate. As outlined in a recent report for the Aristotle Foundation, African slavery was never a defining feature of Canada, particularly as compared to the United States. The generally accepted view of historians is that, over 200 years, a total of 7,000 African slaves were owned in the French and English colonies that would eventually form Canada. That compares to a similar figure of 10 million for the U.S. As such, in contrast to the U.S., Canada’s contemporary Black population is comprised mostly of people who trace their lineage through Caribbean immigrants, or freed U.S. slaves who settled in Canada. What’s more, Canada became one of the first jurisdictions on earth with an explicit sanction against human bondage. The 1793 Act Against Slavery, passed by the colonial legislature of Upper Canada, would end up representing the British Empire’s legislative first step towards its ultimate ban on slavery in 1834; 33 years before Confederation. As noted by the Aristotle Foundation, the much more prevalent form of slavery in pre-Confederation Canada was the version practiced by Indigenous societies — iterations of which could be found on the West Coast well into the 19th century. Nevertheless, the City of Toronto is one of several Canadian institutions that is still attempting to normalize a “slavery acknowledgement” in addition to standard Indigenous land acknowledgements. Starting in 2018, the city codified the text of an “African Ancestral Acknowledgement” that was to be used to open public events, provided it was “delivered by a person of African descent.” If no such person could be found, a non-Black person is instructed to pre-empt the acknowledgement with the line “though I am not a person of African descent, I am committed to continually acting in support of and in solidarity with Black communities seeking freedom and reparative justice in light of the history and ongoing legacy of slavery that continues to impact Black communities in Canada.” Similar acknowledgements can also be found in various Toronto non-profits and government agencies. The Toronto Seniors Housing Corporation, for one, has a section on its website devoted to acknowledging slavery, even while noting that said slavery usually didn’t happen in Canada... Nova Scotia, long a centre of Canadian Black life due to its large pre-Confederation communities of freed slaves, has also seen several institutions flirting with slavery acknowledgements. The officially recommended land acknowledgement provided by the Nova Scotia chapter of CUPE, for instance, mentions the forcible displacement and enslavement of people of African descent,” adding “much of the privilege many of us have in this space stems from colonialism in the past and today, and in the oppression of Black & African Nova Scotian people.” Dalhousie University has drafted an official African land acknowledgement stating that “African Nova Scotians are a distinct people whose histories, legacies and contributions have enriched that part of Mi’kma’ki known as Nova Scotia for over 400 years.” African acknowledgements are also standard fare for the Nova Scotia RCMP, including at a May press conference updating the public on the failed search for two missing children... While land acknowledgements are now standard practice across Canadian legislative session, city hall meetings, church services, airline flights and even hockey games, they’ve notably never taken hold in the United States outside of the occasional corporate boardroom or academic gathering. In a January op-ed for The New York Times, Indigenous history professor Kathleen DuVal said that even this scattered usage had outlived its usefulness. Wrote DuVal, “they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations, and Indigenous scholars tell me there can be tricky politics involved with naming who lived on what land and who their descendants are.” Canadian views are more sanguine. Polls show that Canadians generally welcome land acknowledgements as a gesture of Indigenous reconciliation, even if they object to notions that they live on “stolen” land. A June survey by the Association for Canadian Studies found that 52 per cent of Canadians rejected the assertion that they lived on stolen Indigenous land."
Activist academic who called for ‘end of Israel’ has $870,000 grant restored : r/aussie - "What research was she conducting with such a large grant. I don't really care about her views but I would like to know if the tax payer is getting value for money with her research"
""Arab/Muslim Australian social justice activism", "to recover previously untapped oral histories" https://dataportal.arc.gov.au/NCGP/Web/Grant/Grant/FT220100427 Basically a slush fund to go chat with her mates."
"Seems pretty standard. The amount of money that gets granted to shit like this lol. Meanwhile government cries poor."
"Not an aussie. But academia across the world work more or less the same. It's most likely to reinterpret existing material using another theoretical lens, which can be various decolonial theories (you'll find quite funny things therein) or critical theories or post-modern theories or seemingly more down to the earth empirical approaches that are however just another way to tell stories (like calling Mizrahi Jews "Arab Jews" and asking why they gave up their Arabness). The current investment into humanities is definitely not worth it if you consider how many of them are just doing things like this without doing more solid works like finding, transcribing and digitalizing more raw materials or studying minority languages or translating old manuscripts into modern languages. People doing these things are still often woke (with more not-so-woke or even anti-woke guys mixed into them and arguing constantly with them) but they're woke in a respectable way."
"So basically “my thoughts on x” kinda of a thing? Seems a bit expensive. I mean, you can get the same thing from your local standup show for like $50."
" Basically that's the case. I can give you two examples to illustrate the insanity, one old, one new: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/bmj-academics-criticism-female-genital-mutilation-western-sensationalism-75d2sg03l https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair It's crazy that many are still defending contemporary humanity academics when a large percentage of them are simply bullshitting through the system. Bullshitting in STEM and "hard" social sciences (e.g. archeology, philology and certain fragments of history, certain fragments of linguistics) exists but it's more about old bald guys with incredibly huge egos quarrelling with each other and trying to fake data. In more serious fields it's never like a whole supposedly academic journal consisting of nothing but spicy takes and empty grandiose words with one thousand meanings argued in a confusingly vague way. Apparently, it is a precise description of contemporary "humanities". And it's not the worst part of that. The marginally propagandist concepts created by even non-bullshitting academics are so vague that they're now being used in a way that's... beyond the imagination of any sane person. I can give you another example. Search "Anne Frank white privilege" on Reddit and you'll see a new world. Given that modern humanity scholars constantly remind us that concepts and practices need to be put into contexts, one may ask if Anne knew she's white according to the standard in WW2. But the concept of white privilege has been used and abused for so long that someone having the audacity to write something like this is no longer surprising."
Marco Foster on X - "Ta-Nehisi Coates: “I think Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger. I take no joy in the killing of anyone no matter what they said. But if you ask me what the truth of his life was I would have to tell you it’s hate”"
Zarathustra on X - "Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (who has referred to white people as “majoritarian pigs” in multiple essays & interviews) on 9/11:"
Adrian Vermeule on X - "My take on this, for whatever it’s worth, is that people are reading into it a depth that it doesn’t have. The simpler read is that American liberalism has been intellectually enfeebled by having it too easy for too long. All liberals had to do was mouth a few incantatory words, and the world would cower before them. Now the magic has lost its power, and some are realizing it more quickly than others."
wanye on X - "Many people have compared wokeness to religion, but one detail that’s underexplored is that a lot of ordinary Democrats today are like Christians were in 1960, which is to say that they’ve come of age in a milieu that has been entirely supportive of their worldview to a degree that means they don’t even notice it. But, crucially, it means that they also don’t know any of the arguments of the other side and have no response to them. Their tactics work when they have complete control, sort of like how you could imply that somebody was an atheist or that they were gay in 1950 and that would have been enough to get them on their back foot. Those kinds of tactics don’t work in a genuinely adversarial environment."
Jonathan Taylor on X - "Exactly this. There are also parallels to abolition of mandatory prayer in school in that when trans activists can no longer force their beliefs on captive schoolchildren, they felt grievously wronged...despite them being very much in the wrong, entitled, overreaching, etc."
Left wingers believe that anything that threatens the left wing agenda is "hate", after all. And once again, the anti-"hate" people are incredibly hateful
Dave Greene on X - "The Coates-Klein interview has become viral because it represents the fundamental disconnect our ruling class has regarding the country’s conservative (white) population. Fundamentally, there are only two ways you can regard a politically discontent sub-population in your nation:
1. As stakeholders who need to be convinced or negotiated with for change to occur
2. As deplorable political problems that need to be suppressed by the state’s security forces, forcibly re-educated, or (maybe) ethnically cleansed.
Klein realizes this dilemma, and is coming to terms with the fact that Red-American re-education will never happen, leaving suppression or negotiation as the only options. Still, no matter what he does, he CANNOT get Coates to see the problem right in front of his face, not least because Coates’ celebrity status prevents Klein from rubbing his nose in it. Coates wants to eat his cake and have it too. He wants to call Charlie Kirk, and the massive plurality of Americans he represents, “hateful” and unworthy of mourning after their murder. Yet, Coates doesn’t understand that doing this means that his preferred system cannot then say it represents those “deplorable” white people’s interests. Coates wants to say. “Why can’t we morally condemn all conservatives but then rule over them in a system that claims to embody their voice while simultaneously spending their money and portraying them as villains?” Klein knows this is impossible. A child could see this is impossible. But no one has the moral authority to talk to Coates in a way that would force him to understand this impossibility."
wanye on X - "I think a lot of people who, like me, used to be more moderate, but who have shifted right, did so basically because we’ve accepted this exact framing. To liberals I am something to be either squashed or condescendingly managed. I’m not an actual person. My desires are clearly illegitimate. They talk about me like I’m not in the room, arguing about whether to stomp on my head for all eternity, or attempt to placate my idiotic demands in a bid for the ultimate power to dispossess me. You know that I can hear you, right? Like, this is a public interview. I can see how you’re talking about me."
Meme - "When women complain about the lack of female characters, they're really saying "I'm an uninteresting loser who has main character syndrome". These women don't actually want to see "representation". They want to literally see themselves in a product. And of course that's literally impossible, so it always fails"
Otto Von Trickortreatmarck: "You're talking about a show where this is a major character"
*Glep, small green creature, from Smiling Friends*
{A Miggs from Nantucket}: "The lack of important girl characters in smiling friends is really disappointing, but considering what a boys club the newgrounds scene was, it makes sense"
Meme - wanye @wanyeburkett: ""The talk" that every white father now has to have with his white sons is the one where you say, look, you're going to see a lot of stuff in the news and in the culture and on bookstands about how evil white men are and that's just not true, but also please don't become a weirdo..."
Natalie Wynn on X - "I hate conspiratorial explanations but I feel like I have to wonder—is the online left truly, organically this stupid, or is it all some kind of Russian op?"
Brianna Wu on X - "Genuine engagement with this point? I spent a decade working in professional progressive politics. A large proportion of what you see on Twitter are Russian/Qatar bots. It’s also true that foreign influence networks have spent the last 20 years funding operations in the progressive space. I used to wonder why we had all these pro-Palestinian operatives running foundations and showing up to meetings, organizing events, and basically working for free all the time. Well, the truth is our movement about universal healthcare got infiltrated. And they started hijacking things and moving it from policies to help the working class to outright anti-Americanism. It’s why they spend all their time talking about Palestine instead of anything with domestic policy. Now, these forces have aligned with the purity spiral, a phenomenon where the left can only move further to the left. So the outcome is yes - the left really is this stupid. I’m an Obama Democrat with utterly typical views on every issue under the sun. I have literally not voted for a republican this century. That gets me called a Republican in this environment."
Ironically, left wingers love to accuse those who disagree with them of being bots.
