He was killed by Sikh extremists for serving Canada, and a tax-funded film is celebrating it

He was killed by Sikh extremists for serving Canada, and a tax-funded film is celebrating it

aIf you can find a way to watch the recently released Khalistani propaganda film Guru Nanak Jahaz, you might as well watch it. You paid for it, after all.

The film, which depicts the assassination of a Canadian civil servant by a Sikh terrorist as a heroic act of justice, has a “Funded by the Government of Canada” credit at the end. It was also supported by the B.C. government and gives special thanks to Conservative MP Tim Uppal and Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal. While the Liberals didn’t return a request for comment, a spokesperson for Uppal told me that he was not involved in the film and that the filmmakers did not communicate with him about the credit at any point.

Set in 1914, the plot follows the assassin, who you likely never heard about, and the voyage of the more familiar Komagata Maru, a ship which carried nearly 400 Indian passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver, only to be denied entry to Canada. It was screened in some Cineplex theatres earlier this year.

The official narrative that you’ll find on government websites explains that this was purely a matter of baseless Canadian racism, and it’s been wholeheartedly adopted by politicians today: as prime minister, Justin Trudeau apologized for the incident in 2016, and the Conservative party releases annualstatements commemorating the event, praising the bravery of the passengers and their craving for freedom.

That’s the whitewashed version, however. It leaves out that the Komagata Maru voyage was organized by the Indian Ghadar movement — the word literally means “revolution” — which advocated for violent resistance against the British Empire. (India was a British possession at that time and would continue to be until 1947). Its members were primarily Sikhs who lived in North America. And while they did experience racism, and while changes to Canada’s immigration laws in 1908 indirectly restricted Indian immigration, there were also reasons for the Canadian government to be apprehensive.

Ghadar members dreamed of a return to India, but wanted to rid that land of the British first. They remembered the Indian Mutiny of 1857 with regret — that bloody event saw many British-Indian regiments unsuccessfully take up arms against the Empire; Sikh Punjabis were among the exceptions, largely siding with the British. Decades later, the mostly Sikh Punjabi Ghadarites proposed another 1857-like uprising while applauding anti-British terrorism.

When rumblings of war with Germany began to brew in 1914, the Ghadarites grew excited — now was the time to strike. In August 1914, after the war broke out, the movement’s newspaper advocated, “Go to India and incite the native troops. Preach mutiny openly. Take arms from the troops of the native states and wherever you see the British, kill them…. There is hope that Germany will help you.” Expats in the Orient organized ships to return home and revolt.

The Komagata Maru was part of this movement. Organized by Ghadarites before the breakout of the First World War, it attempted to bring more movement adherents into Vancouver to settle. Canada was right not to let it dock because the entire envoy was a security threat.

Their fears were well-founded. Among the Sikhs already in Vancouver was one Mewa Singh, an immigrant of nine or so years, who wasinvolved in an unsuccessful plot to smuggle weapons to the Komagata Maru. After the incident, Singh went on to murder Canadian immigration official William Hopkinson in a courthouse. According to a report at the time, Hopkinson had recently busted an Indian nationalist bomb-making operation in Victoria which infuriated adherents. Additionally, in the weeks before he was murdered, one of his informants shot and killed two Sikhs at a funeral, creating more animosity.

That is the story that Guru Nanak Jahaz recounts through rose-coloured glasses. Singh is the protagonist of the film, a loyal member of his wholesome community who just wants his people to be treated fairly. White Vancouverites — officials and regular folk alike — are all comic book villains, harassing the protagonists throughout the plot.

At one point, a roving band of white men barge into a Sikh building to trash the place; one member declares, “This is a white man’s country!” before being fended off by the protagonist. Later, we’re introduced to the Big Bad — Hopkinson — who hears about the incoming Komagata Maru and warns his boss that “there’s a ship full of Indians heading for Canada” and that “we can’t afford any more Indians spilling over here.” It’s an over-the-top caricature that would have worked better as clumsy satire.

But that’s how the movie goes: Singh and the Ghadarites fighting for equality as the schemey, racist Hopkinson sabotages their reputation in the press and masterminds the deteriorating conditions on the ship.

In the film, Hopkinson’s sadistic ways ultimately lead to the ship being returned to India, where menacing white British guards at the port fire into the crowd of disembarked Komagata Maru passengers. While there was a riot at this point in real life that resulted in 19 individuals being killed by police, the Indian culture department’s recollection of these events says that the riot was initiated by passengers who resisted arrest.

By the way, Canada’s official story is that a massacre occurred and it was motivated by “British perceptions that the passengers were revolutionaries.” Never mind that the passengers were mutinous members of a group literally named “Revolution” who courted German ships on the way home. Never mind that a year later, seditious Indian troops in Singapore, influenced by the Ghadar movement and enamoured with Germany, led a rampage that killed more than 40 people, mostly British military but some British, Chinese and Malay civilians as well.

Guru Nanak Jahaz hits its climax with Singh’s point-blank shooting of Hopkinson, which is portrayed approvingly as a moment of justice. Singh, as in real life, goes on to be tried and executed for his crime.

What’s striking about the film is its complete lack of self-awareness. It’s as if the filmmakers didn’t even blink at the thought of championing political violence. Neither did the intended audience — the handful of reviews that exist online rave at this tale of social justice.

The Ghadar movement, which got the Indian independence it supposedly wanted in the mid-20th century, isn’t just a footnote of history in this film. It’s also a stand-in for today’s Khalistani movement, which campaigns for an independent Sikh state of Punjab.

The modern Sikh nationalists are responsible for some of the worst political violence Canada has ever seen: the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, which killed 329 people, mostly Canadian; the 1998 assassination of journalist Tara Singh Hayer (a witness in the Air India case) in front of his Surrey home. No one was ever charged for the latter. Concerningly, Khalistani protesters have even portrayed Liberal MP Anita Anand with Indira Gandhi, alongside depictions of the latter being shot. Gandhi was the prime minister of India until her Sikh nationalist bodyguards assassinated her.

Films like Guru Nanak Jahaz draw a straight line from past to present, legitimizing political violence across time. Making matters worse, they perpetuate the cannibalizing narrative that Canada and the bulk of its population back then were fundamentally cruel and immoral entities whose exclusionary border policies were motivated only by hate — ignoring, of course, the historical context. Fears of violent nationalist movements were valid, especially in wartime.

Hopkinson ultimately gave his life in the course of serving his country. What a shame that one century later, he would be turned into a villainous caricature in a government-supported propaganda piece.

Britons are beginning to admit it: Their beloved National Health Service is broken

Britons are beginning to admit it: Their beloved National Health Service is broken

"The day after the United Kingdom's general election last year, newly appointed Labour Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting proclaimed that Britain's socialized health care system was "broken."

Streeting's statement, while certainly correct, would have been political suicide just a few years ago. Criticism of the National Health Service (NHS) has long been seen as heretical. As in other religions, heretics were judged not on the merit of their criticism, but on the mere fact that they dared challenge received wisdom. As former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson put it in 1992, "The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion."...

Criticism of the NHS has remained extremely taboo. When I suggested in 2023 that the NHS was perhaps not the best health care system in the world, the left-wing tabloid paper The Mirror ran two stories about my "shocking" views. I even received death threats.

And yet, in just a few years, the Overton window appears to have shifted. The idea that the NHS isn't the world's best health care system is becoming more and more politically acceptable. Recent polling by YouGov suggests that more Brits now believe the NHS provides worse health care than other European countries, with the percentage increasing from 16 percent in 2019 to about 27 percent in 2025. The British Social Attitudes survey shows that, in 2024, just one in five adults (21 percent) were "very" or "quite" satisfied with the way the NHS runs. This is a steep decline of 39 percentage points since 2019, and marks the lowest level of satisfaction recorded since the survey began in 1983.

Perhaps the various high-profile stories of shockingly poor NHS treatment have driven some of this change. Nowhere is this more striking than in the Lucy Letby case...

How can we not tell the difference between serial baby murder and normal NHS care?

The idea that the NHS used to be the best system in the world but has only recently begun to fail remains common. When London Theatre reviewed Nye, a play about the birth of the National Health Service, the critic found it "bittersweet watching [Aneurin "Nye"] Bevan's fight to bring the NHS into being at a time when years of cuts have left it crumbling, and when its heyday can already be looked back on as something of a fever dream."

But the NHS is far from the best health care system in the world, and has never been the best. The most popular explanation for its shortcomings, echoed in that Nye review, is that the NHS is struggling because it is now underfunded. Yet public spending on the NHS has increased in real terms by an average of 3.7 percent since the 1950s. Health care represented 43.1 percent of total government spending on goods and services in 2024, an increase from 31.6 percent in 1997.

Government health care spending is so high in the U.K. that it has become the source of amusing ridicule. An account on X called Days of NHS Spending puts into context just how much the health service costs British taxpayers. For example, "the NHS spends Russia's entire military budget once every 150 days." If the NHS itself were a military, it would have the third-highest budget in the world, surpassed only by the U.S. and China.

The idea that the NHS is "underfunded" is simply untrue. But the only solution most politicians ever offer for our health care woes is to spend more money.
By almost every available measure, the NHS performs poorly in comparison to other systems. Take avoidable treatable deaths: In 2019, the U.K. had an avoidable mortality rate of 71 per 100,000 people. This is the lowest it has ever been, down from 84 in 2010 and 120 in 2001, yet it's still the second-highest avoidable mortality rate in Western Europe.

Even the 2023 Commonwealth Fund Survey, probably the international ranking that is most positive toward the NHS, ranks the U.K. ninth out of 11 in "health care outcomes."

Four-hour waits at emergency rooms and month-long delays to see a general practitioner have become part of life. Wait times have fluctuated over the years. According to the British Medical Association, the total number of people on NHS wait lists fell until 2010, then steadily increased until 2019. But even at that 2010 low point, British wait times were about twice as long as Dutch wait times for the same procedure. The Commonwealth Fund study found that the U.K. had among the longest wait times to see a specialist... Only Canada reported a lower percentage than the U.K.
The NHS was founded on the promise that health care would be universally accessible and free at the point of use. But with wait lists this long and routine care difficult to obtain, is it really "universally accessible"? And when the tax burden is at its highest level since World War II, does it really matter if you aren't paying at use?

Not only is dissatisfaction with the NHS rising, but the public is slowly waking up to the fact that there could be better systems out there. The fact that the health secretary is now willing to call the NHS "broken" reflects this shift. Now, possibly for the first time in British history, Social Health Insurance (SHI) systems are becoming part of the mainstream debate. The BBC ran an article comparing the NHS to Germany's health care system, saying that the "jury is very much out on whether copying a different country's health system is really the way forward." Politico ran a piece titled "Is it time for the U.K. to (whisper it) ditch the NHS?"

The mere suggestion that marketized health care systems could provide better outcomes is no longer heresy. As is the case in every market, competition and choice allow for the most efficient allocation of resources. These systems empower patients with the ability and freedom to choose.

The Netherlands, for example, transitioned from a socialized system to a competitive, market-based, private SHI system. Sweden has started to allow private companies to set up medical practices. Most of Europe has some form of competitive market in health care, and spends much more on capital and long-term investment than the U.K.

The Australian example is particularly interesting. In 2019, Australian health care spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was 9.3 percent, just a few points below the U.K. Despite similar levels of spending, Australian health care outcomes outperform Britain's. Ovarian, lung, pancreatic, liver, stomach, and colorectal cancer survival rates are all higher in Australia than in the U.K., by as much as 10 percent in some cases. Australia's pancreatic cancer survival rate is nearly 75 percent higher than the U.K's.

Competition and choice drive innovation, efficiency, and responsiveness. When providers must compete for patients, they have incentives to improve quality, reduce wait times, and invest in cutting-edge treatments. Choice empowers patients rather than forcing us into a monopoly system where our only option is to wait and hope."

 

  

 

 

Self-Help: Men vs Women

There is a meme about the difference between men's and women's self-help books.

">male self-help book
>ctrl+f "you have to "
>342 results
>female self-help book
>ctrl+f "you deserve "
>764 results"

This ties in with the majority of the literature, which finds that women have an external locus of control and men have an internal one. Nonetheless, I decided to do an empirical test of this claim.

Firstly, I had to find a self-help book for men and a self-help book for women to compare.

Only Indigo seemed to have listings for both categories, so I looked at the Best Match for both categories.

Under Self-help Books For Women, the first Best Match was The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About by Mel Robbins.

Unfortunately, many male self-improvement books could not be used for various reasons.

Under Men's Self Improvement Books, the first Best Match was The Richest Man In Babylon: Complete and Original Signature Edition by George S. Clason. However, this book was unsuitable due to the structure of the narrative, told in a serialised story that reminded me of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The next book, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, also seemed unsuitable as it was also a Holocaust memoir. Then, I was unable to find a copy of Self Help for Men: Confidence, Assertiveness and Self-Esteem Training (3 in 1): Use These Tools and Methods to Say NO more, to Stop Doubting and to Stop Always Being Mr. Nice Guy by John Adams. As A Man Thinketh: The Complete Original Edition And Master Of Destiny: A Gps Guide To Life by James Allen was published in 1908 with archaic language, and was also very short (the Project Gutenberg file is 33 pages long, vs 272 for The Let Them Theory).

In the end, Make The Impossible Possible: One Man's Crusade To Inspire Others To Dream Bigger And Achieve The Extraordinary by Bill Strickland seemed suitable.

I then searched for the two key phrases in both books. I also looked at the context of these phrases, and generally they were used in a way that matches the analytical framework above (e.g. "you have to" was not being used in sentences like "you have to know that you're worth it").

Results:

you have to (agentic language): 10 for male vs 42 for female
you deserve (entitlement language): 1 for male vs 33 for female

While there is more agentic language in the female self-help book than the meme suggests, looking at the ratios of the phrases is telling.

The ratio of agentic to entitlement language for the male self-help book is 10:1. Whereas for the female self-help book it is 1.3. So men are indeed told that they need to get off their ass and change their life more than women.

Related:

Rob Henderson on X

"Self-help books for women vs. men aren’t selling the same story.

If you walk through the self-help section and compare the books marketed to men with those aimed at women, the contrast is striking. The books for men tend to emphasize stoicism, discipline, and self-sufficiency: become more focused, toughen up, don’t let the world knock you off your path, no one is coming to save you. The message is essentially that you need to strengthen yourself and earn your way forward.

The books for women, by contrast, rarely begin with the idea that you’re lacking something that needs to be built. Instead, the theme is closer to: you’re already great, but you keep getting in your own way. The world hasn’t recognized your value because you haven’t fully accepted it yourself. The promise is that once you stop beating yourself up and embrace who you already are, others will see it too.

Two very different messages—one built around improvement, the other around affirmation."

Dr. Camilo Ortiz 👨🏼‍🎓 on X

"EXACTLY. And this isn't just true about self-help groups. Therapy itself mirrors this trend."

Mario on X

"I watched a doctor on YouTube talk about women and migraines. After rattling off a whole bunch of lifestyle choices that contribute to migraines, the doctor then said, “The first thing to know: is it’s not your fault.”

Make it make sense!"

Rose on X

"I have dev a deep distaste for female self improvement talks/books b/c their focus is make women feel good NOT get better. Reality is maj of 🚺 respond very negatively to self improvement b/c it requires self awareness"

David Wilson on X

"There's a similar orientation in kids/family movies: Frozen, Encanto, Moana -> “you're already enough, you/others must recognize it"

It’s harder to name recent movies where "you're not ready, you must improve"

It's easy to name old ones: Aladdin, Lion King, Nemo, Tarzan..."

Lead in Afghanistan

Thread by @JeffRigsby2 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

Afghanistan has one of the world's highest rates of childhood lead exposure, which causes permanent brain damage.

Nearly all children here have significant lead poisoning.

Researchers in the US have found the source of the lead. But nobody has told the Afghan public.

Thread. 

A worldwide survey in 2020 found that one in three children had blood lead above 5 micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL). That's considered the threshold for lead poisoning.

Children in Afghanistan have an 𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘦 blood lead level of 14.2 μg/dL, nearly three times the cutoff. 

(Wikipedia: "Lead poisoning")

And the vast majority of Afghan kids have blood lead above the 5 μg/dL level.

Compare that to the worst recent case of lead poisoning in the United States, which happened a few years ago in the city of Flint, Michigan.

Roughly 100,000 people in Flint were exposed to elevated lead levels from the municipal water supply.

The affected families won hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and public officials were prosecuted.

There are different estimates of exactly how much harm was done.

 

But according to some studies the share of young children in Flint with blood lead levels above 5 μg/dL may have been around 5 percent.

That was still considered a public health emergency—and for good reason.

Lead exposure in children causes irreversible losses in intelligence.

 

It also predicts violent behavior in adulthood.

Some people think the fall in US crime rates in the 1990s was partly caused by the ban on lead paint and the phaseout of leaded gasoline, which both began two decades earlier.

Lead has damaging effects on other organ systems too.

 

According to the WHO, some of its hazards include "increased risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems and kidney damage":

So if Afghanistan has one of the world's worst lead exposure problems, people should know where the lead is coming from.

There are a few possible suspects.

South Asia as a whole has the world's highest burden of lead poisoning.

And in Bangladesh the problem turned out to be turmeric (زردچوبه).

The spice was being adulterated with lead chromate, a pigment that makes it a brighter shade of yellow.

What happened in Bangladesh was ultimately a success story:

It showed that when a major source of lead contamination can be located, the problem is sometimes easy to fix.

I think that may be true in Afghanistan too, but the evidence has been overlooked.

The cosmetic use of kohl (سرمه) is another risk factor for lead exposure in this part of the world.

Kohl is supposed to be powdered stibnite (antimony sulfide).

But stibnite looks very similar to galena (lead sulfide), and the two minerals are often found in the same locations. 

So kohl sold in India tends to have very high levels of lead. Kohl is banned in the United States for just that reason:

Nobody knows whether turmeric, kohl, or any of the other spices and cosmetics sold in Afghanistan contain dangerous amounts of lead.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosm…

 

That's because they've never been tested. But it would be a good idea if someone tried.

In Bangladesh, the adulteration of turmeric with lead pigment mostly stopped after government inspectors began spot checks at the country's spice markets, using handheld XRF spectrometers.

 

But that isn't the most urgent priority for Afghanistan, where the major source of lead exposure is probably already known.

It just isn't known here.

Since 2019, health officials in Seattle have been finding elevated blood lead levels in Afghan immigrant and refugee children.

 

 And in 2022, four local researchers published a paper in the 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘌𝘹𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 & 𝘌𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘌𝘱𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 which solved the mystery.

The lead is coming from cooking pots the families brought with them from Afghanistan. 

(full text at )

The most hazardous pots tested were a type of aluminum pressure cooker called a 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯 (کازان).

These are a standard item in many Afghan kitchens, and it's been hard to convince some immigrant families in Seattle to stop using them.doi.org/10.1038/s41370…

 

But the authors' "simulated cooking and storage" tests released very high levels of dissolved lead.

(Amusingly, they didn't pressurize the 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯𝘴 for the tests because they were afraid they might explode. So the lead levels produced by actual cooking might be even higher.)

 

Chris Ingalls, of Seattle's KING 5 television channel, has been following this story since the article appeared.

It was newsworthy for non-Afghans because at the time, some online retailers were selling imported 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯𝘴.

Eventually the press coverage forced them to stop. 

 

The US Food and Drug Administration has now issued an "import alert" against Rashko Baba, the dominant manufacturer of 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯𝘴.

And the state of Washington has passed legislation to tighten controls on lead in cookware.

Ingalls deserves a great deal of credit for all this.  

 

So does Afghan Health Initiative (), a Seattle-area nonprofit supporting the immigrant community.

And so do the researchers who originally identified the 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯𝘴 as the source of lead poisoning in local Afghan children.

But why does no one else know?

 

I don't think Afghans in California or Virginia have heard about this threat.

Much more importantly: Afghans in Afghanistan weren't told anything either.

Children here are less intelligent than children in most countries, because of something their mothers cook with every day.

 

And the most incredible aspect of the story is that it could have been told years ago, before the Seattle researchers even completed their study.

In January 2020 Radio Azadi, the Pashto service of RFE/RL, filmed a short video inside Rashko Baba's 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯 factory in Nangarhar.

 

 Tens of thousands of people have seen workmen melting down car engines and radiators to cast into Afghanistan's leading brand of pressure cooker:

But nobody seems to have pointed out that anything cooked in those pots will be unfit for human consumption.

 

The IEA should close the Rashko Baba plant tomorrow. Arresting the company's owners wouldn't be a bad idea either.

But any aluminum 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯 made in Afghanistan or Pakistan is probably recycled scrap metal.

According to the Seattle researchers, this is how it works in Africa:

 

 "Investigations in Cameroon and other West African countries found that the smelting process often used drinking cans, car and motorbike engine parts, vehicle radiators, transmissions, airplane fuselages, lead batteries, computer and electronic components, and other materials."

 

So if you own one of these things, destroy it.

You can buy pressure cookers made from stainless steel, and they won't poison your children's brains.

English Culture

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When people talk about 'English culture', they often think of cricket, tea, or fish & chips 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

But culture isn't about what people eat and wear. It's about norms, habits, and systems of social organisation.

A 🧵 on the systems and norms which make England genuinely unique  

 

National cultures aren't just defined by material culture - for example, what people eat and wear.

Those factors are mutable, and liable to change over time.

Nations are best identified by the habits, assumptions, and methods of social organisation.  

 

In this sense, the English are genuinely unique - even when compared to other European countries.

Our methods of social organisation, approaches to family, attitudes to law, and philosophical norms are distinctive, with deep historical roots.

So what makes the English unique?  

 

Let's start with family.

For centuries, the English have preferred nuclear families, with a low-level of obligation to extended family.

Emmanuel Todd's model of family systems identifies the English as nearly unique in their adherence to the 'absolute nuclear' family structure.  

 

What does this mean?

Two parents, with their children, living on their own land, with few obligations to their extended kin.

Historians Alan Macfarlane and Peter Laslett argue that this has been the primary mode of family arrangement in England since at least the 13th century.  

 

Laslett's argument is based on his analysis of records that stretch back to the medieval period.

In studying a 17th century Rector's Book from the Nottinghamshire village of Clayworth. Over a 12-year period, Laslett found little evidence of co-habiting extended families.  

 

Even today, when high prices prevent many young people from getting onto the housing ladder, England has a lower-than-average level of intergenerational living.

Compared to our European counterparts, the English are far more likely to leave the family home as young adults.  

 

England is also one of the strongest example of the Western European marriage pattern, a social system marked by comparatively late marriage, especially for women, and a generally small age difference between spouses.

Marriage at a very young age is not the norm in England.  

 

From 1619 to 1660, 1,000 marriage certificates issued by the Archdiocese of Canterbury show that only 34 brides were younger than 19 years old.

The average age of marriage for women was 24, while it was 28 for men. The youngest brides were all aristocratic.  

 

And unlike elsewhere in Europe, cousin marriage was never the norm.

In fact, it was banned in England until 1540 - and was only legalised in order to enable a royal cousin marriage.

George Darwin estimated that just 3.5% of middle class marriages were cousin marriages in 1875.  

 

And finally, non-nobles in England have long since had a greater degree of choice over who they marry than their European counterparts.

For more on this in particular, I recommend Alan MacFarlane's "The Origins of English Individualism", which explores this trend in detail.  

 

These relatively shallow kinship networks encouraged another long-standing feature of English social life - economic mobility.

For centuries, people in England have moved to where the jobs are. They have been far less rooted to the land than their European counterparts.  

 

Back to Laslett's Clayworth analysis once again - Laslett found that 61 per cent of Clayworth's residents moved away from the village, from 1676 to 1688.

London, meanwhile grew from 50,000 people at the end of the 15th century to around 200,000 by 1603.  

 

The vast majority of this migration was internal - almost all of these new residents were from other parts of the British Isles, particularly England.

By and large, they moved to London in search of improved prospects - a mobility enabled by loose kinship structures.  

 

According to sociologist Brigitte Berger:

"The young nuclear family had to be flexible and mobile as it searched for opportunity and property. Forced to rely on their own ingenuity, its members also needed to plan for the future and develop bourgeois habits of work and saving."  

 

But despite this remarkable internal flexibility, England saw relatively small numbers of migrants from outside of the British Isles.

Insulated from Europe by the English Channel, population movements were limited post-1066, save for some 50,000 Huguenots in the 16th century.  

 

Given that the maturity of a nuclear family was often demonstrated through property ownership, the English have generally provided strong protections for property owners.

As far back as the Anglo-Saxons, the English have distinguished between common land and private land.  

 

The importance of land to the Anglo-Saxons led to principles such as the transfer of land by enrolment - in other words, if land changed hands, that transfer had to be formally recorded.

And the roots of today's English property law developed during the early Norman period.  

 

The individuated responsibility of nuclear families, and the ownership of property, birthed another of England's social norms - a relatively high level of individual responsibility and freedom.

Slavery was forbidden in England from 1066, and slave trading banned in 1102.  

 

There has been no legally sanctioned torture in England since 1640 - Austria banned torture in 1776; France would ban torture in 1798.

Many of the liberties that took root in Europe during the Enlightenment were already the norm in England before 1700.  

 

However, liberty did not mean anarchy.

The English state has long been more centralised than its European counterparts. Since, at the latest, the time of Henry II (1154-1189), a uniformly applied system of royal justice has been the norm.

Few laws, applied consistently.  

 

And finally, the English have had a strong commercial instinct for centuries.

The English wool trade was the backbone of the English economy between 1250 and 1350, centuries before the commercial boom of the 16th and 17th centuries. Textile guilds emerged by the 12th century.

Unsurprisingly then, it was England - alongside the Netherlands - which embraced trade and commerce most enthusiastically in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Indeed, England has not been self-sufficient in food production since the 1750s.  

 

This is by no means an exhaustive list of England's distinctive norms.

However, these examples demonstrate that England has a complex and unique system of social arrangement, shaped by its history, geography, and culture.

This system is worth understanding - and celebrating.  

 

A failure to understand these norms has been the cause of many of the problems that we have faced over the last 50 years.

In many respects - homeownership, law & order, migration -, we have failed to make the system work on its own terms.

Time to embrace our system as it is! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Marxist female mountain climbers

Every now and then, I see the following meme circulated:

">8 Marxist female mountain climbers who wanted to prove women were just as good at mountain climbing as men.
>Picked the easiest peak.
>Refused any help from men along the route.
>When asked over the radio by A MAN *yuck* how they were doing, gave evasive answers "we're fine!", even though one of them was sick and dying.
>Get disoriented in the snow and all 8 women end up freezing to death.
>All male search party comes and retrieves their bodies."

Recently, I pointed out that very little of this was true and was challenged "Prove it, faggot."

In my experience, people who aggressively ask for proof never acknowledge that they are wrong when proven to be wrong (someone who just claimed that I was deluded when I said that open borders, racial quotas and sterilising children are pushed by Democrats in the US, doubled down when I presented tons of evidence for this and waved his hands and claimed none of what I said supported the claim and continued to double down even after I quoted his nonsense and directly juxtaposed it with the evidence I had presented that provided it was nonsense), but hey, it's material for another blog post (naturally, the person who called me a faggot claimed I didn't prove it after I presented all of the below).

Let us dig into the meme. So what this meme is misrepresenting is a 1974 attempt to cross the Lenin Peak

The team of 8: Elvira Shatayeva, Nina Vasilyeva, Valentina Fateyeva, Ilsinar Mukhamedova, Tatyana Sardashove, Galina Perekhodyuk, Lyudmila Manzharova, and Irina Lyubimtseva was indeed all female and from the Soviet Union, but this doesn't necessarily mean they were "Marxist" (anymore than 8 Communists today who happened to come from the US could be called "Capitalist").

The women were experienced climbers and 3-4 of the 8 had climbed Lenin Peak in the past, so this definitely wasn't a group of women who didn't know what they were doing. One potential team member had even been dropped because the others thought she wasn't good enough.

One page does claim, quoting Pavel Rezvoy, "a Ukrainian geologist who was in the area about the time the women died", that "The idea of the expedition was to prove that women could do this without the help of men." I found this reported (but without sources) by wiredforadventure too. The leader did promote all-women climbing and the team wanted to be the first women's team to do it.

Rezvoy does note that Lenin Peak was "an ultimate task", so this was definitely not "the easiest peak". SummitPost does call it "one of the easiest mountains over 7000m", but considering that the tallest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, is 8,849m high, over 7,000m is still no mean feat. Peakbagger.com lists 106 mountains whose peaks are 7,200m or more, and Lenin Peak is 7,134 m. Explorersweb says that "the mountain’s reputation as the easiest 7,000m peak is misleading because of its high altitude, unpredictable weather, and avalanche risk". They were also going to be the first team (gender aside) to traverse the peak, which presumably would've added to the difficulty level.

There is no evidence that they refused help from men along the route. They did not have any problems from July 30 to August 4, when the storm was forecast. On August 4 Richard Alan North met the Soviet women, but did not offer help.

They did not give evasive answers or claimed they were fine when asked over the radio how they were doing. On August 5th they said visibility was bad and they were having trouble making out the descent, on August 6th they reported conditions had worsened and later that one of them was sick. Vitaly Abalakov told them to descend and they did (i.e. they followed a man's instructions). They reported on August 7th that one of them had died and two of them were sick. So they reported their situation over the radio at least 4 times.

The climbers did not "get disoriented in the snow" but huddled together in their tents during the worst storm in 25 years and then froze to death trying to descend (I did not find any reports that this was due to disorientation). 7 bodies were found and 1 seems to have fallen off a ridge, so we can only confirm that 7 froze to death. Maybe you can say the one who fell off a ridge got disoriented, but mountain climbing is perilous and disorientation is not the only possible cause of that.

Their bodies were not retrieved by an all male search party; the phrasing indicates that the first group looking for them took their bodies off the mountain. In reality, their bodies were discovered by a group of Japanese and American climbers (there is no gender breakdown given), but a few days later, the expedition leader's husband and two others (who were also men) buried them in temporary snowgraves.

Notably, the women's team were not the only ones who died climbing the mountain at the time. Jon Gary Ullin, three Estonians and Eva Isenschmid died too.

So in conclusion, let us enumerate the claims of the meme and whether there is evidence each was true:

1) They were 8 women: True
2) They were Marxist: Not True
3) They wanted to prove women were just as good at mountain climbing as men: Possibly
4) They picked the easiest peak: Not True
5) They refused any help from men along the route: Not True
6) They refused to report that they were having problems when asked over the radio: Not True
7) They got disoriented in the snow: Not True
8) All 8 froze to death: Close enough
9) An all-male search party came and retrieved their bodies: Not really

So we can see, truly, that the majority of this meme is not true.

Chinese Integration

In response to some Malaysian anti-Chinese racism of a Malay supremacist who wants Chinese and Indian culture to fade:

Fayyadh Jaafar 🇲🇾🌹 on X

The Baba and Nyonya, despite marrying Muslims, didn’t convert to Islam.

Clearly showing that their cultural blend wasn’t about mimicking every aspect Malay customs, but rather creating something distinct, which we can't replicate today thanks to Malaysia's conversion laws.

Vynn is playing with spirits on X

People often ask why the Chinese don't assimilate into local culture more. Firstly, they do, just not in the way that some of you expect them to. Secondly, the reason the barrier exists is because of Islamic conversionary laws that prevent two-way assimilation. Consider Sabah. 

In Sabah, the Chinese can and do acquire Bumiputera status and are treated as natives legally. Often known as Sino-natives, there are many cases of Chinese intermarrying with natives and passing down their names, languages, cuisine, schooling, values, & wealth to their children.

 

Chinese identity is seamlessly wedded to native identity in Sabah. The sharp faultlines that typify Sino-Malay relations in West Malaysia are so blurred in Sabah that the racial fear mongering which has long been the mainstay of Peninsular politics backfires so flagrantly at those who stoke its flames amongst Sabahans. It is as if you have pointed the finger at one of our own. The race relations between the Malays and the Chinese of Malaya (then, inclusive of Singapore) were so arid that any frictions were liable to spark quickly into race riots. This is what happened in the 1960s when race riots in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur started spreading to other parts of the country.

 

Prior to these race riots, Malaya has had centuries of intermarriage between Malays and Chinese in the form of Chinese peranakans families, the Baba Nyonya only being one example. These race riots continue to mar the history of Malaysia to this day.

 

The flames of Malaya's race riots did not catch on Sabah's tanah air, however. When news of the riots reached Sabah's shores, there was no dry tinder for it to light. Sino-native relations have been watered by the decades of shared drinking, blood-mixing, and holy water dabbling.

 

Sabah may have suffered the Silent Riot but it has never been afflicted by a race riot between the Chinese and the natives.

 Why Sabah is different.

Local adat (custom) recognizes the native status of Sino-natives. The Native Courts are a third jurisdiction that covers matters pertaining to adat which are not covered by the Civil and Syariah courts.

The Chinese can acquire bumiputera status in these courts by proving to the judge they are married to natives and live as natives. Two cases from the 1950s come to mind: Liew Sin Yin versus District Officer, Jesselton 1959 and Ong Seng Kee versus District Officer, Inanam 1959.

Mr Liew married a Dusun woman and married according to Chinese custom and gave his children Chinese names. But since he lived in Jesselton city, a predominantly Chinese enclave in those days, he never paid poll tax as a native.

Therefore, the judge rejected his application for native status. In contrast Mr Ong from Inanam, lived in the native village with his Dusun wife and paid poll tax as a native. Similar to Mr Liew, his children have Chinese names and re even educated in Chinese schooling systems.

However, because Mr Ong behaves in accordance with local adat, the local native officials of his village testify that he is considered a local. This testimony & the obligations that bind him to community, reassured the native court of Inanam to grant him native status in 1959.

The Chinese truly get along with the natives of Sabah. This is because they are culturally compatible in many ways. One of the ways this is realized is in how they share their duties in life and in death. 

In life, they share their wealth, their lands, and their adat. In marriage, the relative equality of the wife with the husband ensures that the children inherit both sides of the family's rights and duties. In death, they pass down their inheritance and are then buried together.  

Ambilineal inheritance prevails only if religious conversion is not mandatory. The children are allowed to succeed as legitimate heirs, the rights and duties of both parents, unencumbered by Muslim-only inheritance laws.  

Furthermore, there is a great deal of religious compatibility between the Chinese and the natives. Chinese folk beliefs recognize the tutelaries of the land and requires one to pay respect to the local spirits.

If the Chinese are Christian, as in the case of the Hakka, then they find fellowship in the native Christian population.

Why are there so many Hakka in Sabah?

There were many waves of Chinese migration but the Chinese who arrived in North Borneo over a century ago came either as traders or as minorities hoping to escape persecution. The latter group are known as the Hakka. 

After the failed Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) against the Qing emperor, the Hakka became the target of persecution by the Manchu. Many Hakka Christians wanted to migrate to Sabah to avoid the persecution by the Manchu government in China which linked them to the Taiping Rebellion.

To give you a scale of the persecution the Hakkas faced, in retaliation for killing three Hunanese officers, the Xiang Army exterminated the entire Hakka population of Wukeng and Chixi during military counter-attacks on the Hakkas in the year 1888.

The army also massacred tens of thousands of other Hakkas in Guanghai. So when the Basel Christian Mission made a deal with the North Borneo government to resettle the Hakka in North Borneo as coolies, the Hakka leapt at the opportunity.  

The Hakkas that fled to and eventually settled in North Borneo under Medhurst's Free Passage immigration policy were Christians, just like their leader. According to colonials records, 3,859 Hakka entered North Borneo under the Medhurstian Free Passage scheme in the 1920s.

But from 1930–1940, a total of 31,998 Chinese entered Sabah on their own accord. The Hakka had caught wind of the prosperity of their relatives in this land and many more wanted respite from mainland persecution. 

They were given assistance in the form of land concessions and cash subsidies. These Hakka Christian farm-owners would go on to form the backbone of Sabah's economic development. Unlike non-Hakka Chinese, who were mostly labourers or businessmen, most Hakka came as settlers. 

You can see that unlike the Chinese in West Malaysia, who are primarily Hokkien and Cantonese, the Chinese in Sabah are mostly Hakka to the point that it was the lingua franca of the Chinese communities before Mandarin took over in the modern period. 

Unlike the skewed gender ratio typical of Chinese immigration into the Nanyang (Southeast Asia), the Hakka arrived as families. There was as many Hakka women as there were Hakka men. The Hakka after the Taiping Rebellion were a poor people.

But they made up for their lack in material assets with a grit like no other. When the great stupidity of Chinese footbinding became fashionable during the Qing dynasty, the Hakka women were one of the only Chinese women who did not bind their feet even when the practice was commonplace in other parts of China. Hakka women engaged in hard work like the men and so did not have time to entertain self-detrimental luxuries. During the Taiping Rebellion, the leader of the Xiang Army, Zeng Guofan, had a special contempt for Hakka women,  referring to them as "hillbilly witches" for the active role they played as generals and armed resistance during the Rebellion. Hakkas who settled in the rural highlands of Sabah also earn the moniker Cina Bukit (lit., Hill Chinese) and are known as Chinese who work the hills. 

The Hakka are adept at speaking multiple tongues since they've accustomed so well to the local colour. It is not uncommon to meet a Cina Bukit who speaks Dusun, Malay, English, Mandarin, and of course, Hakka.

The Hakka women marry with the locals and pass on their tongue and work ethic to their children. If Chinese men marry native women, they pass down Chinese names and receive Chinese schooling. 

In return, the native spouses of these mixed marriages pass on their bumiputera status as well as rights to land unto their Sino-Native children.

When the Chinese die, they are buried together with their family in the same cemeteries. 

The Chinese and the Natives live together, eat together, raise children together, worship together, and die together. Mandatory conversion laws prevent this.

Let's not forget how three of Sabah's past Chief Ministers (the head of government) have been held by Chinese. Chong Kah Kiat (2001-2003). Yong Teck Lee (1996-1998). Peter Lo Su Yin (1965-1967).