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Tuesday, October 27, 2026

The Deconstruction of Western Game Development (RIP BioWare) (Get Woke, Go Broke)

SirD 🇺🇸 on X

The Deconstruction of Western Game Development (RIP BioWare)

I'm going to tell you guys a sad little story. It starts all the way back in 2011, and ends with the closure of one of the west's most beloved RPG developers: BioWare.

15 years ago, some weird shit started happening in game development. I'll skip the frivolous details and I won't bother naming names, it's already a long story, but essentially it involves certain left-wing activists campaigning for social justice.
 
You see, these activists noticed video games due to their surging popularity and cultural relevance, and boy let me tell you, they were not happy about this! "How dare these silly little games that men love have such a massive impact on our culture?! Are the video games influencing elections?!"
 
Once this was noticed, there was no turning back. These activists knew how important gaming was, and they also knew that nobody cared if they personally liked them or not. We can't have that! How non-inclusive..!
 
There was only one thing for them to do: change video games into something they could personally be proud of. So they got started by declaring various things about video games "problematic."
 
"Does this camera angle show up a woman's skirt? Why is it focused on this fictional character's scrumptious rump for more than 7.2 seconds? How absolutely and utterly objectifying! Does this game actually incentivize killing strippers and hiding it? Is this fictional character just a little too curvy and attractive? Are men having too much fun?! How many women have been told to 'get back in the kitchen' in a Call of Duty lobby? Wait a minute, there's only two black guys..?"
 
🤬😡🤬
 
Meanwhile, the west was being introduced to a little something called "cancel culture." You see, a lot of people had the audacity to publicly voice opinions that leftists weren't fond of. This was one of the most severe possible social crimes. If convicted, you could potentially face cry-bullying, friend-group ostracization, deplatforming, and in more severe cases... losing your job or being debanked.
 
Naturally, nobody wanted that. Some even feared "getting canceled" more than death itself, as evidenced by some rather tragic suicides. "If we are going to change video games, this is the perfect weapon for us to utilize," the aforementioned activists thought to themselves. But if they were going to pull this off: they needed to break out the big guns. A caped crusader so fearsome, that none would dare oppose them...
 
..Polygon and Kotaku.
 
Anyways, I promise I'm getting to the point. As activists started their campaign to "change video games," journalists everywhere rallied to their cause. You see, they were very angry at gamers after they had the audacity to call a woman a "whore" for... literally sleeping her way into the industry and publicly bullying her ex-boyfriend into suicide. From this point on, gamers were the enemy. Problematic bigots, and misogynists, oh my. 💫
 
The mission? Simple: bring social justice to video games at any cost, make the industry more politically correct and inclusive. Punish those brave enough to resist our efforts with left-wing cancel culture. Make video games more "diverse," aka more in line with our political ideology. There was just one problem: the gamers were starting to notice. 🫥
 
You may have heard of a little movement called "Gamergate." While you probably heard that this was little more than a white supremacist, anti-women hate campaign orchestrated by 4chan, the simple reality of this movement is that it was a collective of individuals from various cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds who all shared one thing in common: they actually liked video games and didn't want activists to bastardize and change them for political reasons.

The message of Gamergate was simple:
 
"If you allow these activists to politicize game development, it's going to lead to lesser quality products, and potentially the downfall of video games as we know them."
 
That's right. Fifteen years ago, those silly little bigots, aka "Gamergate 4chan trolls," (🥵) predicted...
 
..Dragon Age: The Veilguard!
 
It may sound like I'm joking, but I'm not. You see I was right there with Gamergate predicting the downfall of video games. I knew that games like 'Veilguard' would be the inevitable result of the left-wing politicization of game development. I tried to warn you, I really did... but so many of you simply refused to listen.
 
Yes, dear reader. You were so caught up in your Tumblr-tier performative social optics, that you ignored our warnings. You joined in with game journalists to write us off as bigots. You told us we were overreacting, that we didn't know what we were talking about, and that "the only reason we could possibly not want left-wing politics in game development is because we hate black people and wahmen."
 
You called us trolls, white supremacists, Nazis, white nationalists, alt-right, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, gooners, incels," and every other name under the sun to discredit us as opposition: blindly taking the "activists" side. But you know what we didn't hear a lot of..? Arguments quantifying what, precisely, that we are wrong about. I distinctly remember there being an acute lack of those responses. I digress.
 
The problem with politicizing video games and their development is not a difficult concept. Time and development resources are finite. When you spend $500/hr on an "inclusivity consultant..." that is several thousands of dollars that you could've spent elsewhere, on something that actually matters to your players. When you hire activist game developers who ignore your player's preferences and/or create in spite of them, you're not going to have the most appealing product.
 
It's not rocket science:
 
When activists come along, look at the last twenty years of blockbuster success stories in gaming, then tell you "hey, um... actually... all of this is a problem, and if you do not change your problematic ways, me and my progressive friends will cause you... problems..." you're dealing with literal snake oil salesmen. Rather than hiring them, you should either tell them to fuck off, or just fucking run. But so many of you idiots made it a point to ignore our warnings and tell publishers, "this is actually what we want." So publishers listened. And then you got Veilguard.
 
Today, we learned that BioWare is shutting down. The end of an era. What was once one of the most beloved and celebrated RPG developers in the west, is now little more than a cautionary tale of what not to do in game development. And it all started fifteen years ago when those of you who took the activist's side ignored our warnings about the downsides of politicizing video game development.

I hate to say we told you so, but we told you so. We reeeally did warn you guys.

I'd ask you politely to actually learn something from this, but I never claimed you guys were smart, or honest. It's been fifteen years, and yet creators like @AngryJoeShow are still crashing out whenever we criticize something, while brilliantly ignoring the entire fucking point of our arguments. Who knew..? No... really! Who knew that politicization, censorship, sanitization, social justice, trigger warnings, inclusivity seminars, and zoom calls where game developers spend eleven minutes explaining their pronouns would be something of a problem in an industry that is supposed to be about interactive entertainment and fun?
 
Rest in Performative Left-Wing Social Optics, BioWare.

Links - 27th October 2026 (1 - South Africa)

RE-OPEN THE SIZZLERS on X - "Boomer leftists continue to reference apartheid as if it was 1994 and 30 years of sordid South African history haven’t since occurred:"

RAMZPAUL on X - "Whites form their own town to escape the “kill the boer” threats. This town becomes an amazing clean, crime free place that everyone wants to live in. Blacks demand entry into the town despite controlling the rest of the country (which is a violent shithole.)"
Naturally, the Guardian was very upset that a documentary on this safe space for minorities went in with an open mind and didn't go in guns blazing condemning it and gave it 1/5 stars, without even mentioning how much South Africa discriminates against white people

Thread by @Will_Tanner_1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is why the powers that be absolutely despise Orania by the way.  It shows the way out of the current crime problem, so those relying on anarcho-tyranny to solidify their rule hate it more than you can imagine.  I'll explain more in the 🧵👇
For those who don't know, Orania, which @Volkstaat10 does a great job publicizing, is the Boer community in rural South Africa that serves as a safe haven of sorts from the anarcho-tyranny that is the rest of South Africa. It has its own currency, maintains Christian values, and generally serves as a way for those who wish to exit from South African society. It's much the same impulse, though even more total, as the one behind @extradeadjcb's @exit_org. Key to Orania's success is that it is Afrikaner only. The Afrikaners there do their own work, no maker how dirty, without relying on external, African labor. This is what their symbol, the child rolling up his sleeve, symbolizes. The result of that hard work is that they keep their community rooted in Afrikaner tradition and free of the caustic policies of South Africa generally, namely its DEI insanity. They can grow, work, and prosper without having affirmative action mongers shoving race communism down their throats. The other side of the Afrikaner-only coin is that the media frequently and unfairly slanders it as a "whites only" town in which racists...well it's not clear what exactly the hand-ringers thing is going on; as is evident from the pictures, all they're doing is building a nice community. But regardless of Oranians not presenting a threat to anyone or anything but the Rainbow Nation's post-1994 founding myth, the media, and critics smear it and try to get the government to destroy it. Orania is enshrined in the South African constitution, and so it's protected by that provision, but given the anarcho-tyranny present in the country, is probably more protected by South Africa's declining state capacity
What ties the whole project together is that Orania can, and does, defend itself.  For one, it screens residents, and even visitors, requiring guests to get permission to visit before they can do so. More than that, it can actually defend itself: the citizens of it are armed, trained, and united by the ties that bind to such an extent that they will defend it. Like America in its frontier days, the Oranians have guns, carry them, and are ready to use them. The result is a peaceful society with nearly non-existent crime, much unlike everywhere else in South Africa. The smears of Orania are absurd. For example, a black writer visited, was treated with kindness and hospitality, and then smeared the little community, titling his article, "Inside creepy ‘Whites Only’ village Orania with own currency and bizarre rules… including asking permission for visitors". He the article, he described the rules as "bizarre," saying, "The village has its own national holidays, its own currency - the Ora - and day-to-day life is governed by a bizarre set of rules including having to seek permission from the town council before receiving visitors." Hilariously, he also tried to dispute the fact that Orania has nearly no crime, claiming that merely the statistics were different. "Local estate agent Marli says business is booming as more Afrikans - who make up just four per cent of the population - seek a safe haven from South Africa's crime-ridden townships. The country has one of the highest crime rates in the world, with a murder rate of 45 per 100,000, compared to 6.3 in the US and under one per cent in the UK. While the community has often claimed to be "crime-free", this has been widely disputed by others who claim statistics are not gathered there as they would be in the rest of the country," he said. Whatever his ramblings, the truth is that Orania is quite safe and secure, which contrasts mightily with the horrific crime situation in South Africa generally. Particularly, it's very different from the general situation the Boer farmers find themselves in, where marauding gangs of thugs attack them near-daily and commit murder nearly weekly. Those farms are isolated, and so prey to attackers. Orania, by contrast, is a united community that, because of its numbers and shared purpose, is willing and able to defend itself. As "liberal democracy" rots every country that adopts it, turning everywhere into Zimbabwe, the world is a much, much more dangerous place. Further, it's getting more so every day. The solution to that, if one cares about his family, is to get them to a haven like Orania. Doing so might present temporary pain and annoyance, but is much better than seeing a child drowned in boiling water (a farm murder atrocity, as @k9_reaper noted in a recent podcast interview), out of an unwillingness to make a move. Further, in a time when all world differences and culture are being subsumed by globohomo's Marvel movies and rap "music," Orania has preserved historic Afriker culture. That is worth a great deal, and is something that more ought try to do"

Meme - "Africa when we send $5 Trillion. *zinc shacks*
Africa when we send 300k "colonizers". *City with rainbow, clean streets etc*"

Marino Linich on X - "Being a white South African farmer is, by far, the most dangerous occupation in the world, with a peak rate of 313 murders per 100,000 a year (0.313%).  At that rate, 3,130 per 100,000 (3.13%) would be killed over 10 years, and a constant hazard to age 80 implies about a 22% chance of being murdered."

Visegrád 24 on X - "South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has made it clear that the country will not abandon its radical anti-White policies known as “Black Economic Empowerment” (BEE).  “Those who say BEE and affirmative action must stop are just dreaming,” he said.  South Africa has strict laws that mandate discriminatory hiring practices.   A new law called the Employment Equity Amendment Act sets hiring targets for 2025–2030 across 18 economic sectors, with some workforce targets aiming for 90–96% of employees to come from groups excluding White men.  That means that if a company has more than 5% White men, it could face penalties of up to 10% of its income."
Will Tanner on X - "They'd rather the whole country implode than retreat even slightly from the race communist agenda. Such is always the case. They don't care if things get worse. They want things to get worse. That's how they inflict suffering on the supposed "oppressors". The only way to stop them is to destroy their system entirely, and replace it with what existed before the Great War: systems premised on excellence rather than equality"

Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "No one can fix South Africa because it’s filled with South Africans.  You can only blame Apartheid for so long before the excuse wears off.  Japan was firebombed into oblivion and nuked twice during World War II. South Korea was invaded by North Korea, militarily occupied, and had almost every square inch of the country bombed during the Korean War.  Look at where Japan and South Korea found themselves 32 years later in 1977 and 1984 respectively.   The fact that South Africa has become a de-developing developing country is not something you can pin on Apartheid any longer. The country is a failed state because the people inhabiting it are a failed people who clearly do not know how to build or even maintain anything great."

Kane 謝凱堯 on X - "Since 1994, South Africa has received over $26B in aid. For context, Japan received $2.2 billion in aid ($12B in 1994) after being firebombed and nuked twice in World War II."
Proof that apartheid was really that damaging and that the world needs to send them even more aid

Polymarket on X - "BREAKING: South African unemployment rate soars to 33.6%"
Common Sense Extremists on X - "When it was a “White supremacist” nation they were a nuclear power with a space program and performed the first heart transplant…"
Clear proof of how damaging apartheid was!

The South African Government Has Relinquished its Monopoly on - "The German sociologist Max Weber defined the state as a political institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in order to maintain law and order within a given territory. This foundation for an ordered society is showing serious cracks in South Africa, but these cracks are being filled with a variety of non-governmental elements – good and bad.  Over the past 30 years, a power vacuum has emerged because the capacity of the African National Congress (ANC)-led government has declined in many respects. These include a collapse in service delivery, infrastructure maintenance, electricity and water supply, and policing.  The South African Police Service (SAPS) can no longer effectively carry out its constitutional mandate and primary function. According to a 2026 audit, only 44% of SAPS stations answer their telephones. In 2023 the Minister of Police confirmed that the SAPS had ignored more than 6.3 million calls for help over a period of three years. This figure represents more than 5 700 calls per day. In 2021, when the country suffered its worst wave of looting and riots since the end of apartheid – hundreds were killed and destruction totalled billions of rands – the SAPS proved woefully unprepared and overwhelmed. The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is in a similar state of deterioration, having been drained and incapacitated by decades of neglect and mismanagement. More than 85% of its aircraft and fleet are out of action, while most of its budget is spent on salaries. SANDF soldiers have recently complained about a lack of combat boots, uniforms, medical supplies, and even starvation. Only three entities possess the resources and organisational capacity to fill the vacuum that is left by this crumbling state: the private sector, organised communities, and organised crime. It is therefore no wonder that all three are currently flourishing in South Africa.  The growth in the power and sophistication of organised crime under ANC rule is well documented. Almost every sector and industry in South Africa has been infiltrated by some form of organised crime syndicate, such as the construction, water, taxi, and hospital mafias. As recently emphasised again at the Madlanga Commission, South Africa ranks 7th out of 193 United Nations member states on the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime’s organised crime index. The country ranked 19th in 2021, when the first such index was published.  And just this year, President Cyril Ramaphosa said: “Organised crime is now the most immediate threat to our democracy, our society, and our economic development.”  For some, the distorted facade of order that organised crime creates in the communities it takes over is the best option, and sometimes the only one available. It usually takes the form of protection-money extortion, but it is preferred by some to the total lawlessness and anarchy that government collapse invites. No industry epitomises the private sector’s response to government collapse better than the country’s private security sector. Over the past 30 years, this sector has developed into one of the world’s leaders in size, innovation, scope, and competitiveness. This sector has experienced more than 400% growth in active workers since 1997, and an almost 86% increase in registered firms since 2014. In 1997 there were approximately 115 000 active private security personnel in South Africa. As of 2026, this number has risen significantly to over 600 000. The SAPS has roughly 148 000 sworn officers, while the military have roughly 69 000 active uniformed personnel. This means that private security personnel outnumber those of the SAPS and military combined by a factor of almost three.  South Africa's policing capacity has been eroded so severely that the SAPS was forced in June 2026 to enlist the assistance and resources of private security firms to help maintain law and order during nationwide protests against illegal immigration. In striking contrast to the 2021 riots, looting and destruction were largely contained during the 2026 protests. The last non-governmental entity that made notable progress in recent years in maintaining law and order is that of community safety structures. Since 2012 the civil rights organisation AfriForum has established 177 neighbourhood and farm watches that, at their own cost and risk, cover thousands of kilometres of patrols every month and achieve remarkable successes every week."
No wonder they are obsessed with Palestine, since that's the cause of hateful losers

Farai Mazhindu on X - "In South Africa, the ANC hands out a water tank during election season and calls it governance.  Thirty years in power, and the flagship achievement on the campaign trail is a plastic tank, not a functioning municipal water system, not fixed infrastructure, just a tank, wheeled out with cameras rolling and comrades smiling for the gallery.  This is what "service delivery" has been reduced to, a photo-op standing in for policy, a handout standing in for a plan. The taps have been dry for years. The pipes are corroded. The reservoirs are neglected. But none of that matters as long as there's a banner, a tank, and a chance to remind the community who to vote for in four weeks.  It's not development. It's a transaction dressed up as generosity, solve nothing, fix nothing, just show up with a tank and ask for another term."
Farai Mazhindu on X - "The Third World begins the exact moment a society alters its daily life to accommodate the failure of the state, rather than forcing the state to fix the failure.  It is defined by what the people learn to live with.  When a community accepts that municipal water will never run from the tap, and instead celebrates a plastic bulk water storage tank as a luxury, that is the Third World mindset.  When citizens buy private generators, dig private boreholes, hire private security, and pay private medical bills, all while continuing to pay taxes to a corrupt ruling elite, they are actively financing a Third World reality.  The infrastructure collapses because the public's threshold for outrage has collapsed. Mediocrity becomes the national baseline."

South Africa: The DEI Nation - "As planes fall apart in the air and on the tarmac while municipal water supplies become increasingly contaminated and everything that once used to function well now hardly works if it works at all, Americans are looking around and wondering to where all of this leads. What is life like when you can’t count on the cops showing up, the courts ruling impartially, the public services functioning as they’re supposed to, the electricity working when you flip a switch, supply lines functioning as designed, etc.? In other words, what is life like when a country goes not from Third World to First, as Lee Kuan Yew famously described Singapore, but rather from First World to Third?  Unfortunately, this problem has a precedent that shows exactly what happens: South Africa. Though it avoided most of the horrific genocides of European settlers that were inflicted upon much of the rest of post-colonial Africa, such as Rhodesia, the Congo, and Angola, its fate wasn’t much better. Now, it is the DEI nation... When South Africa got rid of apartheid, it received plaudits from around the world and was hailed as the “Rainbow Nation.” According to the powers that be, all of which were happy to see it shed its Boer control and hand over the reigns of government to anti-white fanatics, such as convicted terrorist Nelson Mandela, South Africa would move from being a civilized nation run by evildoers and “racists” to a bright land of opportunity run by the enlightened, formerly oppressed. The hugely successful “Invictus” movie pushed that message of supposed unity, and critics of the formerly mainly white South African security services cheered as the former “oppressors” were removed from their positions of power. But, far from being a Rainbow Nation with a pot of gold at the bottom of a kumbaya society, South Africa is now a living hell. Nothing works, violent crime is both rampant and often unpunished, the Boer farmers are being genocided by violent gangs, and once-thriving cities are now crime-ridden, mostly unoccupied slums... South Africa went all in on DEI policies and it is collapsing as a result. It has no doctors because those competent to be doctors are excluded from the university system on the basis of race. It refuses to punish crime, and so economic activity has all but ceased and many of those who would be its best and brightest are living in hellish slums or tuning out of society. The corrupt and incompetent are promoted while the competent can’t find work, so corruption is rampant and everything is falling apart. All that proponents of DEI in America demand has been tried in South Africa, and all that opponents of DEI in America claim will happen here has happened in South Africa. The only place that still functions is Orania, where the Boers are still in control and able to determine their own destinies instead of relying on a corrupt, affirmative-action government. The result of those policies can be seen in all aspects of life. The South African steel industry, which should be strong given the nation’s immense natural resources, has evaporated. The nation passed a law requiring compliance with “equity targets” for the business sector, and the business sector has collapsed. Meanwhile, even water access for farmers is meted out on the basis of race, and now the nation’s once famously efficient agricultural sector is struggling to produce enough food. South African Airways went all in on DEI, and now it’s fighting insolvency...   Success didn’t require the strictest apartheid laws, but it proved impossible to retain when South Africa ran in the opposite direction and embraced DEI. Now, the nation that used to provide food and electricity in abundance not only to its citizens but to the nearby nations is instead unable to produce either in needed quantities for itself. DEI did that, and it will do it to America if we let it. Sadly, America is following in the same dismal, DEI footsteps of South Africa."

Jacob Zuma under investigation for using hate speech - "Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa, is under official investigation for using hate speech against a man who died 338 years ago.  Complaints have been lodged with a human rights watchdog after Zuma blamed South Africa’s ills on the country’s first white settler, Jan van Riebeeck, a Dutch administrator who opened the way for European colonisation.  “You must remember that a man called Jan van Riebeeck arrived here on 6 April 1652, and that was the start of the trouble in this country,” Zuma reportedly told a recent fundraising dinner in Cape Town. “What followed were numerous struggles and wars and deaths and the seizure of land and the deprivation of the indigenous peoples’ political and economic power.”  Van Riebeeck’s arrival “disrupted South Africa’s social cohesion, repressed people and caused wars”, he said...  Pieter Mulder, leader of the FF Plus, said Zuma was resorting to “scapegoat politics”. He told parliament on Wednesday: “The honourable president says a man called Jan van Riebeeck arrived here, and that was the start of problems in the country. I can prove the president is wrong. But what did he say in plain language? He said, when white people arrived here the trouble started.  “What is the understanding of ordinary ANC supporters? They understand that if one gets rid of the white man, all problems are solved. Get rid of the cockroaches and all problems go away.”...  Van Riebeeck, working for the Dutch East India Company, founded the settlement at the southern tip of Africa that became Cape Town. The day of his arrival used to be a public holiday known as Founder’s Day, but was abolished by the new democratic government in 1994. Van Riebeeck’s face also used to adorn the national currency, the rand, which now bears the image of the first black president, Nelson Mandela.  Dave Steward, the executive director of the FW de Klerk Foundation, wrote last month: “The anti-Jan van Riebeeck campaign is yet another example of the disturbing and increasingly overt anti-white posture of the president and the ANC. Indeed, the ANC’s core programme, its ‘national democratic revolution’, is the continuation and completion of its ‘liberation’ struggle against white South Africans whom it views as ‘antagonists’.”"
From 2015. Left wing ideology is about refusing to take responsibility and blaming others, especially the "powerful"

Morocco knocks South Africa off top spot as Africa’s leading industrial economy | Business Insider Africa - "While South Africa remains one of the continent’s biggest industrial powers, the report noted that the country has struggled with declining competitiveness in recent years...   The index assessed industrial development across 54 African countries between 2010 and 2024 and found that 41 countries improved their industrialisation scores, while Africa’s overall industrial performance rose by 6%."
Damn apartheid!

Craig Mokhiber on X - "The sight of the US President, who is actively helping to perpetrate an actual genocide in Palestine, sitting in the White House and shouting at the South African President about a non-existent genocide (made up in dark web chat rooms by racist, white supremacists still bitter about the end of apartheid), and all because South Africa had the courage to bring Trump’s Israeli collaborators to the World Court for its crimes, is truly extraordinary. The inmates are truly in charge of the asylum."
Terrorism supporters think you can't commit genocide on "white" people and that "white" people aren't allowed to defend themselves. Ironic that he can't see how some of the claims about "genocide" in Palestine would justify calling South Africa a genocide too

This account shows how South Africa has decayed in just a decade, and it's a warning to us all - "I've been seeing this account in my feeds for months, and there's a reason why. People are fascinated with the ruins of once-thriving civilizations. That's a timelapse of Booysens Train Station in Johannesburg from 2014 to 2025. Within 11 years, what was once a clean, functional rail station was stripped for parts and reclaimed by nature.  This is happening all over South Africa, and you can see it on Google Maps:.. After apartheid (segregation between whites and blacks) ended in the 1990s, South Africa had a short moment where it strove for equality as the standard of a new and brighter future.  Unfortunately, it fell prey to the same Marxist poison that claimed Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). Robert Mugabe forced white farmers, who actually had the tools and training to work the land, to sell their farms to blacks, who didn't have the training, and thus the entire agricultural output of the country (ie, the ability to feed itself or profit off the land) disappeared overnight. The same cries about reparations, black solidarity, and stolen land that you might see today in Minneapolis were used to force whites out of every industry, and then the country entirely.  The result? Zimbabwe's economy collapsed by 2003 and it has become the butt-end of a joke about inflation. It is now a fractured husk of its former glory.  South Africa has taken a similar route, pushing racial quotas that actively discriminate against whites. Even worse, major political movements now call for the extermination of whites, and white farmers are being attacked by gangs every week. Many have died. Electrical grids now suffer routine power outages. Roads aren't being fixed. Trash is piling up. Criminals are stripping wires, rebar, and materials out of buildings for scrap. Water treatment plants are going offline and the government is struggling to find people qualified to maintain them. The entire country is collapsing back into the Stone Age. Just this week, there is a water crisis in the news. The government can't even guarantee water to the largest city!"
Time to blame Apartheid and/or white people

Threads - "South African leader says: "We have not called for killing off the whites FOR NOW" This was NEVER about equality. It’s a POWER GRAB fueled by RACIAL HATRED."

Libs of TikTok on X - "OMG Trump just played a compilation of South African leaders calling to kiII White people and steal their land in front of the President of South Africa’s face"
Left wing logic - random Israeli politicians (even nobodies) talking shit about Palestinians proves that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians, but "Kill the Boer" is not about killing white people.
South Africa being anti-Israel is classic projection

Meme - Dr. Sara Browning @sararen21: "Pres, Trump played a video of South Africans chanting racist rhetoric about "shooting White people" and "cutting their throats" during a WH meeting with the country's president, Cyril Ramaphosa. Trump flipped through a stack of papers bearing the names + photos of White victims of violence.
Ramaphosa: "There's no genocide."
CNN: "Conspiracy theories."
NBC: "Baseless claims."
MSNBC: "False claims."
New York Times: "Debunked myths."
"If genocide is ultimately an act of erasure, denial is its final, comprehensive deed" - Serj Tankian"

Donald Trump For President | Facebook - "President Trump confronts South African President Ramaphosa about the atrocities taking place against Afrikaners:
President Donald Trump: "You do allow them to take land — and then when they take the land, they k*ll the white farmer, and when they k*ll the white farmer, nothing happens to them."
South African President Ramaphosa: "Let me clarify that because what you sow, the speeches that are being made, one, that is not government policy. We have a multi-party democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves, political parties to adhere to various policies, and in many cases, or in some cases, those policies do not go along with government policy. Our government policy is completely, completely against what he was saying, even in the parliament. And there’s a small minority party, which is allowed to exist in terms of our constitution."
President Donald Trump: "But you do allow them to take land."
South African President Ramaphosa: "No, no, no, no. Nobody can take land."
President Donald Trump: "And then when they take the land, they k*ll the white farmer, and when they k*ll the white farmer, nothing happens to them."
South African President Ramaphosa: "No, no. There is crime in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity, are not only white people. The majority of them are black people. And we have now been utilising the...""

60 Minutes on X - "In May, Pres. Trump said “over a thousand” White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. He showed a video of what he said were crosses marking their burial sites. But when 60 Minutes traveled to the site, the crosses were gone. Anderson Cooper tracked down the farmer who placed them there."
RIP Charlie Kirk ✝️ (Jesse aka Darth Crypto) on X - "So they tried to turn this into a hit piece on Donald Trump because he used the term burial site instead of memorial and they went on to prove that white farmers are regularly being slaughtered so often that the guy needs to continuously bring out the crosses to repeat the same memorial process?  Holy hell. 😂"
Stephen Horn on X - "The fact that this farmer can rattle off three close personal friends who were murdered on their farms is all the evidence you need as to the severity of this problem I'm not sure I know a single person who has been murdered"

Meme - Ayn Randfontein @aynrandfontein: "Hout Bay, Cape Town, South Africa. September 2009 - September 2025."
*Good condition* *Rundown*
Clearly this is due to apartheid

Meme - Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1: "It doesn't take long to go from First World to Third, a lesson that Mandela and his spiritual progeny forced the South Africans to learn.  Civilization is a precious and fragile thing. Race communism shatters it"
"Hillbrow 1970 *civilised* Hillbrow 2021 *falling apart with dirt on the streets and people sprawling*"

Meme - David J Harris Jr @DavidJHarrisJr: "🚨White babies on pitchforks and signs reading ‘Kill Whites’ seen at a protest in South Africa. This is being encouraged by the government!"

Conscious Caracal 🇿🇦 on X - "South Africa has introduced a new category to geopolitics: a de-developing nation."
Will Tanner on X - "From First World to Third in one generation, all in the name of equality"

Monday, October 26, 2026

Links - 26th October 2026 (2)

Relentless busybody fines will radicalise us middle classes - "I’ve long nurtured an almost indecent attachment to the film Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas as William “D-Fens” Foster, a man on the edge of losing his sanity having already been fired from his job. There’s a finely orchestrated build-up of small irritations – log-jammed LA traffic, failed air-con, a store owner who won’t swap a note for change for a phone call and an attempted mugging – before a simmering Foster implodes. I should clarify that the character is no hero (his wife has left him – and for good reason), but rare is the human attempting modern life who doesn’t sometimes feel like going rogue with a rocket launcher.  My own mild-mannered husband flipped his “nuclear” switch this week and I almost hurled myself into the reinforced concrete silo with him. The trigger was two unexpected letters from Ulez penalty collectors, although my spouse hasn’t driven in central London for well over 15 years. He did, however, drive to the funeral of a dear friend of 50 years standing in Kent in August. The wake was in a country pub and afterwards he drove the widow and another guest back to the family home in Orpington, where he stayed the night before returning to Cambridge in a state of deep melancholy. The widow assured him that the Ulez charges did not apply to her neighbourhood. But my spouse had committed the grave sin of driving down Orpington’s Station Road. Not once, but twice. The letters both listed an utterly terrifying array of fines. My husband jabbed the figures at me. “Full amount £1,000, if paid within 14 days £500”, escalating to £1,500 in red ink. Or more. “I can’t pay this,” he gibbered, “I’m a pensioner. That’s a grand in total.”  “I’m so sorry,” he added. “But you’ll have to pay it.”  By that time, both of us were stressed out enough to run amok with a flamethrower. I dashed upstairs to email a friend who works on the outer fringes of the Greater London Authority: “How can this be just or right?” I fulminated. Which is when my husband came upstairs and said he’d read the whole three pages of tachycardia-inducing material and found the small print: the fines were £90 each if you paid early. Even so, £180 is still huge for an impecunious 73-year-old pensioner in a 22-year-old diesel Ford Focus – which was only liable because the meatheads of the Noughties’ Labour government told us diesel cars were better for the planet than petrol ones. “Appeal it, I said. “It’s easy to prove you were at the funeral and distracted by grief. Your civil record is clear and you only strayed inside the Ulez zone for a nanosecond.” Needless to say, my spouse’s pleading letter was flatly rejected. I had to dip into my “repairs account” because my husband is a good, caring and chivalrous man. I feel like sky-diving into City Hall and staging a Mothers for Justice-style tantrum with a custard gun. Nor is this the only unjust fine to hit my family this week. One of my sisters had an appointment at St Thomas’ Hospital. She’d had “a funny turn” earlier this summer and the medics wanted her to wear a heart monitor for 24 hours. She was standing outside by the kerb, fretting and pacing, as she’s also halfway through moving home (try finding an affordable room in London on a bar manager’s wage), when she dropped a cigarette butt. Only for one of the new stealth “enforcement officers” to sneak up and levy a £350 on-the-spot fine. She and I both loathe fag-ends and litter (we were trained to be Wombles by our mother) but if there’s one place I wouldn’t snitch on smokers it’s outside a hospital, where so many souls are at their wit’s end. Also, before you blame the “turn” on her smoking, she’s a gym bunny and a scan revealed her lungs are in rude health. But what truly enraged me about both these stories is the fact we apologised profusely and offered good excuses for moments of aberration. But no one gave a monkey’s, so we lost and paid up like the good, browbeaten, law-abiding citizens we are. (We also know they’ll send the bailiffs round if we protest.) We transferred our hard-earned cash to the bureaucratic blob, while puzzling why on earth we strive to keep our end of the civil compact. Every day you can see young men force their way through tube gates, or dash from shops, arms laden with stolen goods, while the police do zilch.  Meanwhile, two years ago, my sister was beaten to the ground and kicked in the head by a mob of feral teenage girls after dismounting from a bus near Victoria station. They appeared to take objection to her androgynous looks, yelling a homophobic slur. The bus driver watched and did nothing, ditto bystanders. She filed a crime report and, apart from a short phone conversation with a police operative weeks later… nada. For all we know, her funny turn could be linked to being booted in the head. This is surely the greatest scandal of our age: the complying, law-abiding and tax-paying are the ones who must pay for every tiny infraction, while those who savage the fabric of society stroll away from any consequences. And it is one which threatens to radicalise the middle classes, who are growing ever wearier of relentless busybody fines issued en masse while the country fractures and breaks.  It’s certainly a good thing the only rocket launcher I currently have access to is an ancient toy Second World War field gun, which fires matchsticks."
Anarcho-tyranny strikes again

Airline pilots must go. They’re just too dangerous to have aboard - "The technology for pilotless planes has been available for a long time. It’s not a matter of erratic deep neural networks (or “AI” as they are generally known): this is simple, reliable automation. The task of flying an aircraft, ironically, is easier to automate than driving a car. Large fleets of pilotless aircraft are already operated by various organisations. The technology is perfectly capable of taking off, flying somewhere and landing without any human input. Indeed, it’s relatively rare for most airliners of today to be directly controlled by the pilots. An airline pilot friend of mine has actually said to me: “An emergency isn’t really the time to be flying the plane.”  So, given that a solid majority of airliner crashes are caused by the pilots, and there is no actual need for them, it would seem pretty clear that we can hugely improve airline safety by simply not having airline pilots any more. There would surely still be some crashes, just not as many."

France’s youth are fuelling a Catholic revival - "Adult baptisms have more than tripled in a decade, from 4,124 in 2016 to 13,234 this year, with young adults driving the rise.  A record 21,386 adults and teenagers were due to be baptised at Easter, according to the French Catholic Church – 13,234 adults, up 28 per cent in a year, and 8,152 teenagers. Church leaders and historians say many seek community and meaning in an angst-ridden world and hope for guidance from the Pope. That partly explains Leo’s expected rock-star reception. Nearly 600,000 have registered for Saturday’s Mass at Place de la Concorde, where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined. A giant white canopy will mark the altar at the site along the Champs-Élysées.  That exceeds the 350,000 at John Paul II’s Le Bourget Mass in 1980 and is roughly twice the crowd of 260,000 for Benedict XVI at Les Invalides in 2008, although John Paul drew more than a million in 1997... The increase in young people wanting to be baptised shows a growing trend of Catholicism being consciously chosen rather than inherited.  In the early 1960s, 93 per cent of babies were baptised by three months. Today fewer than 20 per cent are baptised even by seven, said Guillaume Cuchet, a professor of contemporary history at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.  “For a measure that survived the Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and two world wars, it has collapsed over the past 60 years,” the historian said.  Baptisms of children under seven fell from 380,000 in 2000 to around 150,000 in 2024.  But there has been a shift towards Catholicism among younger adults. A survey published by the French Catholic Church in March found that 40 per cent of those preparing for baptism had embarked on their spiritual journey following a difficult experience such as illness or bereavement, while 32 per cent reported a powerful spiritual experience.  “That shift from Catholicism passed down through generations to one based on personal commitment is probably something that interests the Pope,” said François Mabille, the director of the Geopolitical Observatory of Religion.  Philippe Portier, a sociologist of religion at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, said: “In a world in crisis, we need to find our bearings, and the Church can be one of those points of reference.”"

Sacred Mysteries: No bells, no horses for Christians living under Islamic rule - "People sometimes say or even write that Christians at odds with the Orthodoxy of Byzantium welcomed the sudden conquests in the Near East in the seventh century by mostly Arab Muslims. Using primary sources, the historian Sidney Griffith disproved this claim. “Christians of all communities unanimously regarded the conquest as a disaster,” he wrote in 2008.  That was in The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, “a work without precedent or parallel” in the words of Prof Gabriel Said Reynolds of Notre Dame. Now Prof Griffith has died aged 87, after more than 50 years opening up a new perspective. “Western Christian thinkers engaged in interreligious dialogue with Muslims in the modern world,” he wrote, “have seldom if ever taken any useful cognisance of the intellectual history of the Christians who lived for centuries in the world of Islam and who wrote Christian philosophy and theology in Syriac and Arabic.” He changed that.  From the seventh to the 13th century a new cultural expression of Christian doctrine developed, in Arabic. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque was the first book to study the cultural life of medieval Christians in the Islamic world.  Most Arabic sources, Christian or Muslim, divided Christians under Islamic rule into three main kinds, with separate ecclesiastical structures: “Melkites” (who followed the orthodoxy of the Council of Chalcedon), “Jacobites” (after the sixth-century Bishop Jacob Baradaeus, who protected Monophysite Christians), and “Nestorians” (East Syrian Christians accused of following the heresiarch Nestorius).  All varieties of Christian found their position increasingly precarious as their numbers dwindled. They lived as dhimmis – protected or tolerated as “People of the Book”, Jews and Christians who had received a partial revelation through the Torah (al-Tawrat) and the Gospel (al-Injil). They enjoyed not even second-class citizenship. A tax, jizya, had to be paid and there were laws on dress, on where dhimmis could live and how they could worship. New churches were forbidden and old ones could not be mended. Church bells must not be rung. Christians must not ride a horse.  But a Christian theological tradition in Syriac and Arabic emerged from the Greek tradition of the Church Fathers. It had as much claim to Apostolic status as that of the Latin West. Christian apologists writing in Arabic might even use Islamic terms, such as the “beautiful names” of God, to introduce a concept like that of the persons of the Trinity.   In the happiest circumstances of the 9th and 10th century, Christian scholars contributed to the intellectual scene in Baghdad alongside Muslims. Christian philosophers, in a tradition deriving from Alexandria, were at its centre. But Christian Arabic treatises also responded to Islam and rebutted the status of Mohammed as a prophet. They encouraged Christians to resist conversion to Islam, though it offered a gain in social standing.  Griffith wrote that “even the friendliest of Christian apologists” of the period saw no sense in calling Mohammed a prophet or calling the Koran divine revelation. He pointed out that Abraham was seen as a dividing point between Jews, Christians and Muslims, never as a sort of common ancestor, as implied by the present-day term “Abrahamic faiths”. He was a historian who favoured reality over wishful thinking."
Weird. We're told that Islam was very religiously tolerant

Polymarket on X - "BREAKING: American man accused of kidnapping Flock camera, "digitally waterboarding" it by subjecting it to 23,040 license plates per second via six 4K monitors rapidly flashing images of plates."

Allie ✞ on X - "The most frustrating part about modern discourse is that it appears to be a conflict of values, but it's mostly a conflict of information  Your cousin who's panicking about the Cornell 7 probably has no idea what she's talking about  Your friend saying Lindsay Clancy was framed legitimately believes that because she saw it from people she trusts  Your dad thinks you are evil for not opposing data centers because he truly believes they will turn the water brown  Most people these days have their outrage formed for them by an algorithm and do approximately zero research on top of that -- this happens on both sides, by the way  When you're talking with these people you will look like a monster to them because they think you have the same information they do: a college girl was drugged and raped, a mother was abused and framed for murder  The vast majority of people are unable to revisit the assumptions that led them there because that would be like a fish examining water  To them it is totally and completely true, which means any new information is only an attack  On a personal level, please avoid talking politics with people close to you who think this way. It will ruin your relationships"
This slightly misstates the problem - it's ostensibly a conflict of information, but that's driven by the conflict of values, i.e. motivated reasoning. That's how 2 people can read the exact same facts and come away understanding totally different things.

Whitman Republican Club denied affiliation — for being Republican - "Right in its student handbook, Whitman College specifically promises every student freedom of expression and association. So, when members of the Whitman Republican Club sought recognition to become a college-affiliated student organization, they had every reason to expect approval through the same review process as any other group.   Instead, the student senate unanimously rejected their application. 25-0.   Was it something they had done? Was it something they forgot? No, the record points somewhere else: It was what they believed... It’s not surprising that some or all of the senators found the club’s Republican views offensive. Virtually every viewpoint is offensive to someone. Whitman recognizes dozens of diverse groups on campus, many with missions or purposes that likely conflict with each other or the ASWC: Like Whitman’s affiliated Don’t Eat The Wheat group, who may have some conflicting values with the also-affiliated Cooking and Baking Club. But to deny one club based on its view threatens the same rights of all groups. If dissent leads to exclusion, what happens to any viewpoint that disagrees with the majority?   In the past, prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination have protected groups whose views were not popular when they sought to form campus organizations. For example, the principle of viewpoint neutrality protected chapters of LGBT organizations in Arkansas and New Hampshire in the 1970s and ’80s when student senates and university trustees refused to “support a homosexual group” or their expression, which was considered “shocking and offensive” at the time. Using only viewpoint-neutral criteria means that voices that may not be popular can still be heard."
Clearly, college campuses are liberal because all smart people are left wing

My favorite beverage is a 2,000-year-old energy drink from ancient Rome - "The Romans were famed for their innovations in military logistics, which allowed them to extend their territory from Rome and its immediate surrounds to the whole Mediterranean and ultimately, with the establishment of the Roman Empire, virtually all of western Eurasia. But an army can’t win if it’s thirsty. Enter posca. This blend of vinegar and water—and possibly salt, herbs, and other stuff—holds a special place in beverage history thanks to its role as the Gatorade of the Roman army."

Derek Thompson on X - "If you want to have a good time in life, I think you should believe in some conspiracy theories. They're fun. Life is about having fun.   But if you want to be right, you should probably have a reflexive aversion to every conspiracy theory you hear. It's not that they're all wrong. It's more that the vast vast vast majority of them are incredibly stupid and don't really survive three seconds' thought (see post below for why it makes no sense for Karen Bass to rig an election to help a stronger candidate against her). More broadly, conspiracy theories almost always assume the extraordinary competency of a shadowy group of elites who are very good at keeping a secret. Haven't the last few decades proved that elites aren't that competent? Everybody accusing Karen Bass of expertly rigging the LA election on Twitter right now also thinks she sucks as mayor. What are the odds that the politician you hate, who you think sucks at everything, is exclusively good at rigging electoral outcomes to make you personally upset?  There's more to life than being right, so feel free to ignore the second paragraph. But people interested in being right should be much more reflexively judgmental of conspiracy theories."
Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 on X - "This is why you should only believe conspiracy theories which are
1) VERY fun
2) higher on plausibility
3) don’t make you change your life
For example Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s son"

Meme - joann.blake: "If Democrats ever seize the reins again, the mandate is not healing it is eradication. Lawyer up. Court up. Charge every sycophant, every enabler, every provocateur who carried water, shuffled papers, or whispered obedience-every accomplice. No rest. No absolution. Because if you don't finish the job, the snake sheds its skin and comes back sleeker, meaner, and immune to the last dose."
pm512973: "And I'm curious, what would you charge a republican voter with? It's funny how you call Republicans fascists but yet your post is more fascist or Nazi like than anything Any Republican has ever said or done. And then of course, what happens if the courts decide that your proposal is unconstitutional? What will you do then?"
Meme - reiterpallasch199: "*weaponizes the justice system*
"No they're trying to weaponize the justice system!"
"When we're in charge we must weaponize the justice system!"
Fucking comic books have more nuanced villains than this"
Persecuting your political enemies to the ends of the earth is only an unacceptable violation of norms and dangerous authoritarianism when it threatens the left wing agenda

Meme - *Man smiling in bed with empty place and pillow*
Man waking up: "Cindy?... SHE LEFT ME. FOR REASONS BEYOND WHAT MY HEART CAN COMPREHEND, SHE LEFT ME."
Man hugging pillow: "LEFT ME WITH NOTHING BUT HER SMELL AND MEMORIES OF A LOVE AFFAIR SO CONSUMING, YET SO BRIEF..."
Annoyed woman in bed: "RELAX, ROB, WE DIDN'T PAY HER TO STAY THE WHOLE NIGHT."

Meme - Big Serge @witte_sergei: "Probably the worst thing about drones is that they are ruining the aesthetic quality of armored vehicles by forcing them to wear thick sheets of cable and caging. Once a noble beast, the tank now looks like an unkempt Pekingese."

Meme - Smiling woman with big cucumber measuring it with forearm: "WHATS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING HUNGRY AND BEING HORNY? WHERE YOU PUT THE CUCUMBER"

Meme - "Dilbert Classic April 15, 2004"
Dilbert's Mom: "HAVE YOU MADE YOUR MOTHER PROUD BY BECOMING A MANAGER?"
Dilbert: "NO. HAVE YOU MADE YOUR SON PROUD BY HOSTING A COOKING SHOW ON TELEVISION? YOU COULD CALL THE SHOW "COOKING WITH TOO MUCH SALT.""
Dilbert's Mom: "HOW DID You GET THIS WAY?"

Meme - "Twonks"
Man: "WHAT'S YOUR RING SIZE?"
Woman: "OH MY GOD, WHY?"
Man: "NO REASON *looking at BUTT PLUGS*"
Reference to this

Meme - "Average modern leftist understanding of politics:
Socialism is when government does stuff I like.
Fascism is when government does stuff I don't like.
Capitalism is when rich people spend their money in a way I don't like"

Meme - "The Berenstain Bears: Papa Bear's Not-So-Happy Ending
*Mama bear angrily seeing location at The Pampered Bear Massage Parlor*
*2 kid bears looking puzzled while credit card bill is on table*
Asian woman bear to Papa Bear: "Ok, now turn over..."
First Time Books
More Berenstain Bears Adventures!
Free stickers inside!"

L. Wayne Mathison on X - "George Orwell, Thomas Sowell, Friedrich Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat give you four excellent tools for cutting through Canadian political language.
Orwell: Watch the words.
Sowell: Ignore intentions. Examine results and trade-offs.
Hayek: Be suspicious when politicians think they possess enough knowledge to manage millions of people’s decisions from the centre.
Bastiat: Look beyond what you can immediately see. Ask what the policy costs, what it prevents, and what would have happened otherwise.
Apply those four tests to Canadian politics.
“Affordability” can mean spending more government money, cutting a tax, sending you a cheque, controlling a price or subsidizing something.
Orwell asks: What does “affordability” actually mean here?
Sowell asks: Does the policy really make Canadians better off after all the costs are counted?
Hayek asks: How does Ottawa know the right price, subsidy, industry or investment for millions of different Canadians?
Bastiat asks: What don’t we see? What would taxpayers, businesses and families have done with that money instead?
“Investment” sounds better than “government spending. Fine. Investment in what? How much? Who decided? Who takes the loss if it fails?
“Compassion” describes an intention. It doesn’t tell you whether a program works.
“Fairness” sounds unquestionably good. But fairness to whom? Who pays more? Who receives more? What behaviour does the policy encourage?
“Common sense” is another slogan until somebody explains the actual policy. “Corporate greed” can describe genuine misconduct, but it can also become a convenient explanation that ignores taxes, regulation, wages, competition, monetary policy, supply constraints and government decisions. “Crisis” may describe a real emergency. It can also create the political urgency needed to push through measures that would receive much more scrutiny under ordinary circumstances. “Misinformation” should mean a factual claim that can be demonstrated to be false. It should never become shorthand for “an argument we don’t want to answer.” “Dangerous” tells you somebody wants you to fear an idea. Ask for the evidence.
And when somebody calls an argument “simplistic,” ask them to identify exactly what is wrong with it. Sometimes a simple argument is wrong. Sometimes the complicated language is there because the simple question is uncomfortable.
This applies to Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats, premiers, bureaucracies, CBC, private media, corporations, unions and people on social media.
It also applies to the politicians you like. Especially the politicians you like. Strip away the language and ask:
What is actually being proposed? What will it cost? Who pays? Who benefits? What incentives does it create? What knowledge would government need to make this work? What consequences aren’t immediately visible? What would people have done with their own money and resources instead? What evidence says the policy works? What happens when it fails?
Orwell teaches you to examine the language. Sowell teaches you to examine incentives, trade-offs and consequences. Hayek teaches you the limits of centralized knowledge. Bastiat teaches you to look for the unseen cost.
Put all four together and you have a pretty good bullshit detector for Canadian politics."

Max 📟 on X - "Tucker Carlson: The government of the United Kingdom is punishing and prohibiting people and ideas it doesn't like. Russia's not doing that.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whaaaaaaat?"
Melissa Chen on X - "Tucker markets himself as "anti-war" in the US Any guess as to what happens to Russians who oppose war, just like he does? (None of this justifies the UK's increasingly Orwellian approach to speech but the idea that Russia is a paragon of free expression is laughable)"

Andy Ngo on X - "Update: A Portland, Ore. teen suspected of being a member of the "764" terror cult has been charged with domestic terrorism after a bioterrorism attack occurred at Benson High School—the school I went to.  On Sept. 8, an unnamed teen mixed dangerous chemicals in the cafeteria, causing severe injuries to himself and prompting a mass evacuation.   The 15-year-old has been charged at the state level with domestic terrorism, 12 counts of attempted m—rder and more.   The FBI has been assisting in the investigation. It found references to the "764" cult on devices belonging to the teen. The international p—dophile cult grooms and recruits youths into killing animals, making s—xual content and killing others. I recently reported on the decades-long sentencing of one of the cult's leaders, who is trans. There are members of this cult all over the world, and they've groomed multiple youths into carrying out m—rder-s—icides."

Meme - Kings of A&R: "Haiti's president demanded "respect" for his country, then drank water straight from an pitcher during his speech."

Meme - Hereward the Woke @BamaExpat: "Cambodians have a uniquely flat distribution of educational achievement. I wonder how that happ...oh."
Post-Menshevik @Fullantho: "TIL: Cambodia unique status in PISA"
"The smallest social gradient is found in Cambodia (mathematics 8 points, reading 4, science 4). In this country there is almost "ideal social equality": the performance difference between the upper and lower quarters of socioeconomic status amounts to only 21 points in mathematics and even only 8 and 9 points in reading and science, respectively. By comparison, in Germany the differences are 111, 112, and 121 points. The downside of "social equality": almost all Cambodian students learn virtually nothing. With competency scores of 336 in mathematics, 329 in reading, and 347 in science, Cambodia has the lowest performance level in all domains. In mathematics, 95.6 percent of students do not possess even the minimum competencies required for full participation in life in modern societies; in reading the figure is 97.1 percent and in science 96.2 percent-equality at the lowest possible level."
Left wingers are obsessed with equity, so this is their paradise

Letter: Conservatives aren’t less intelligent - "Singh cherry-picks a few studies, ignoring evidence against his conclusion. For example, Singh cites a study about verbal intelligence — which noticeably measures correlations with right-wing authoritarianism among children, not general conservatism among adults — neglecting to mention that a more recent study finds that those who identify as Republicans have higher verbal intelligence, greater probability knowledge and better question comprehension than Democrats. This study has been corroborated by the further finding that Republicans score between two and five IQ points higher than Democrats on verbal intelligence. Another study found that those who identified as center-right had the highest IQ, controlling for gender, age, education and income. Finally, a 2021 meta-analysis concluded that economic conservatives have higher cognitive ability. Nevertheless, it would be foolish and overconfident to assert based on these findings that Republicans are more intelligent than Democrats, and I don’t think that’s true either. Effects are small in either direction, and it is a notoriously flawed method to make causal inferences from correlations, yet this is exactly what Singh does."

Kaja Kallas on X - "The ICC is the cornerstone of the international criminal justice system. It prosecutes individuals responsible for the most serious crimes under international law. I have spoken with ICC President Tomoko Akane following the United States’ announced intention to impose sanctions. The six-month period before the measures take effect offers a window for dialogue. The EU has always supported the Court, and the EU has options to ensure that it can continue its vital work. Protecting the ICC remains an EU priority."
Ribeiro on X - "This is nonsense. The ICC did not go after Assad or the leaders of Saudi Arabia for their crimes in Syria and Yemen, respectively. It also did not go after the Chinese leaders for their crimes against the Uyghurs. It's a court that's targeting citizens of countries that have sound legal systems and, as such, should be reformed or dismantled."

May ’68: What Legacy?

Since left wingers are praising the current riots as a continuation of a long French legacy, including 1968. But in reality the 1968 protests were incoherent and nihilistic

May ’68: What Legacy?
Fifty years later, the time has come to take a measured look at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since.

Of the hundreds of books and essays published about the events of May 1968 in Paris, one of my favorite remains the philosopher Raymond Aron’s La révolution introuvable, written as the events unraveled in July 1968. In this book, whose title translates to The Nowhere-to-Be-Found Revolution, the events are described as a tragicomedy in which “a verbal delirium with no casualties” placed bourgeois students with a “utopian negation of reality” and workers with authentic and legitimate demands on France’s center stage. Raymond Aron was critical of the student protest; however, he was also critical of the centralized Gaullist government, which had failed to anticipate the aspirations of a whole society. A fellow graduate of Jean-Paul Sartre at Ecole normale supérieure in the late twenties, Raymond Aron joined General de Gaulle in London as early as June 1940 and enrolled in the Free French forces. Aron and Sartre were often caught on opposite sides of arguments. Sartre was the committed, politically engaged intellectual of the Left, while Aron was the philosopher of the Right who preferred to observe events at a distance. Though Aron had more accurately predicted the course of Eastern Europe in the fifties through the eighties, it was nonetheless fashionable among French intellectuals to say, “Better be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.” Sartre was more exciting company. He was a magnet for generations of thinkers, he had the sparkle of the perpetually angry man, while Aron had the calm of a pessimistic humanist.

Today, however, it is clear that Raymond Aron’s quiet yet acute dissection of les evénements of May ’68 offers the best entry point into a critique of ’68’s legacy. Many argue, like Aron, that May ’68 and its heritage are still nowhere to be found, impossible to define even fifty years later. 

The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who was teaching philosophy at the University of Strasbourg in 1968 and who therefore embraced the ’68 ideals (he lived with his family in a commune for a few years) argues that the reason there is no possible legacy of ’68 is because ’68 never ended. In an interview he gave in 2009, Jean-Luc Nancy declared, “We intimated that the society was changing, that the order had been broken … The course of history, of progress, of human emancipation, rational and in control of its own destiny, had been somehow diverted.” According to Nancy, we are still trying to find that new direction. For Jean-Luc Nancy, there was also something profoundly abstract at play: “The ’68 events were even more metaphysical and spiritual than they were social, political and cultural. The heart of the matter, those days’ incandescence, lies in the mutation that was taking place in western civilization.” Some call it postmodernism.

How do the generations who came after judge May ’68? Let’s take, for instance, the generation of French sociologists born in the seventies, the children of the young soixante-huitards. They have tried to look at May ’68 through a new lens, albeit perhaps still a biased one. Irène Pereira, a sociologist and a member of the radical libertarian trade union SUD, tends to see May ’68 as the mother of a form of protest and contestation that since the nineties has resurfaced and flourished in France and throughout the world. Known in France as altermondialistes, or anti-globalization movements, these range from the 1995 student and strike protest in France to the international Occupy movements, and they embrace direct (and at times violent) action as a way of influencing politics. For Christophe Prémat, another sociologist born in the seventies and a socialist French MP, it is worth going back to the Paris streets of 1968 to better understand what was at stake. Stuck between a rigid Gaullist power on one hand and the equally rigid and powerful Communist Party, the radical Left sought and succeeded in challenging the status quo. The students and workers’ insurrection aimed to break free of the twin stifling authorities of Gaullism and the Communist Party. May ’68 erupted therefore as an antiauthoritarian and spontaneous élan whose aim was to assert the individual’s autonomy and emancipation.

“At a superior level, the events of May denounced a double despotism, Sovietism, and the bureaucratic rationality of the industrial society,” Raymond Aron writes. However, he continues, “May ’68 failed to demonstrate that the self-governance of companies, universities, society, the end of hierarchies, and the abolition of separation between the masses and the decision makers, offered a radically original third way, something between a liberal Sovietism and a social-inclined capitalism.”

May ’68’s legacy can seem like one of disappointment—sometimes a bitter disappointment. For all the talk of a new society, May ’68 proved to be more of a jubilant vacuum, devoid of any tangible project, as sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky explains in 1983’s L’ère du vide (The Void Era). Worse, its cult of the individual might have accelerated the coming consumerist frenzy. Destroying the values of the old social order without replacing them with new ones left future generations terribly confused. If it is indeed “forbidden to forbid” as one famous May ’68 slogan had it, then where does that leave citizens today? For many critics, May ’68 created a social childishness whose favorite toy is rebellion or l’esprit de rébellion.

Raymond Aron puts this idea into historical and social context. “The French, since 1789, have always retroactively magnified their revolutions. Those moments of immense celebrations during which they allow themselves to experience what they refrained from doing in normal times give them an elating feeling of self-fulfilment, even if they know it is but a daydream. Such revolutions necessarily appear destructive, and are accompanied by the most extravagant projects, in a utopian negation of reality.” In his eyes, May ’68 was both anarchic and archaic. It set itself alongside a long tradition of national unwinding. Borrowing from Tocqueville and his views on the events of 1848, Raymond Aron points to the profound conservatism of French society, which needs momentary release, an imaginary antithesis to an otherwise consuming reality. In fact, President de Gaulle was himself an old resistant, and he likely had more in common with the activists than with the one million people who marched in his name on May 30, 1968, bringing the events of May to a close. May ’68 proved a successful social protest, but the rebellion lacked in political content. That is why, in Raymond Aron’s eyes, it is now nowhere to be found.

How do the generations born after 1968 overcome the individualistic and irresponsible aspects of the movement in order to find democratic passion and collective ideals? First of all, I would say, they can accept that May ’68 created a monster that we are still struggling with and eventually need to tame. In today’s public discourse, outrage very often replaces argument; self-proclaimed radicals oppose themselves to norms, morals, and institutions without offering alternatives. In a puerile and vain exercise, they place themselves comfortably outside the system instead of grappling with the issues from within the system. If anything, the epic failure of May ’68 has taught us that rebellions need a project, an aim that is detailed and practical. It is the only way they can succeed. Seen from Europe, the American students’ movement in favor of gun control has every chance to succeed: It is rational, legitimate, and coherent. Its aim is both tangible and achievable through legislation.

It is also time for feminists to question how liberating May ’68 truly was for women. It is widely assumed that sexual freedom as advocated by soixante-huitards led to the legalization of contraception and abortion and, more widely, measures that gave more rights to women in the workplace and at home, such as shared parental authority over children and the possibility of opening a bank account without a husband’s approval. This is undeniably true. However, sexual freedom, or the libertine ideology, was more often than not used by heterosexual men as a right to collect female lovers. The critic Philip Hensher, in a review of Richard Vinen’s book The Long ’68, which looks at events in France but also in Britain and the U.S., puts it this way:

’68 is, if anything, a shift from principle to personal inclination. The significance of personal inclination often seemed to depend on whose personal inclination it was. Radical students at Lanchester Polytechnic thought nothing of shouting ‘Fascist pig! Get her knickers off!’ at a visiting Mrs Thatcher in 1971. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers proposed that rape could be an insurrectionary act. Although feminists were a more significant part of the radical movement than they were of mainstream politics, they could not be guaranteed a warm welcome. The same was true of gay liberation movements, just beginning, and probably hardly recognised by the majority of heterosexual radicals.

May ’68 was an instant in time, a suspended poetic moment, an outcry of dreams dreamed out loud, a mutation from an older to a younger country. It is only by looking at May ’68 at the distance of fifty years, examining it openly, and admitting to its epic failures that the children of May ’68 can move forward, on to battles that are perhaps less poetic but hopefully more meaningful.

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