Canada, I mean.

Following this eye-widening farce, in which a mentally ill woman claimed to be crushed and psychologically violated by a haircut booking form, I bring you a vision of things to come:

And thus a pretext for legislative punishment and financial ruin.

Because you must defer to the claims of people whose perceptions are wildly unreliable, at least regarding themselves. And because you mustn’t notice the overlap of cross-dressing and unsavoury phenomena, as Mr Neufeld did. Lest it bruise the egos of the Officially Downtrodden, who must be spared any whisper of contradiction or exposure to statistics.

And so we arrive at compulsory question-begging. No other possibilities being permissible, it seems.

Oh, and gloating, vaguely threatening cross-dressing men:

Threaten me all you like. I still won’t pretend to believe in gender identities. https://t.co/xkPFJZTGWL

— Mia Hughes (@_CryMiaRiver) February 21, 2026

Mr Oger, quoted above, spends his time campaigning to financially cripple women’s rape shelters, on grounds that said shelters don’t also cater to cross-dressing men, i.e., men much like himself. A preoccupation that possibly tells us quite a bit about the kind of man he is.

Presumably, absurd and sweeping rulings of the kind seen above will inhibit questioning of the motives in play, and will deter people from acknowledging distinctions between autogynephiles, transvestites, opportunists, and people with sexual dysmorphia, and deter them from considering the possible causes of that dysmorphia, including, quite often, childhood sexual abuse.

Which is to say, it will stupefy. It will make dishonesty mandatory. Because you mustn’t be allowed to determine for yourself what it is you’re looking at.

It will also give enormous leverage to spiteful bedlamites.

Which doesn’t strike me as an entirely utopian scenario.

Lifted from the comments, on a theme we’ve touched on many times – namely high-trust societies and those who struggle with the concept:

This is not what “high trust” *means*. High trust is not something that you can personally manifest. It doesn’t care about your emotional reaction to events. You cannot instantiate a high trust society by being nicer and nicer and nicer in the face of fraud and theft and graft. https://t.co/OGSh2IDugO

— wanye (@xwanyex) January 27, 2026

A thread ensues. With relevant illustrations.

Readers may wish to ponder the implication that a high-trust society can somehow be maintained unilaterally, simply by not caring about the number of people who violate that trust, and who do so repeatedly, whether in ways that are audacious or just wearyingly routine but nonetheless degrading.

As if pretending not to mind the evaporation of civilised, reciprocal standards – and pretending not to be alienated by primitive behaviour – somehow means that said behaviour isn’t there and didn’t happen. And that it won’t happen tomorrow, or the day after. And with ever greater boldness.

As if a high-trust society means letting antisocial fuckers act with impunity.

Such are the wonders of the progressive mind. In which, noticing routine and shameless thievery, the screwing over of others, is apparently much worse than indulging in it.

There is, I think, an assumption, most obvious among progressives, that in a civilised society you should just stand around impotently and demoralised, carefully averting your eyes, so that the bedlamites and ferals can do whatever they like, over and over again. As if the civilised aspect of the society will never require maintenance and enforcement of a kind one might call vigorous. As if it all just happens automatically, for free.

The idea that you shouldn’t want a society in which people just stand around pretending not to notice a young man with Down syndrome being mugged, for instance, is, for some, quite troublesome, ideologically. And perhaps psychologically. There being a great deal staked upon the pretending.

But it seems to me that this learned impotence – this cowed affectation – is much more corrosive and demoralising than a world in which the degenerate and predatory – say, those who choose to mug the disabled in broad daylight – know that they run a risk of being given a good kicking.

A good kicking that they deserve. And upon which, the gods would smile.

Some elaboration on an item from Friday’s Ephemera:

Liberals do this very weird thing where some deranged, violent criminal sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, but the wallet only has $20 in it, so from then on they’ll minimize the crime by describing it as, “stealing only $20.”

This is so fundamentally dishonest… https://t.co/fDj2uCk8m1

— wanye (@xwanyex) November 23, 2025

Readers will note the sly conceit that what matters, all that matters, is the sum being stolen this time, not the whole at knifepoint or gunpoint business – as if this lively means of cash extraction were some trivial detail, beneath acknowledgment. A thing with no informational content, no clues as to the character of the perpetrator, their fitness for a civilised world.

Those pointing to the smallness of the sum as if it were a significant mitigating factor don’t seem troubled by the implication that someone who will violate others, and threaten them with death, for a mere $20 is someone who will use very small incentives to behave in monstrous ways. Likewise, the implication that robbing people with only $20 to surrender is a matter of no import.

Indeed, one might note the underlying belief that the outrage and horror of being robbed at knifepoint or gunpoint – the degree of violation and moral injury, the amount of wrongness – depends only on the amount of cash you happened to have on you at the time.

Which, again, rather screws over people who don’t have a lot of money.

The chappie doing the pointing in this case is Brian Rosenwald, a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, a teacher of history and political science, a shaper of young minds. Mr Rosenwald objects to a three-strikes law whereby “you had people stealing $10 items and getting life sentences,” which he describes as a “disaster,” a series of “foolish, unjust outcomes.”

To which commenter John D replies,

There is, shall we say, some sleight-of-hand. And a now familiar flattening of values, a signature of progressive posturing. And so, as noted in the replies on X, histories of armed robbery, carjacking, assault and battery, serial sucker-punching and other vigorous activities, all horrific for the victims, are somehow reduced to “stealing $20.”

So hey, no biggie.

As noted here many, many times, progressives often have a wildly inaccurate conception of the criminal demographic and of the psychology and motives in play, as expressed by the criminals themselves. A conception so inaccurate, one might call it perverse.

Readers with a taste for corrective statistics regarding recidivism and motives will find much to widen the eyes here. Along with some striking illustrations of how a very large fraction of crime could be prevented by dealing decisively with a surprisingly small number of persistent offenders.

To concentrate, as Mr Rosenwald does, on the assumed triviality of the third strike, rather than the seriousness of the first two and the pattern of behaviour being vividly revealed, is quite the manoeuvre. As if the refusal to be law-abiding after repeated warnings of incarceration – and what might be deduced from that – couldn’t possibly be useful information.

It occurs to me that someone who, having been warned in the strongest terms that any further law-breaking will have severe consequences – and who nonetheless continues violating others, whether for trivial gains or for purposes of recreation – is someone unlikely ever to become a functional and trustworthy citizen, someone to be given, once again, benefit of the doubt.

On this and much else, progressives aren’t just wrong in some detail, some particular, some point misunderstood. The assumptions so often in play, the relentless contrivance, the defining mindset, are fundamentally, directionally wrong. There’s an air of perverse motivation.

Such that the law-abiding, including the many victims of habitual and violent predation, are expected to endorse an insane leniency, a grotesque forgiveness, on grounds that their own safety and expectations of justice should be rescinded in favour of giving an irredeemable sociopath another 56 chances to learn how to behave.

And so, we arrive at the implication that women, for instance, should resign themselves to a low-trust urban dystopia, and learn to accept the growing risk of being menaced and assaulted, or worse, on public transport, so that habitually criminal brutes can be given more chances to decide not to be habitually criminal brutes.

Because accommodating brutes, indulging them with more chances, is somehow better, fairer, more moral.

These are people whose every action screams “I am someone who cannot be trusted in a civilised society. I am dangerous and always will be. I will hurt people, for fun, because it amuses me, over and over again, until I am forcibly stopped.” And our analyst and scholar, our esteemed academic, says, ‘Oh, nonsense. Nothing to worry about. We can fix them.’

While having no idea how.

And when faced with an avalanche of pushback and factual correction, Mr Rosenwald, our statusful scholar and thinker of deep thoughts, simply waves his hands dismissively and says, “I could care less – I’m a historian. The research on three-strike laws is unambiguous. Who cares what people on here think?”

Before ascending to the heavens, like some higher being.

Pst314 adds,

And not just academia.

I’ve mentioned before an episode of the long-running comedy-quiz show QI, in which Stephen Fry and his celebrity panellists sneered at the three-strikes policy with much tutting and condescension.

Viewers were given the impression that otherwise harmless and adorable people were being incarcerated simply for stealing “nine videotapes” or a few boxes of cookies. The assorted luvvies seemed oddly incurious about the rather more serious crimes that must have occurred previously. Nor did they seem interested in having those who’d been incarcerated roaming free in their own neighbourhoods, carjacking their neighbours, or breaking into their homes.

None of the participants seemed keen to find themselves or their loved ones being robbed at knifepoint, or gunpoint, even for a modest sum.

But everyone congratulated themselves on being so lofty and enlightened. Not like those redneck Americans and their silly, punitive ideas. Expectations of punishment and public safety being so terribly déclassé.

A recurring theme of the QI series is to show how common assumptions are sometimes wrong or misleading. And so there was a certain unintended irony in seeing the left-of-centre politics of the host and panellists being affirmed by an omission of facts. An omission that could not plausibly have been an accident.

The same sleight-of-hand as practised by our indignant academic. In a show about the wrongness of things that are widely assumed.

Or, Assume The Position.

A point made in the comments and possibly worth repeating:

From what I’ve seen over the years, the word ally is typically used, by the people who rush to use it, to mean something like advocate, or mouthpiece, or supplicant, or puppet. There’s no discernible interest in, or expectation of, reciprocation; no obvious shared goal or mutual benefit. Indeed, the role, once assumed, appears to entail saying dumb and vividly untrue things, thereby becoming unreliable and absurd.

Say, by insisting that odd, cross-dressing men are somehow, magically, women. Or that a reluctance to mouth fabulist pronouns, to affirm a person’s imaginary themness, is some life-threatening moral oversight.

And then there are the not infrequent detours into outright struggle sessions – as seen, for instance, here, where a disobedient woman finds herself being scolded by a man in an unconvincing wig for not doing the “work” expected of an ally – essentially cowed deference and dishonesty on demand.

Specifically,

This, then, is a world in which allyship – “listening to the community” – requires prostration, a suspension of cognitive faculties, and a surrendering of basic probity.

In the case above, regarding race, the duty of the ally would presumably be to announce, as Mr Zellie does, that preferring the civilised to the thuggish is “a white supremacist construct,” to regurgitate his assertions about the character and motives of “straight white men,” to demand the “defunding” of the police, as Mr Zellie does, and jumping through whatever rhetorical hoops, and taking whatever “action,” Mr Zellie deems appropriate or amusing.

The only benefit I can see for those willing to debase themselves in this way would be the hope that Mr Zellie won’t assert or imply that you’re a racist, or that you’re insufficiently “anti-racist.” And therefore racist.

Not, it has to be said, the most tempting offer.

As someone notes in reply to the post quoted above,

Not an unfair summary.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

The great political divide – Guardian-style:

Yes, an “always Labour” politics teacher clashes with a GP who votes “Labour every general election.” No crockery was thrown, you’ll be astounded to hear. To spare you the unbearable suspense, both dislike Mr Trump. That’s pretty much it. Both ordered cocktails and had “a really positive experience” chatting to the other. Or, in effect, to themselves.

Really getting to the bottom of things.

Previously in the world of vastly different people with vastly different views:

The Guardian series Dining Across The Divide, in which supposedly contrasting characters thrash out their differences, should any materialise at some point, is credited to Zoe Williams, whose mouthings have proved so inadvertently entertaining to regulars of this parish.