GDP Haters Aren't Making Serious Arguments

GDP Haters Aren't Making Serious Arguments

The US is wealthier than Europe, and the gap between the two keeps growing. No one can deny this anymore, so some have taken to arguing that we shouldn’t care that much about GDP, because other countries do better on other measures. Here’s one particularly annoying piece, which includes the following chart.*comparing the UK to US states and it supposedly coming out ahead*

I like how this treats left-wing policy goals themselves as accomplishments. “Paid maternity leave”, “higher minimum wage”, and “statutory paid holiday.” What if a country just declared the entire year a paid holiday? I guess that would be a great success story. This reminds me of how the Soviet Union had an endless number of rights guaranteed in its constitution, for all that was worth.

Economic statism is always sold as something that will help make societies richer. When it fails, you can just point to the policies themselves as a success that refutes the need to worry about economic comparisons at all! I can just start listing right-wing political goals like more religious freedom, free speech, and lower taxes to prove America is a better place to live.

Even on the more objective measures, we can say that Nigeria does better than the UK on obesity and prisoners per capita. It also has a healthier birthrate. Is Nigeria better than the UK? Sure, maybe by some criteria. But the UK is still much wealthier, and it would be foolish to deny this or act as if it is unimportant.

Putting aside the clearly political criteria, the argument of the GDP skeptical crowd is that wealth is not the be-all and end-all. What good is GDP if you die sooner, you’re addicted to drugs, and you live in a state of constant economic insecurity? Of course, most alternatives to GDP per capita correlate very strongly with it. But when the differences between countries are relatively small in percentage terms – like between the US and UK, but not between the UK and Nigeria – we might argue that the poorer society is “better” in some sense.

It’s fine to say you’d rather live in Europe than America. But the denigration of GDP is always done to make an implicit or explicit point about policy, usually without explaining exactly how the things other countries do better on are related to them being poorer. 

It’s not a big mystery why the US has a relatively low life expectancy: mainly opioids, higher obesity, car accidents, and murder. Slower European growth is caused by higher taxes, bad energy policy, and more stringent business regulations, particularly when it comes to labor. If the US adopted Western European economic policies, would our life expectancy match theirs? Would higher taxes make Americans skinnier or less likely to die in accidents? Nobody ever sells a tax proposal this way. “We need to raise the marginal tax rate. Sure, it might make us all poorer. But Europeans pay more, and they’re less fat than we are, so it’s definitely going to be worth it when we all lose weight.”

One may argue that the US can learn something from the way Europe enforces traffic laws or something. Yet I don’t know why such a conversation has to reference GDP at all. You can just say “I like X about Europe, we should do this specific thing in the way they do.” There is no pushing a button that says “Lower GDP, smaller waist sizes.”

Here’s a chart of GDP per capita versus obesity rate, with the US and European countries highlighted.

In America, 42% of adults are obese, compared to less than 13% in France. I would definitely sacrifice a bit of wealth to get down to France’s numbers.

But what is the policy implication here? This is mostly a cultural issue. But if the US simply adopted French economic practices on taxation and business regulation, we’d end up poorer and just as fat. We probably should adopt French policies on things like housing and nuclear power, which would be good for GDP, but again I don’t think that would change the obesity numbers. If there’s an actual anti-obesity policy we can implement, it would be worth losing a few GDP points over, but nobody has put that on the table. 

Sometimes life expectancy numbers are used to indict the American health care system. But there is little reason to believe that this explains why Europeans live longer. In fact, the evidence generally points in the opposite direction. When you contrast survival rates for the same kind of cancer between countries, the US generally comes out near the top.

Compared to four other advanced nations in one study, between 2011 and 2017, older Americans who suffered an ST-elevation myocardial infarction – a type of heart attack – were more likely to undergo percutaneous coronary intervention, though Canada was in first place. International comparisons show that Americans with hypertension are more likely to know they have it and more likely to be treated. One 2003 study found that, of those 35 to 64 with hypertension, 53% of Americans were taking medication for the condition, compared to an average of 27% among six European countries. And despite the higher American obesity rate, as of 2015 Europeans generally had higher high blood pressure, which may be attributed to more extensive treatment in the US. 

None of this is surprising. Europeans spend less on health care, and socialized medicine means worse quality, for the same reason that socialism leads to worse outcomes in other contexts. The US health care system is a semi-socialized system, which is preferable to going all the way. It must also be noted here that the US is responsible for the vast majority of medical innovation worldwide, which Europeans and others benefit from. So the American system should get credit for advances in treatment that other countries make, though it rarely does because people inclined towards left-wing economic ideas don’t want to admit capitalism works and their preferred ideas would make the world worse off.

Another argument you will sometimes hear is that Americans work more hours, and that explains at least part of the income differential, which is true. In some cases, the gaps are substantial; Americans work about a third more hours than Germans and the French.

Of course, you would expect countries that disincentivize work to work fewer hours. You could imagine a government that taxed all income at 95%, saw working hours collapse, and then declared that it chose more leisure. That’s obviously not a desirable outcome. There’s nothing stopping Americans from seeking out jobs that have fewer hours, but generally people like earning money. They also appreciate leisure, and there’s no reason to believe that government knows what the right balance between work and rest is, or even that if it could be confident of the right balance, it would be wise to impose that on the entire society. 

I don’t know what the “ideal” or optimal number of hours worked per week is. But we’re more likely to reach that point in a society that puts fewer barriers in the way of people earning as much as they want. I generally don’t see government policies as choices societies make in any real sense. They’re usually better understood as products of historical contingency and elite bargaining, given how sticky the status quo tends to be. The only way to meaningfully speak about choice is in the individual context.

The GDP-haters seem to interpret “the US has a higher GDP than Europe” to mean “the US is better than Europe.” So they want to respond that actually, Europe is much better. But they’re the ones who are acting like a child saying his dad can beat up someone else’s dad.

This is a dumb way to think about international comparisons. Which country is richer and which country is safer or has a higher life expectancy are different questions. If you think there’s something the US can learn from Europe, explain exactly what it is. But you can’t just say Americans shoot each other more, and therefore European tech policy is better. 

There are GDP deniers on the right too. JD Vance doesn’t want to champion woke socialist Europe, so he picks Japan to make his point in his latest book. He writes that, despite the country struggling on conventional economic measures, the strawberries there are delicious and everything is clean, which led him to conclude that “maybe economics is just fake.” So does it follow that raising American taxes or stopping free trade would make our subways safer and our bathrooms more sanitary? You can go ahead and make the argument, I guess. But “economists say Japan is less wealthy, when it’s actually safe” does not argue anything. It’s little more than a cheap rhetorical ploy. The goal is to distract the reader, which one does by denouncing “economics” as a profession in order to create a permission structure that allows them to ignore logic and data and replace them with wishful thinking. 

It’s like if someone says Car A is faster than Car B, and someone responds Car B has a nicer color. Maybe this is a sensible thing to say if there is a tradeoff between speed and how nice the car looks. But you actually need to show the connection! You don’t get to just assume that red cars are slower than blue cars because you have a bias against the engineering method that makes cars go faster.

Whether on the right or left, every GDP skeptic is basically arguing for policies that cannot be defended in a straightforward way. Japanese are always going to commit less crime than Americans. Telling us that Japan is safer has no relevance to debates over taxation, trade, or land use regulations, any more than knowing that Europeans are skinnier and have less access to opioids suggests that we should adopt socialized medicine. 

You can bet that if Europe and Japan had higher GDPs than the US, all of the GDP skeptics would eagerly champion this fact. What would we think of a politician who promised higher living standards and oversaw an economic collapse, but then turned around and said it doesn’t matter because crime went down? We’d say good job on crime, but you still failed on economics. 

I would actually turn this argument on its head, and say America is amazing for having such a high GDP despite its less responsible and well-behaved population. Compared to Europeans and East Asians, Americans commit more violent crime, drive worse, eat themselves into obesity, and show many other kinds of personal flaws. Despite that, we’re still wealthier than Europeans and East Asians. People talk a lot about the pathologies of the black community in terms of high rates of crime and out-of-wedlock births, but black Americans earn roughly as much as the French. This is quite remarkable, and should be attributed to our superior economic system. The fact that Germans earn about as much as Hispanic Americans do, many of them a generation or less removed from developing world poverty, is a strike against the German system. If you could send our Hispanics to Germany and bring an equal number of Germans over here in exchange, like in a fantasy novel written by Stephen Miller, I’m sure the Hispanics would end up worse off and the Germans would be much wealthier.

Wealth isn’t everything. But it’s really important, and the only time people deny this is when they don’t like the fact that free markets continually prove superior to high levels of taxation and regulation.

 

Capitalism and Leisure / Welfare instead of Space

Tired Peasant @HorrorGorl: "Capitalism stole the time we’re supposed to spend with each other."
Chris Freiman @cafreiman: "Counterpoint:"
"Estimated lifetime hours of work and leisure
Unit 3 'Scarcity, work, and choice' Section 3.9 'Explaining our working hours: Changes over time' in The CORE Team, The Economy. Available at: https://tinyco.re/3090321 [Figure 3.21] *Lifetime Discretionary Hours going up, Lifetime Work Hours going down, Lifetime Leisure Hours goung up*"

Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1: "It’s the same story every time “You must reject greatness, extort the productive, and demolish your civilization so that yet more subsidized corn syrup can be funneled into my maw”"
*Fat black woman with black girl in wheelchair*
Sign: "Billion $ for space. Pennies for the hungry"
"With sign "billions for spoce, pennies for the hungry, Mrs. Mattie Gray, lame daughter Jackie, 8, demonstrate at NASA site."
Breaking911 @Breaking911: "NEWS 12: "Danielle Grant is starving." *fat black woman*"

Related:

We Could Have Settled Mars; Our Regime Chose Global Zimbabwe Instead
Mars vs utopian welfare programs

Links - 13th September 2026 (Indigenous Peoples: Canada)

Jim McMurtry on X - "Premier Eby uses the word “reprehensible” three times in talking about residential schools, e.g. the sexual abuse. There was infinitely less sexual abuse in these schools than on reserves today. The predators are all Indigenous males who never went to residential school."
Damn colonialism and inter-generational trauma caused by residential schools!

Frances Widdowson on X - ""I don't think we should have to prove to anybody what happened to these [dead children at Kamloops] because they are there and they send us messages telling us they're there...[@tkemlups] Chief Casimir and I went to visit the sacred site. You can tell they're there, right?""
Jonathan Kay on X - "Indigenous leader declares that no proof is necessary that 215 dead children lie below the surface in Kamloops because indigenous people have the psychic power (which white people cannot “understand”) to communicate with dead people & experience their “energy”"
Time to condemn Christianity as superstition

Aaron Pete on X - "Robert Fife has been holding power accountable for nearly 50 years. I admire individuals who challenge power, expose corruption and fight for justice and fairness on behalf of everyday Canadians. Throughout his career at CTV and The Globe & Mail, Fife has broken major stories ..."
Jonathan Kay on X - "Some of the stuff is pretty bonkers. At the 41 minute mark, Fife claims he knows that there are real unmarked graves in Kamloops. As proof, he told a story about some woman who started crying when talking about residential schools."
Danceinnadighetto on X - "He is an exemplar of the Canadian boomer elite and not any different from his UK forebearers. Relaxing on his status to expound on magical MSM myths like climate; immigration-good; rednecks-bad. The Globe (what a name!) is garbage and only survives due to subsidies."
Time for left wingers to call the Globe centre right again

Rent-seeking reconciliation industry needs conflict-of-interest rules and an end game - "Reconciliation has narrowed from the official goal of correcting historical and current wrongs perpetrated against Indigenous peoples into a pay-to-play model that increasingly resembles rent-seeking.   The incentives are all there.  Project proponents need legal certainty and physical access. Under the BC NDP government, this increasingly extends beyond consultation and simple “engagement” to the need to gain permission (by whatever deal necessary) from the Indigenous community claiming the territory where the project is located. Often this takes some form of partnership involving a combination of capacity funding, compensation, revenue sharing or equity. Ottawa’s own description of the pipeline emphasizes consultation, Indigenous equity, loan guarantees, and partnership.  The emerging unofficial rule strikes uncomfortably similar to a line from the classic mob film, Goodfellas: “F— you, pay me.” Because once you strip away the binders and bureaucracy, the situation looks a lot like a shake down. But even questioning this state of affairs draws attacks, and accusations of being hostile to reconciliation or outright racist, rather than a rational inquiry into public governance.   The Supreme Court has stated that Crown consultation with Indigenous peoples is a process, not a guarantee of a particular outcome. It requires good faith and, when warranted, accommodation. The B.C. government, enabled by the federal government, has gone much further.  Sections 6 and 7 of the 2019 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) allow cabinet to authorize joint or consent-based statutory decision-making agreements between the province and Indigenous bodies. Under a consent-based agreement, a project or land use can’t proceed without approval of the Indigenous group. Without consent, the project is essentially vetoed.  This did not descend from the clouds as natural law; it was a deliberate legislative choice by the NDP government, apparently enabled by the federal government. In essence, Indigenous consent requires lucrative financial deals for major projects to proceed. And the BC NDP government has created a chokepoint for major projects, with the costs and risks borne by industry and citizens.  The Eskay Creek mine in northern B.C. is a case in point.   Under the Eskay Creek section 7 agreement, Tahltan consent was required for the project to move ahead. The Tahltan approval process was tied to an Impact Benefit Agreement negotiated with the mine proponent, Skeena Resources. As part of a reported nearly $2 billion in benefits that would flow to the community under the agreement, the company also advanced the Tahltan government $40 million to be disbursed to community members before they voted whether to approve the project.  In all, Skeena Resources and other sources estimate life-of-project benefits for the Tahltan community will reach $1.2 billion in cash, $570 million in contracts, and more than $184 million in wages.  Separately, Tahltan will also receive 37.5 per cent of the provincial mineral tenure tax, which is estimated to reach as much as $1 billion. While $1.19 billion in revenues are projected for the province during the life of the mine.   Apart from money, there is the question of authority. In northwest B.C., for example, the province has launched joint land-use planning across roughly 16 million hectares with five First Nations, while new mining-tenure registrations are paused across just under one-third of the planning area.  The province says it will engage local municipalities and tenure holders, but the framework remains government-to-government; local governments do not legally qualify. If co-management becomes the operating principle, it risks transferring public control over public land to small Indigenous groups (with no democratic duty to the public at large), before British Columbians have even seen the final map.  This model will only continue to sow distrust and cynicism over dealings with First Nations. There may never have been a point in modern B.C. history when reconciliation has been under more scrutiny, or at greater risk of becoming a toxic word.  There was no need for it to be this way.   Other models based on cooperation and good faith have shown a better path for reconciliation. The Haisla, for example, conceived of the Cedar LNG project, secured 50.1 per cent ownership, approved the project through a community vote, and borrowed $1.4 billion to finance their stake. That is true ownership and real risk-taking, because the Haisla carry downside risk if the project fails.  The Nisga’a Nation has partnered with Western LNG and Rockies LNG on the Ksi Lisims LNG project, which is proposed for Nisga’a treaty land. Ksi Lisims and associated infrastructure are expected to attract more than $30 billion in investment if they proceed. These examples reflect First Nations seeking to build and be productive partners, rather than simply charge tolls for access.  An owner only gets paid if an enterprise succeeds, while a landlord gets paid regardless.   By pursuing sweeping changes to land use and opening the door to the pay-to-play model, the NDP government also risks amplifying inequities between First Nations. The NDP approach rewards litigation and strategic geography in a manner that advantages Indigenous communities with the leverage and resources to hire experienced negotiators.   First Nations more poorly positioned economically have far fewer opportunities to develop projects or negotiate revenue.  The federal Community Well-Being Index shows greater variation among Indigenous communities than among non-Indigenous communities. Turning reconciliation into a preordained hierarchy based on project location is manifestly unfair and destined to fail... Reconciliation in this model has become an industry, rather than a settlement, and its business case depends on never finishing the job."
Damn Trump keeping Canada behind!

Report examines colonial legacy of Canada's national parks | Toronto Sun (aka "Parks Canada report calls creation of national parks a 'colonial injustice' for Indigenous peoples") - "“For millennia Indigenous people have cultivated reciprocal relationships with land, water and ice guided by cultural practices, values and knowledge systems,” said the Evaluation of the Indigenous Guardians Initiative Internal Review, as reported by Blacklock’s. “Beginning in the 19th century the development of national parks and protected areas in Canada disrupted these relationships through exclusion and colonial injustices.   “In establishing national parks, Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their homes, denied access to traditional territories and prohibited from hunting and harvesting on park lands,” the report said. The document is dated 2024 and was released without comment on June 22... “Stoney Nakoda were prevented from using the land as in past ways,” the report said. “These laws, practices and policies caused historic and ongoing harm for Indigenous communities. They eroded Indigenous systems.”   Parks Canada was established in 1911 as the Dominion Parks Branch. Charged with administering a small group of parks and reserves, it became the world’s first national park service... A 2019 report titled Framework For History And Commemoration proposed that all federal observances address issues of “colonialism, patriarchy and racism” nationwide. “In Canadian history colonialism, patriarchy and racism are examples of ideologies and structures that have profound legacies,” the report said.    “Nothing can be immune from review,” the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board, a Parks Canada agency, wrote in its 2019 report Careful Review Of Existing Designations. “Every designation can be re-evaluated.”"
I remember when left wingers supported national parks

Gabriel J. Benton ☦️🇺🇸 on X - "In 1697, Natives kidnapped Hannah Duston from her home in Massachusetts. Then they bashed her newborn baby's head against a tree. Today, people want to vilify her, because she killed her captors in their sleep and scalped them. Hannah Duston simply did what any true English mother would do.   Pro-Tip: many American Indian tribes weren't exactly nice people."
Mike Kobe (Wild Horse) 🪶 on X - "During King William's war, Abenaki tribesmen killed 15 children in this particular settlement before taking Hannah Duston and her baby.   They killed the baby (presumably to stop it making noise) and when they went to sleep, Hannah slipped out of her bonds and killed ten(!) of the Abenaki in their sleep with a hatchet. She then scalped them, which to me sounds quite reasonable.   She deserves a statue in my opinion."
If white people defend themselves against "indigenous" people, that's "genocide"

Alberta First Nation sues Ottawa over $5 treaty annuity, argues amount stuck in 1899 - "A northern Alberta First Nation is suing the federal government to increase its annual treaty annuity payments.  Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam says the $5 his members receive every year is an amount that’s stuck in 1899, when Treaty 8 was signed.  The payments date back to the signing of treaties across the country more than a century ago and were meant to provide assistance to First Nations members... First Nations across Canada, including other Treaty 8 signatories, have also launched legal challenges over the payment amount in recent years, and in 2023 Ottawa and the Ontario government reached a $10-billion settlement with 21 First Nations in that province... The claim notes the purchasing power of $5 has declined significantly since the treaty was signed and that there was never any mention of inflation when it was being negotiated.  One online calculator pegs $5 in 1899 to be worth roughly $200 in today’s cash."
Weird. Left wingers tell us that the treaties are sacrosanct and can never be amended or renegotiated, and must be honoured for the rest of eternity, or that would result in the breakup of Canada.
Of course, they won't be satisfied with $200 either.

Leaders demand better health care for First Nations people after chief's 13-hour wait at Winnipeg hospital - "First Nations leaders are raising concerns about the quality of health care their citizens receive after the chief of a northern Manitoba First Nation waited in pain for about 13 hours at a Winnipeg hospital last month.  Little Grand Rapids First Nation Chief Clinton Keeper, a cancer survivor, recently needed emergency medical care after experiencing complications from a kidney stone that obstructed his urinary tract, the Southern Chiefs' Organization said"
When you want special treatment not just for "indigenous" peoples but chiefs. Of course, they won't give up their money to fund more healthcare. Or go to their medicine men with their sacred and reliable ways of knowing

China clandestinely targeting First Nations leaders to procure Canada's natural resources: NSICOP - "Beijing is targeting Canada’s First Nations leaders with intelligence operations based on tourism that are aimed at securing Aboriginal-controlled natural resources, a Top Secret report from Ottawa’s intelligence-review watchdog NSICOP says.  Additionally, Beijing funded a British Columbia provincial candidate and its Consul General in Vancouver took actions to cover up the candidate’s “possible Chinese Communist Party membership,” NSICOP’s June 2019 draft report alleges.  The Bureau exclusively obtained NSICOP’s unredacted, 2019 report on foreign interference, which details China’s pervasive operations to bribe, coerce and co-opt Canadian leaders at all levels of government... Canada’s Aboriginal leaders — and the tension between federal and First Nations jurisdictions over natural resources in northern Canada — are an unexplored aspect of the Chinese interference story.  But the 2019 NSICOP report demonstrates crucial national security issues at stake.  It suggests Beijing is seeking clandestine relationships with First Nations leaders under false pretences in order to control Canada’s strategic resources in areas of increasing geopolitical importance.  “In late 2011, China invited a national-level group of Aboriginal leaders to travel to China. A CSIS assessment noted that the invitation was advertised as an opportunity to develop tourism for First Nations,” NSICOP’s report says.  “According to a Minister Counsellor at the PRC Embassy, the tourism opportunity was merely “beipian” (Mandarin for ‘to be fooled’) and that the true intention of the invitation was to pursue Aboriginal-controlled natural resources.” The report continues, saying that Chinese intelligence conducted research into every First Nations leader that joined the junket before they arrived in China.  “The PRC conducted research on each delegate in part to identify their ‘potential usefulness’ to the PRC,” the report says. “The Minister Counsellor concluded that “Chiefs are ‘blind’ when dealing with the PRC and have no interest in knowing more.”  In an interview Charles Burton, a sinologist and former Canadian diplomat, said “the idea of making friends with Aboriginal people for Chinese strategic purposes, would be part and parcel of their overall agenda to get access to the Canadian north and the natural resources that are there.”  “China would be fully aware of the Aboriginal leaders that have permissions to give exploitation of resources,” Burton said. “But we don’t know to what extent gifts or benefits may have been given to the Aboriginal people from the Chinese regime.”  More generally, NSICOP’s 2019 report says China’s deep interference in Canada expanded significantly, “following Xi Jinping's election as general Secretary of the CCP in 2012.”... “I’m not aware of this case, but I think a lot of people that have come to Canada and have been successful in the Chinese regime, are party members. And Beijing can leverage them, because I think it’s difficult to end your membership.”  “So the idea that there could be candidates for provincial office that are members of the CCP, is very likely,” he continued. “The idea they would be used by the United Front as sleeper agents, even if they wanted to become part of Canada’s mainstream political life, that is very difficult to escape.”...  “several PRC businessmen contributed to a mayoralty campaign instead of planned donations to a hospital, given that the ‘investment return on such a donation would be greater,’” NSICOP’s 2019 report says."
From 2024. Time for more "consultation". Anyway, looks like they're succeeded, and Canadians are happy about it, because they get to spite the USA as well by becoming a Chinese province

Five-year sentence whittled down to 810 days for Indigenous carjacker | National Post - "A judge defended the one-day sentence he handed a carjacker who stole a Toronto driver’s Mercedes at gunpoint, blaming the man’s jailers for failing the community...  “Some decry what they call the court’s catch-and-release approach to criminal justice,” Justice André Chamberlain wrote in a recent decision where he ruled that Robinson would have to spend just one more day in prison. “If they truly believe that incarceration is the answer to our criminal justice problems, they should admit that the correctional institution’s neglectful approach to inmate care has led to shorter sentences, less time in custody, and lower rates of incarceration, even for serious offenders in some cases. The jails are the ones failing the community, the inmates, and the justice system.”... Robinson, 31, is a Black and Indigenous man.  “During his time at the Toronto South Detention Centre (the South), the Indigenous Unit was eliminated. In September 2025, correctional officers removed and disposed of the artwork, teachings and prayers that were in the former Indigenous range,” Chamberlain said.  “The position of Native Inmate Liaison Officer (NILO) has been and remains vacant, denying Indigenous inmates access to consistent Indigenous support services in the institution.”  Robinson is a “Status First Nations adult with maternal ties to the Carry the Kettle Nakota First Nation,” said the decision.  “His personal history reflects the enduring and well-documented impacts of intergenerational trauma arising from the legacy of residential schools and the colonial policies instituted by successive past governments, resulting in a cultural genocide. His maternal grandmother attended the Lebret Industrial School, and the resulting disruptions have contributed to a loss of cultural identity, fractured parenting models, and exposure to substance use and trauma within the family system.” His “upbringing was marked by family instability, emotional suppression, and a disconnection from cultural supports and traditions.”  The death of his maternal grandfather when Robinson was 16 “represented a significant turning point in his life,” said the decision. “This loss appears to have intensified feelings of grief and abandonment, contributing to subsequent emotional dysregulation and substance use.”  In early 2024, Robinson “faced multiple concurrent stressors, including bereavements, a serious illness affecting someone close to him, financial instability within his family stemming from the impending foreclosure of his mother’s home, and the abrupt loss of a significant business contract” for his audio engineering business, said the decision.  “The convergence of these events is described as precipitating a ‘tailspin,’ and the temporal proximity between the loss of the contract and the index offence, within days, is particularly striking.”  Robinson, who had past convictions for aggravated assault, theft under $5,000, and robbery, described for the court conditions he was held in at the South...  “Jaiden Robinson has lived his life under the yoke of racism and colonialism. His background reflects a textbook Gladue profile: entrenched intergenerational trauma, compounded childhood abuse and addiction, and systemic disadvantage, alongside clear evidence of resilience and rehabilitative potential when supported through Indigenous-led programming,” Chamberlain said."

7 First Nations sign nuclear reactor ownership deal with Ottawa, Ontario
Dallas Brodie | Facebook - "Quit saying this is “in partnership” - if they put up their own money from their accumulated surplus, then it could possibly be seen as a partnership - provided other groups had a chance to bid on it as well. But giving taxpayers' money to FN to be “in partnership” does not form a true partnership - if you get money for free, your business decisions are not guided by proper risk management.  Will the FN share in the losses if this goes south? Or is it always a risk-free investment when we form these “partnerships”?  Until these deals are properly structured with risk to all partners, it is nothing more than welfare by a different name."

Geoff Russ: The South Africanization of B.C. | National Post - "The likely renaming of the small British Columbia community of Okanagan Falls exemplifies the toxicity, unworkability, and power of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) and “decolonization” more broadly. It is a top-down, legally binding process, not an organic or democratic one.  DRIPA, passed by the B.C. NDP government in 2019, requires the province to align its laws with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which includes recognizing and restoring traditional Indigenous place names. The mandate to rename Okanagan Falls stems from these legal obligations... Chief Clarence Louie said, “When it comes to reconciliation and land claims and Indigenous people having rights, those aren’t up for a vote.”  Okanagan Falls is seeking to become B.C.’s newest municipality. However, through the incorporation process, the very name of the community itself has become subject to a higher dispensation.  This is the South Africanization of B.C., in which an ideology of historical accusation, and the causes of “reconciliation” and “decolonization,” are turned into a permanent regime of racial political privilege, with undemocratic renamings only part of it. Unlike South Africa, Canada has no legacy of apartheid, and there is no reason for us to conduct our politics as if such a legacy exists. What we call a place matters greatly. If it did not, those on the political left and radical Indigenous activists would not devote so much time and energy to changing place names.  After the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa’s new, supposedly post-racial government for the “Rainbow Nation” also began to wrap itself in the language of reconciliation. Rather than becoming a movement for national healing, the politics that followed evolved into something that included almost punitive dispossession of property, vicious rhetoric, and history wars. Sound familiar? Much of Canada is walking the same road, especially in B.C., and DRIPA has been made into a legal weapon.  Following rulings that found DRIPA was legally binding to all past and future laws, rather than merely a guideline, NDP Premier David Eby attempted to suspend the legislation. He stopped himself in his tracks after the First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC) warned that any amendments without its permission would result in the pursuit of “every available avenue, legal, political and through direct action.”  Faced with a situation that stopped barely short of open rebellion, Eby backed down. New powers have been unintentionally ceded to unelected Indigenous authorities, and they will fight to keep them. These powers include the ability to change what is on the maps of the province. Regarding democracy, the true spirit of “reconciliation” and “decolonization” has driven a wedge through Powell River, a small city on the B.C. coast. The local Tla’amin Nation has demanded that the city be renamed, and has rejected a referendum or opinion poll on that change, arguing that “the human rights of a minority should not be decided by a majority.”  Even Powell River’s own Joint Working Group has said a poll is “not the appropriate tool.” Local power players have staked much on the renaming. After a wave of pushback, they are afraid of losing in the public square.  The replacement of Powell River is already occurring, piece by piece and without public consultation. Powell River General Hospital was renamed in 2022, followed by the school board, both replacing “Powell River” with the name “qathet,” which means “working together.” Furthermore, the regional Vancouver Island University satellite campus was renamed to “tiwšɛmawtxʷ,” meaning “house of learning,” to eliminate references to Israel Powell, a controversial colonial official. Very ugly racial language has accompanied these changes. Former Tla’amin leader Maynard Harry went on the record declaring that, “the white people in Canada are subhuman because of what they’ve allowed to happen.” He repeated the word “subhuman” several times. There is no healing to be found in those words, and they make suspect the very notion that healing was ever the goal, rather than power.  South Africa has already renamed more than 1,500 communities since 2000 on the basis of race, reconciliation, and retribution.  Historic towns like Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage, and East London, all of which have great importance to Afrikaners and Anglo-South Africans, have had their names replaced. These changes were often made despite public surveys indicating fierce opposition, including from some Black South Africans, from the residents of these communities. These name changes have occurred alongside land and property seizures in the “public interest,” often with little or no compensation.  Even if one were to concede that South Africa’s renaming policy is justified on the basis of correcting historic wrongs, that doesn’t justify emulating those policies in Canada.  Even so, the B.C. NDP has fully embraced this worldview, such as Premier Eby calling B.C.’s origins an “original colonial mistake,” while his MLA Rohini Arora said in the legislature that India, Pakistan, and Canada “share the same colonizer.”  In this worldview, B.C. is a sin that must be purged and remade into something new. The NDP has authorized literature that declares the term “British Columbian” to be exclusionary. It publishes official guides for immigrants where the only history section is about the mistreatment of First Nations. Newcomers are being taught to despise B.C. before even signing a lease.  B.C. is obviously not materially, economically or historically comparable to South Africa, but its political narratives are converging. Black nationalists in South Africa chant “Kill the Boer” as a threat to white farmers, while Indigenous chiefs in B.C. speak of non-Indigenous people as “subhuman.”"
Time to slam Israel for renaming towns to Biblical names, because we all know that the true eternal names of places are what they were just before "white" people "showed up"
Treason is only bad when it threatens the left wing agenda. Alberta must forever stay in Canada to pay for the gravy train

Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ Was a Warning We Ignored

Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ Was a Warning We Ignored

Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate seems to have aged in reverse. It was published in 2002, though I read it in 2006 when I started developing an obsession with evolutionary psychology. At the time, I viewed it as the killing blow to blank slate psychology—the notion that human nature is purely a product of social construction. The book sat on my shelf all these years as a representation of an argument that had been definitively won. But after personally battling gender ideology and sex pseudoscience for almost a decade, it now represents a warning to society that went shamefully ignored.

The intellectual habits and belief systems Pinker criticized did not disappear. Instead, they infected neighboring fields, became infused with moral dogma, and then expanded from making claims about the mind to making claims about the body itself.

Blank slate psychology has a long history. John Locke once described the human mind as “white paper” drawn on by life experience. Twentieth century behaviorists were even more extreme. John B. Watson famously claimed that, given a dozen infants and full control over their environment, he could train any one of them to become a doctor, lawyer, artist, or thief, regardless of inherited traits. This confidence in the power of conditioning spread into psychology, education, and popular culture.

Pinker’s great achievement in The Blank Slate was not simply showing that genes matter, as many competent scientists have demonstrated before. Rather, it was exposing the way that fear of human nature had distorted entire fields of study. Many intellectuals seemed to believe that simply recognizing innate differences would somehow justify unequal treatment before the law or weaken the case for social reform. Pinker argued that scientific facts must be separated from moral judgments, because if you believe that equality under the law requires everyone to be biologically interchangeable, you’re hitching your moral commitments to empirical claims that are always only one experiment away from being proven false.

As an evolutionary biologist, I have always found the strongest version of blank slate psychology almost impossible to take seriously, because even the most cursory glance at nature shows it to be false. Put down the Women’s Studies journal article and look at data from our closest animal relatives. Simply knowing average body size differences between the males and females of a species can tell us a great deal about their likely current behavior as well as the evolutionary forces in the past that produced them. For instance, when males are a lot larger than females, as in gorillas, we generally expect intense competition among males for access to harems of females, and large differences in reproductive success as a result. When size differences are small or nonexistent, as in gibbons, we more often see males and females pairing up and less extreme competition among males. While this rule doesn’t hold in every case, it is a firmly established pattern with a sound evolutionary reasoning. 

Humans did not emerge from outside nature. To believe that humans have somehow shed all our inherited tendencies requires one to hold that while every other animal has behavioral traits shaped by evolution, humans somehow lost them, only for our societies to recreate the same sex-related patterns through socialization. Why would evolution erase these tendencies only for culture to independently produce them in the same form? Why not just keep the evolved tendencies? I have yet to hear coherent answers to these questions.

Political pushback to this basic evolutionary reasoning is not new. When E. O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, the vast majority of the book focused on nonhuman animals, where readers were presumably all nodding along to his sound and compelling arguments. But in the final chapter, he crossed what he later called the “guarded boundary” between the natural sciences and the humanities. The social justice activists of the era accused sociobiology of promoting racism, sexism, eugenics, and even genocide. At a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, protesters poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head while chanting that he was “all wet.”

Shockingly little has changed since then. Human evolutionary psychology—especially when applied to sex differences—is still met with strong resistance. I hesitate to call human evolutionary psychology “controversial” because the notion of evolved psychological differences between the sexes is almost universally accepted as true among evolutionary biologists. The evidence is overwhelming. We’ve since moved on to asking and answering the relevant questions downstream of that fact, like which traits differ, how large those differences are, and how biology and culture might interact.

Socialization matters, of course. I don’t know any biologists who’ve ever claimed it doesn’t. But many feminist scholars and social scientists frequently portray culture alone as a complete explanation, but strangely only for the biological differences it finds ideologically inconvenient. Colette Dowling’s The Frailty Myth, for example, argued that the athletic advantage that boys enjoy over girls are mostly produced by culture and tried to argue that strength differences mostly disappear when men and women are matched for size and training. But this simply isn’t true. Controlling for body size, males have considerably more lean mass and much greater upper-body strength. That doesn’t mean training doesn’t matter, but it does not erase sexual dimorphism.

Given that we have more than enough data to debunk blank slate psychology many times over, why didn’t Pinker’s book and the quarter-century of data generated after its publication settle the debate once and for all? Unfortunately, academia is unusually good at shielding bad ideas from outside criticism. Most scientists are busy with their own research and assume that weak arguments will remain on the fringes. This was my mindset for years. I viewed sex pseudoscience as akin to belief in a flat Earth. I only spoke up once I realized how quickly it was gaining political influence and institutional protection. This was made possible by treating disagreement as a form of harm, which isn’t really a debate tactic available to flat-Earthers.

That was my experience after I published “The New Evolution Deniers” in 2018 and began challenging the widespread denial of biological sex differences beyond the brain. Blank-slate psychology had somehow mutated into blank-slate morphology. The older and more familiar claim was that male and female minds were basically identical until society imposed gender roles on them. The new claim was that the sexes themselves were infinitely malleable social constructs that can be altered through identity, language, hormones, or surgery.

Once a field becomes protected from criticism on moral grounds, it completely loses its “self-correcting” empirical anchor and begins to drift further from reality.

Pinker has taken a different path from mine. He has remained in academia and used the enormous credibility he has built over his career to defend reason, scientific truth, and open debate on volatile topics. He is Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and a co-leader of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom. His work on psychology, language, human nature, and rational thinking makes him unusually difficult to dismiss as a crank.

Prominent dissenters make it easier for others to speak openly. An adjunct professor can often be quietly cancelled; Steven Pinker is much harder to silence. His calm demeanor and precise style also helps. I have tried to follow the same approach of prioritizing facts over rhetoric.

Some people on the right dislike Pinker because of his strong opposition to Donald Trump. But political tribe is the wrong place to draw the line. The more important divide is between people who try to discover what is true and people who attempt to bend the facts to conform to their ideological commitments. On that question, Pinker has been one of the most ardent and consistent defenders of truth out there, and he has done so from within institutions that desperately need internal resistance.

The Blank Slate remains essential reading because the impulse it challenged never disappeared. It may never disappear. Pinker understood early that denying human nature does not make society more moral or humane, because you cannot build a better society on a false theory of humanity.

What is Europe even for? Decline and tragedy at the heart of the West

When you have managed decline, and endorse it too.

The author dismisses Trump's comments on mass migration, but that only worsens the fiscal problems he does cite. He also approvingly cites the left wing policies that're weakening Europe, while later saying Europe should follow Mario Draghi's recommendations. Ironic.

What is Europe even for? Decline and tragedy at the heart of the West - The Globe and Mail

"European leaders at the Munich Security Conference this month, the world’s premier geopolitics summit, where the elders of the Old World spent a weekend telling everyone it was all going to be okay.

Times are bad, but we are strong. Such was the energy of the conference. The embodiment of this message was French President Emmanuel Macron, who, without saying the words, anointed himself Captain Continent. “Europe has been vilified as an aging, slow, fragmented construct,” but in fact “everyone should take their cue from us,” he said...

Try as they might to project otherwise – and perhaps because those continental leaders tried so hard – it is plain that outside, beyond the hotel’s 19th-century façade, Europe’s light is fading.

The EU has irreversibly fractured with Brexit, no matter how much British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it ain’t so in Munich. War creeps from the east, and Big Brother USA unfriends Europe and eyes its wallet. Not that there’s much to take. Britain’s and France’s economies are barely growing, and Germany’s is stagnant. Facing crushing debt and populist upheaval, continental governments are revolving doors where nothing gets done. Today prisoner exchanges are done in the United Arab Emirates. Gaza peace talks are held in Qatar. Ukraine negotiations might be held in Geneva, but Europe was not at the table...

A once-mighty people has been brought low. “Europe is a myth,” Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, said at a WEF panel. “It’s a beautiful myth, but it’s not working.” Or, using the gamer-speak recently adopted by Tesla’s Elon Musk, one might say the continent has become a “non-playable character.”

It raises a tough question: What is Europe even for? And for those on the other side of the West, who draw our values and institutions from the old country, it raises a further question: What does an irrelevant Europe mean for us?...

We can trace the source of European decline endlessly. Brendan Simms, the Cambridge scholar, writes about five centuries of the destructive “struggle for supremacy” among the closely packed European powers that led to their second-fiddle status to the United States. Ian Morris of Stanford University traces the origins of Brexit for 10,000 years. Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King once said “some countries have too much history.” Such is Europe’s tragedy.

History was what culminated in the Second World War and the utter devastation it wrought. It was only American money that saved the continent, aid from a land unravaged by war. And the Old World was never again the same.

In 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt after the latter seized the Suez Canal, a major shipping route they funded. But U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who disdained such echoes of colonialism, had his own geopolitical priorities. Mr. Eisenhower, who had Britain deeply in his pocket, threatened to sell British bonds and ruin its economy. Prime minister Anthony Eden lost that standoff, and then lost his job.

Then Britain would find it could not even win a stare-down against China, a backwater only recently recognized by the world. In 1982, a steely Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking Chinese leader no taller than five feet, bluntly threatened to invade Hong Kong. Britain made concession after concession and walked away with what is arguably nothing. It left prime minister Margaret Thatcher “depressed,” she later said. So shameful was that moment, Queen Elizabeth II was deliberately kept away from the handover ceremony.

History has these moments sometimes, which capture the tides of centuries: Europe had become neutered, wearing a veneer of wealth but underneath just a sick man of the West.

In a rules-based world where institutions are respected, all of this might have mattered less. It may even have been better. One man’s lustrous past is another’s colonial nightmare. The world was moving in a new direction, away from the might-makes-right that has defined much of existence. A new Europe emerged: less powerful, more compassionate, an enthusiastic champion of a new multilateral world. And Europe found a new sort of power.

But then that veneer of wealth started to crack. As entitlements piled up, debt grew and growth slowed. The 2008 financial crisis sparked the eurozone sovereign-debt crisis. The American economy was once about the same as the EU’s, but over the past 20 years, the U.S. economy has more than doubled to US$30-trillion; the 27 EU countries’ economies are at only US$20-trillion, barely more than that of one rising China.

Six U.S. companies founded in the last five decades are valued at more than €1-trillion. In Europe, no company founded during that period is worth even a tenth of that. Some higher-education rankings show only one EU university in the world’s top 30. “Europe is no longer at the forefront of progress,” the European Central Bank’s Ms. Lagarde said in 2024. Europe has been content with old-school industries such as machinery, trains and cars. And those depend on two items that are now either gone or going: cheap Russian energy and abundant Chinese demand. On top of that, China now also makes machines. The proportion of sectors in which China vies directly with the eurozone is 40 per cent now, up from 25 per cent at the turn of the millennium.

Meanwhile, France has now seen five prime ministers in just over two years. Its troubles are the same ones that broke the unwieldy coalition of Germany’s former leader Olaf Schulz, the same that Chancellor Friedrich Merz now faces and the same afflicting the British government that saw six prime ministers in 10 years and its chancellor of the exchequer crying in parliament: Welfare, pensions, healthcare – the entitlements that once stemmed from prosperity now weigh on budgets, but woe be to any government that tries to cut them or raise taxes to fund them.

And so radical politics rise in Europe, for anger and empty stomachs push people toward flashy prophets. In France and Germany, centrist coalitions are barely holding on.

Add to this the return of Donald Trump and geopolitical brinkmanship. The United States does not want to carry Europe or the world order anymore. And we live now in an era of extremes: If you’re not a superpower, you’re not a power at all...

The fraying of the transatlantic partnership, like a rotting carcass, is now attracting vultures. China sees the decay of what Germans call the Weltordnung, and it sees further reason to test Europe, to play hardball in trade talks. Russia, already bent on regional dominance, flies drones into Poland and Romania. Seldom before, perhaps not since the Dark Ages or the fall of Constantinople, has such a proud continent seemed so small in such a big world.

After it came back from a season break in 2024, Emily in Paris, the show about an American gallivanting across a caricatured continent, was 36.6 times more popular in Canada than a typical Netflix production. Forty-four per cent of Canadians want this country to join the European Union. These data confirm anecdotes: It’s hard to go a week without seeing friends’ Instagram pictures from Porto or Tuscany. And you somehow know six people who have done a semester abroad in Aarhus or Stuttgart.

This Euro-lust is not undeserved. Decline is long. Ask a Roman in the fourth century, and she would not know that her empire was falling. Even as Europe fades, its wellspring of soft power remains visible. Canada’s cultural ties aside, we live in a world that Europeans built. China’s super rich have snapped up European vineyards. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un studied in Switzerland. The Thai king treats Germany as a second home. The UAE loves France’s Louvre museum so much it spent US$1.3-billion on licensing and loan fees for Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Indeed, the vestiges of Europe’s power show precisely why its decline is a problem: We mourn a loss only when it has value.

Even with Mr. Trump’s disdain for Europe, he mandates that new federal buildings use classical architecture to “visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity.” Mr. Trump swears by Italian suits and Swiss watches. Germany’s Mr. Merz charmed Mr. Trump with an invitation to his ancestral hometown. Britain’s Mr. Starmer used a royal invitation as a trump card during his visit to the White House. Mr. Trump later also accepted an invitation to the Dutch royal palace. Mr. Carney, to assert Canada’s sovereignty, invited King Charles to deliver the throne speech, an event the likes of which have not been seen in nearly half a century. Cambridge’s Prof. Simms has suggested making Charles emperor of Europe, a modern day Charlemagne, to stabilize the continent.

There’s even some power left that is more than soft. There’s a saying that the United States innovates, and the EU regulates. It’s meant derogatively – that the United States gives the world internet giants and the artificial-intelligence boom, and Europe mandates caps that stick on bottles (for better recycling) and made Apple use USB-C. But think about the impact. The EU sets global standards in regulating climate protection, competition, food handling, privacy and social media. In a world often criticized for unbridled capitalism, where trillion-dollar corporations are gaining unprecedented power, the EU is the lone bulwark against problems that the free market either creates or cannot address.

And where Europe retreats, its antithesis fills in the blanks. It sounded like a good thing when the colonial powers left Africa, and it was, but now we do not live in a good world. Russia’s Africa Corps, mercenaries who took over from the Wagner Group, have been active in six countries that we know of and probably more that we don’t; more than half of that continent has some military pact with Moscow. China has stakes in 46 ports and includes all but two countries in its Belt and Road infrastructure program. In Djibouti, Chinese debt has accounted for as much as 70 per cent of the economy. Eyeing Africa’s natural resources, Russia and China now own so much of the continent that there are reports of them meeting and clashing with each other. In the United Nations, most of Africa votes with China and Russia, although that’s probably no big deal – who cares about UN votes these days?

Europe’s decline exacerbates the trajectory the world is on, and we will end up with a meaner, smaller place. If Europe does not fix its trajectory, it would be to the detriment of not just itself – and therein is also a lesson particular to Canada.

In this new era, institutions and soft power – no longer underpinned by the hard power of the United States – no longer command the clout they used to. Now it is all about defence and industry. It’s about power and money, although it boils down to just money, for that is where power comes from.

Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief and Italian prime minister, painstakingly wrote 400 pages on this subject in 2024, calling for regulatory reforms, a unified capital market and €800-billion more per year in business investment, among 170 recommendations. “We have reached the point where, without action, we will have to either compromise our welfare, our environment or our freedom,” Mr. Draghi said. “This is an existential challenge.” But, as Politico noted, “Draghi’s report got about a day’s worth of coverage in the continent’s major media outlets and then was quickly forgotten.” European leaders must heed that report.

Beyond the major, structural changes, there’s a simple solution: Work harder. Continental productivity is still relatively high – how much economic value a worker produces with how much work. It’s just that Germans work 86 hours for every 100 hours Americans work, and the French work even less at 77 hours. In Britain, critics say, decades of social policy that saw work as inherently bad for mental health has resulted in a vicious circle of unemployment. Germany’s Mr. Merz lectured his country earlier this month, saying, “Work-life balance and a four-day week will not be enough to maintain our country’s current level of prosperity.”

In that respect Canada shares something with Europe: Through our trade and security dependency, we, too, have been propped up by the Americans, who now grow weary of that role. We must take in a lesson: Throughout modern history, dark trends originate on the continent and then ripple forth. In Europe, this country sees a crystal ball, threatening a future in which we, too, will be so irrelevant.

Some of Canada’s path will be easier than Europe’s. Canada has vast natural resources, and a handful of provinces and territories is easier to corral than 27 countries plus the others. But while Europe can simply work harder, Canada is already working hard – we work the same hours as Americans, but with our abysmal productivity we make only European wages. Something has got to change.

The greatest issue of all is that one of Canada’s strengths is also a weakness: We have but a handful of provinces and territories – a small internal market that has problems trading with even itself. Europe, the second-biggest economy, can stand alone and be the big cheese if it musters the will. But Canada, the world’s 10th-largest economy, never can. For Canada to prosper and stand tall, we need a stable world order and big players in it that respect that order. Canada needs a strong Europe.

So, it is all the more important that Europe gets its act together. It must accept the inevitability that life will get harder. The only choice is when. For all the 100-page reports and complex proposals from various policy shops, it really boils down to a marshmallow test: Will Europe make the hard decisions today so that it may have a better tomorrow, or will it coast on accumulated wealth and standing until it all runs out?"

 

Links - 12th September 2026 (Trans Mania)

Chris Milburn: Woke doublethink controls Canada | National Post - "the Standing Committee on Science and Research met to examine explicit affirmative action hiring practices for women. However, when Conservative MP Vincent Neil Ho asked a witness — Dr. Mona Nemer, a molecular biologist and Canada’s chief science advisor — to define “woman,” chaos erupted... Immediately, Liberal MP John Paul Danko interrupted on a point of order. “It is Pride Month,” Danko said, clearly agitated, “and Order 18 prohibits personal attacks, insults and offensive language.” Danko’s interjection kicked off several minutes of acrimonious debate as Ho pressed the question, and his colleague persisted in trying to shut him down.  For viewers, it must have felt like stepping into 2021–22, when “What is a woman?” became one of the defining flashpoints of the culture wars. While many countries have since begun retreating from the postmodern ideology that fuelled that moment, Canada remains stubbornly mired in it.  Postmodernism’s most damaging legacy has been its insistence that even our most basic and self-evident truths — including the biological reality of womanhood — are open to question. This wasn’t a problem when the ideology was confined to obscure fields like 19th-century French literature or 1920s feminist art. But like a malignant cancer, postmodernism spread quietly at first before metastasizing throughout our cultural and societal institutions. Along the way, it produced increasingly absurd ideas, such as “decolonizing light” and “queering math.” But to most people, the most visible consequence has been the efforts to “break the gender binary.” As science fiction author Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Activists can try to “break the gender binary,” but its existence is as fundamental a truth as the physics of light or the reality of mathematics. Our human existence as male or female is as definite and fundamental a distinction as black and white or up and down.  So why do governments and institutions in Canada continue to push forward this harmful, unscientific ideology through, for instance, the recent appointment of a gender activist as the head of the Canadian Pediatric Society? Wokeism’s advocates will, no doubt, claim that the United States’ recent retreat on the issue is fuelled by the supposed transphobia and bigotry of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. However, countries that would normally be considered “progressive” are also eliminating ideologically based policies and returning to a science-based approach. In the United Kingdom, the government closed the infamous Tavistock Clinic and greatly restricted hormonal and surgical manipulation of children in the wake of the release of the Cass Review, while Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have restricted the use of puberty blockers. Gender activists may believe that it is harmless to view sex and gender as fluid. But there are very real-world consequences. Just ask the biological women who, almost overnight, were forced to share women-only spaces such as changing rooms, prisons, or rape crisis centres with biological men. Or ask the women and girls who watched biological men take their places on sports teams and their spots atop the podium.  More than a half-century ago, George Orwell warned of the dangers of “doublethink” — the psychological process of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind and accepting both as true. He also wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”  Today, Canadians are forced to engage in doublethink on a range of contradictory ideas, from “I’m a proud Canadian … but there is no Canadian culture” to “We are living on stolen land … but I support open borders and mass immigration” to “Women need affirmative action in hiring … but asking for a definition of ‘woman’ is deeply offensive.”  The heated exchange between MPs Ho and Danko and Dr. Nemer highlights how “double-thinkers” can retreat to defensiveness and anger when their contradictions are challenged. For many Canadians, it was another moment adding to a growing sense of unease.  Doublethink is not just bad for individuals, it is unhealthy for our country as a whole. We need to be able to agree on basic realities, such as the sex binary. Canada needs to break wokeism’s grip on the nation. How can we begin to find answers if we can’t even ask questions?"
It's telling that asking someone what a woman is is considered a personal attacks, insult and/or offensive language.
Left wingers get very upset when you challenge them, because of cognitive dissonance. They are also not used to being challenged because they stay in their echo chambers and safe spaces

For The Win on X - "Sophie Cunningham must use caution in trans sports debate | Opinion https://t.co/jiGICWsCpH 📸 Trevor Ruszkowski, IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect"
J.K. Rowling on X - "Caution didn't win women the vote, or equal pay, or fair sport, or the right to single-sex spaces. Sophie Cunningham is standing up for women and girls everywhere and it's glorious. Fuck caution."
Left wingers only celebrate badly behaved women and/or "standing up to the establishment" when they push the left wing agenda

Women Speak Tasmania | Facebook - "Heather Herbert, a trans-identified male who worked as a web developer at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, publicly celebrated the death of Ann Widdecombe (former Conservative minister and Reform UK MEP and spokesperson and gender-critical woman). The university launched an investigation and Police Scotland later charged Herbert over the posts. Now some of the same activist circles that spent years insisting “misgendering is violence” and supporting court actions against women (see the Kirralie Smith case in Australia) are suddenly discovering that free speech is fundamental. Free speech for thee but not for me? It’s either a two-way street or it’s not."
How ignorant. Don't they know free speech is to push the left wing agenda?

Aja ♀️🇬🇧 on X - "Dear corporate PR teams: You were told backing women who defend women's rights would destroy your brand. Instead, Sophie Cunningham's Adidas release sold out in under 24hrs. Turns out the loudest people on Twitter aren't your customers. Women are. Maybe it's time you remembered that."

There’s nothing to celebrate about the extremism of trans Pride - "I went along to observe the Trans+ Pride event in London. As a lifelong feminist with more than 20 years’ experience campaigning against gender ideology I was well aware of the misogyny inherent to this movement – as well as the risks it poses to women and children.  I was with Michael Kerr, who spent seven years living as Caitlin before detransitioning last year, and is now seen as an enemy of the trans movement.  I have spoken out against gender ideology for more than 20 years, and was not expecting a warm welcome. What I hadn’t anticipated was how upset I would find it. The sight of hundreds of young women showing off their double mastectomy scars left me tearful.  The first thing I had witnessed on arrival were two women, both with facial hair, passing cream to each other, wincing as they massaged the scars where their breasts had been. Many of the young women had serious outbreaks of acne as a result presumably of going through a puberty induced by cross-sex hormones. Yet despite having been surgically and chemically altered, they remained identifiably female.  There was also a higher proportion of disabled participants than might be expected (as indicated by the use of wheelchairs and walking sticks) with an unmissable over-representation of relatively young women.  “This is my last summer with tits,” read one placard.  There was also aggression, threats and warnings of violence. It wasn’t long before I was spotted; an organiser used the sound system to announce that there were Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) in attendance. The chant, “There are many, many, many more of us than you”, went up, and my name was shouted out. Several of the most obscene placards referred to JK Rowling and included threats of violence. One man held a sign reading: “Vore all transphobes.” Vorarephilia is a sexual fetish involving eating another person. He had fake blood running down his face.  Another stated: “The EHRC can suck my d---.” But perhaps the worst was: “90 per cent of pigs in the UK are gassed to death, but TERFS still exist.”  Sarah Jane Baker was there chanting about prisoners’ rights, having been released from a male prison in 2019 after serving a lengthy sentence for kidnap, torture, and attempted murder. At a similar demo in 2023, he urged participants to “Punch a f---king TERF”. This time, the words “Free Gaza” were painted across his naked breasts. Bash Back was in attendance: “Stand-up, fight back!” as was the usual omni-cause, with some claiming the trans “genocide” to be comparable to what is happening in Gaza. Sex workers’ rights activists were there too. Chants and slogans proclaimed “trans joy”, and there was a near-constant refrain of “HRT, HRT, over the counter and for free!”  One young woman’s placard featured a QR code for her GoFundMe request for “top surgery”.  Amid the many “Protect the Dolls” signs, a lot of paraphilia was on display. Next to me was a furry, complete with tail, and sizeable groups of sado-masochists (many of them biological females) wore heavy leather and, in one instance, a gas mask. A man sporting a black veil pointed theatrically at me and Kerr before making a dramatic throat-cutting gesture.  I asked a group of gay men why Trans+ Pride was necessary in addition to LGBT Pride (which is held across the country throughout the summer). Their response was that trans women were being kept out of “their own” bathrooms and other facilities, and had no rights. When I mentioned women’s rights – did they understand that female-only spaces were created to defend against male violence? – they looked aghast. If one trans woman were to commit a sexual assault, they said, that would only be the same as the occasional woman who does so.  As I joined the rally at Trafalgar Square, the sign “Every time you punch a TERF, a trans kid gets more rights” was waved in front of my face.  But in that sea of misogyny and threats of violence, all I could do was grieve for all those mutilated female bodies, swept along on the most dangerous form of social contagion imaginable."
Damn violent far right oppressing a poor helpless minority!

Dr Helen Webberley (she/her) on X - "Remarkable how many people who have never spoken to a gender specialist, never read a clinical guideline, and never sat with a trans person through any part of this journey feel fully equipped to redesign trans healthcare from scratch. What I particularly enjoy is the certainty. Not a flicker of doubt! Staggering. Truly. 🙄"
Comment: "Remarkable how a doctor who's been suspended several times by the GMC and had her licence revoked in 2024, is still out there spruiking the 'healthcare' that got her suspended. 🙄"

Clown World ™ 🤡 on X - "Jane Michelle Arc, a trans identifying software engineer from San Francisco, “fled” the US last year after Trump won, seeking asylum in the Netherlands over fears of persecution.  Now placed in Ter Apel, the country’s largest asylum center, surrounded by migrants from war torn regions, the Red Cross has pulled its own aid workers out due to violence, and stabbings have become routine.  Arc’s own words: “I will be hurt or killed”  Turns out the danger wasn’t Trump. It was never Trump"

Taxpayer-funded transgender dolls to hit classrooms this fall - "“First-of-their-kind” transgender dolls — complete with removable genitalia — will debut in some Minnesota classrooms this fall to kids as young as 4 years old.  The paper dolls, with gender-neutral names like “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery” and “Parker,” have removable internal and external genitals, along with more than 100 interchangeable pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles — like a trans Mr./Mrs. Potato Head.   The goal is for kids to “learn about the different options that exist for who they can be,” according to a therapist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which spent over half a decade developing the controversial project funded by lefty Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz  The Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health research over those six years included paying $20 to $60 for “trans and gender diverse” children and their parents to play with the dolls and “talk about gender and bodies” in groups...   The trans dolls — which promise to “make gender fun” — will be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and mental health providers, according to a website of the “MyGender Dolls” company. It features an image of a boy doll wearing a dress and others in various states of sexual identity confusion...   The dolls began as a University of Minnesota research project, which was later spun into a commercial venture — “MyGender Dolls” — by two licensed psychologists who are professors at the medical school.  The website does not reveal the cost of the paper dolls.  The University of Minnesota’s Medical School has been receiving $15 million annual funding from the state via Walz — cash earmarked to “increase the medical school’s research capacity” and “ensure its national prominence.”...   Walz, who’s pushed pro-transgender policies on the Midwestern state, was bestowed the institute’s inaugural “Distinguished Sexual and Gender Health Champion Award” in 2023, a title created just for him.  The scandal-plagued governor was even pictured with a wide grin alongside Medical School Associate Professor Nic Rider — co-founder of MyGender Dolls, which is bringing the radical dolls to market... “They will find anybody who’s in trouble and use this as a tool to say, ‘this is why you’re unhappy.’ This is absolutely grooming,” slammed Dr. Quentin Van Meter, past president of the American College of Pediatricians.  “The younger kids — many of them still believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. And you’re then presenting them with paper dolls that kind of look fun, and you can change clothing, hair, genitals… It’s well beyond their ability to sort out fantasy from reality.”...   When reached by The Post, a university spokesperson claimed no public funds were used “to support MyGender Dolls’ commercialization efforts.” But when pressed on how much taxpayer money went to research and development of the dolls, and to the salaries of the professors involved in the project, the university refused to answer, telling The Post instead to file a freedom of information request."

Andy Ngo on X - "Trans activist Sarah Jane Baker, who served years in prison for attempted m—rder and kidnapping and torture, was one of the speakers at the London Trans Pride today in Trafalgar Square. One of the trans activists held a sign declaring “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS” and the photo of @jk_rowling and the Queen."

Uncaptured by Janet Murray | Facebook - "It’s not just the BBC that ignored the more unsavoury side of yesterday’s London Trans+ Pride.  Across much of the mainstream media, the event was presented as a colourful, peaceful demonstration.  Images that might have complicated that narrative - including extremist placards, masked protesters and calls for violence against “TERFs”- were largely absent. At the same time, both the Metro and the Standard published an interview with Caroline Litman, whose child Alice died by suicide in 2022. Her loss is heartbreaking, and her perspective deserves to be heard. But journalism also has a duty to distinguish personal testimony from evidence. Both articles repeat claims that gender-affirming care is “life-saving”, and warn that “more children are going to die” unless government policy changes, with little indication that these are highly contested claims. Where are the voices of detransitioners, or parents who say affirmation wasn’t the right approach for their child? Journalism is shaped by editorial choices.  Whether it’s the images selected from a protest or the voices chosen to explain it, what gets left out can be just as revealing as what gets included."

Meme - r/fourthwavewomen: "I have always felt this from the bottom of my heart."
"If movement declares that a man can define what it means to be a woman based on his feelings, but a woman cannot define being a woman based on her material reality, then it is a movement for the interests of men." -Tasia Aranguez

Andy Ngo on X - "Another trans person has been arrested over the m—rder of his parent.   36-year-old Safford James Wolfson, who identifies as female, was arrested on suspicion of the m—rder of Angela Caprioli. The 61-year-old woman was found dead at her home in Laguna Beach on July 20.   The suspect formerly worked at Spin magazine, according to his Linkedin. He attended the private liberal arts college Pitzer College.   Multiple trans people have been arrested over the m—rders of their parents in just the last couple of years. In extreme trans ideology, parricide — killing one's own mother or father — is often a recurring theme.   In my research of the Zizian trans death cult, I found that its members believed strongly in m—rdering "transphobic" parents. They believed that's how they would get justice"

Thread by @hecheateddotorg on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In a recent post, I highlighted the #1 "female" disc golfer in Iceland, a man named Marteinn Hörður Kristínarson, now going by "María Eldey Kristínardóttir."  Kristinarson was the national champion in Iceland in the "womens" pro open, formerly open, category from 2021 to 2025.  But did you know, the top "female" disc golfer in Iceland before Kristinarson came onto the scene was also a man?  Meet Hilmar Jón Pálsson, now known as "Kolbrún Mist Pálsdóttir". Pálsson began playing "women's" disc golf in 2016 and immediately won that year's "women's" national title.  He then proceeded to win nationals again in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, only coming in second in 2021 after Kristinarson arrived on the scene.  For the past 10 years, the best "female" disc golfers in Iceland have been men.  It should be noted that there are relatively few female athletes in Icelandic disc golf, and Pálsson and Kristinarson have occasionally been the only two in the category in smaller competitions, but these titles are still meaningful for the women who compete for them. Pálsson is an activist, and appears to have been one of the board members of the Frisbee Golf Association of Reykjavík that approved the decision to continue allowing men into the women's category (in other words, the decision to abolish a women's category).  In 2019, he was appointed to a committee with the National Olympic and Sports Association of Iceland (ÍSÍ), that worked to give boys access to girls' teams, co-authoring a guide in 2020 "Trans börn og íþróttir" (Trans Children and Sports)  Like so, so many other organizations in the 2010s, Icelandic disc golf and Icelandic youth sports in general were guilty of consulting a man pretending to be a woman on the abolishment of the women's category rather than actual women."
Matt Osborne on X - "All the best female disc golf players in Iceland are men, what a stunning and brave coincidence"
Weird. We keep being told this never happens

The Globe and Mail on X - "Storm co-owner fined, suspended five games by WNBA after confrontation with fans"
Jonathan Kay on X - "And by “confrontation,” you mean the woman lost her mind and started screaming at two girls because they believe that biology exists"

Meme - greg_meyer61: "Only about 0.5% of high school athletes are transgender. About 0.002% of collegiate athletes are transgender. The frequency of voter fraud is 0.000845% per the far right Heritage Foundation. Yet, a whopping 24% of households spend nearly their entire income just on necessities. Transgender people in sports and voter fraud are issues invented by Republicans to scare gullible voters so they will ignore what their economic policies are doing to everyday Americans."
Meanwhile left wingers fixate on school shootings which kill fewer people than cows and claim that measles deaths are only low because of vaccination so we can't afford to lose vigilance
Since ICE only shot 10 people in 6 months, will left wingers shut up about it or will they continue to pretend there's an issue to scare gullible voters so they will ignore what their immigration policies are doing to everyday Americans?

Meme - "White Woman *female reproductive system* Black Woman *female reproductive system* Latin Woman *female reproductive system* Asian Woman *female reproductive system* Indian Woman *female reproductive system*
Trans Woman *male reproductive system*"

Meme - "*Pirate boy*
KIDS KNOW WHO THEY ARE
Avast ye, mateys! If ye be looking for a life of excitement, adventure, and booty, then a career in piracy be the perfect choice for ye! Imagin seas, free from the constraints of landlubber societ whenever ye want, and do whatever ye want. Ye can merchant ships, or even maroon your enemies on d of the crew! Pips Ye'll form life watch yer mentionin could bec But be wa could be But that' start livi enjoy the fo treasure So what lool  ing th  ates would  na  e-knit bunch, and theyhave our fellow pirates, and ye'll always have someone to cussion of p is, spices, silks - lubber could eve hot all fun and gar by the navy, or e hat are ye waiting for? Arrr! Join the crew today and At wait, there's m free parrot; a l o the Pirate Quarterly Bec enture, and dom of sai  want, and  ga ev W  the  omeor to w out mentioning the booty. Gold Cl Ye could become richer than any eing a pirate be not all fun and o  to survi  be complete without en martoned on a desert island.  e! As a pirate, you'll also get to te to booty ig the high seas, free from the ever ant ships or ever 'e a  a  3200  all part o  y the ema vhat are you waiting for? Arrr! Become for a life hoice for val Imsnine the fraodom of"

Liberal sports secretary says IOCs new gender testing rules concerning | National Post - "Canada’s top federal sports official says he’s “concerned” about new eligibility rules limiting Olympic women’s events to biological females, but says the changes are unlikely to stop Canada from trying to host the Olympics in the future.  Secretary of State for Sport Adam van Koeverden told reporters in Calgary on Monday that he was worried about the International Olympic Committee’s plan to roll out mandatory genetic screening for all athletes competing in the female category...  Michele Krech, a professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University says that the IOC’s new gender eligibility rules are illegal under Canadian law.  “The Genetic Non-Discrimination Act is the most obvious place to look, but the rules could also run afoul of Canadian human rights legislation or the Charter,” said Krech. Krech said that hosting the Olympics would put Canada in a legal grey area.  “The Government of Canada already bears some responsibility for allowing these rules to be enforced in Canada. Hosting international competitions would only add to this responsibility, particularly if the hosting agreement does not align with Canadian laws and policies,” said Krech."
Peter Menzies on X - "Modern man explains that, in Canada, it’s important for men to explain to women in sport what it means to be a woman in sport"

Michael on X - "Another Twitch Streamer, Silvervale, a VTuber, was brought to tears after being doxxed/harassed for playing Hogwarts Legacy."
The "be kind" and "empathy" crowd are incredible hateful and vicious

La Belle Époque 🏺🍇 on X - "When I say that a Troon is a not a woman, I am grilled by libtards about biology, epistemology, the utter meaning of words themselves, etc. When a Troon says they are a woman, not an ounce of inspection is applied to them (or themselves)"

CPS pulls its hate crime guidance for schools after 14-year-old girl mounted legal challenge - "The Crown Prosecution Service has pulled its LGBT hate crime guidance issued to schools earlier this year after a 14-year-old girl mounted a legal challenge against it.  On January 21, the CPS issued its 'LGBT bullying and hate crime schools pack' which warned schools they could face legal action if they do not allow transgender pupils to use their preferred toilets or changing rooms.  But lawyers acting on behalf of the school girl, known only as Miss A, said their client found the guidance “very distressing” and was concerned that she could face prosecution for failing to abide by the rules set out in the guidance...   The letter accused the CPS of “misrepresenting the law” and acting “irrationally” by pulling together the guidance “without input from bodies with specialist knowledge of child welfare”, such as the Department for Education.   “It is extraordinary that no statutory organisation with expertise in safeguarding and the welfare of children has been consulted,” lawyers on behalf of Miss A wrote. "
From 2020. Left wingers only love and praise young activists when they push the left wing agenda