Janet Bufton 🍁🌻

@janetbufton.ca

3657 Followers 473 Following

Canadian mum, 3D liberal in Babylon Writing collected at janetbufton.ca Co-founder, theILS.ca. Contributing fellow @Liberalism.org diversity dynamism democracy Detroit Lions

A website banner reads:

Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism
Liberalism for the 21st Century

The banner is for a conference happening next week in DC.

Shortly after Jordan’s rise to notoriety back in 2016, I emailed him to express my upset with his dishonesty and lack of intellectual and social integrity. He called in a conciliatory voice the next morning. I was reiterating my disappointment and upset when he interrupted me, saying more or less the following:
“You don’t understand. I am willing to lose everything, my home, my job etc., because I believe in this.” And then he said, with the intensity he is now famous for, “Bernie. Tammy had a dream, and sometimes her dreams are prophetic. She dreamed that it was five minutes to midnight.”
That was our last conversation. He was playing out the ideas that appeared in his first book. The social order is coming apart. We are on the edge of chaos. He is the prophet, and he would be the martyr. Jordan would be our saviour. I think he believes that.

Poll results:
75% Woke / 25% Chud
56% Techbro / 44% Neo-Luddite
73% Hopepilled / 27% Doomer
95% Davos / 5% Dubai

YOUR CLOSEST MATCH:
Mark Carney
[photo of Mark Carney]
Prime Minister of Canada (2025-present)

Bovy's positive thesis can be stated rather briefly: female heterosexuality is a lot like male heterosexuality is thought to be: it's about fucking the opposite sex (pp. 138, 157, 186, 231). Women are not passive receivers in the game of straights (130). They are not eternally sexually fluid (141). They are not more concerned with wanting to be wanted than with wanting (133). They are not trading the undesired (sex) for the desired (the ring, stability, protection) (125). They are, in a phrase, things in and for themselves, and one of the things they want for themselves is to fuck men.

A Conservative campaign poster implies the sale of Canada into slavery to the United States. It's thought to be from 1891. Canada is represented by a bound white woman, the seller is a barefoot dark skinned person in a turban with a hunchback.

I take seriously the Lockean roots of the Declaration (and of _Common Sense_ as well). These have been repeatedly but unpersuasively denied, giving rise to a long debate that takes the form of the question: is the document Lockean and therefore liberal? Or is it Harringtonian or Ciceronian or Machiavellian and therefore civic republican?[3] I don’t propose to rehearse that debate here. Rather, I suggest that the Declaration was Lockean, _and therefore not liberal_, in ways that continue to impede the American struggle for a free society.

Two brown paper bags of coffee from Little Victories Coffee Roasters.
On the left is Bright Eyed Espresso. Notes are caramel, hazelnut, citrus, and the graphic is of a leaping fox.
On the right is Colombia - Sandra Gomez. Notes are cranberry, mango, brown sugar, and the graphic is of two floating sea otters from above.

An American toad with especially vivid markings—very light base with tan and dark reddish brown bumps—on a piece of wood, behind some moss but in front of some ferns.

A bunch of stinging nettles in my hand—narrow opposite leaves with toothed edges.

Is there a fear that proprietors, as sole holders of political powers, may make these weigh heavily on the deprived class? The nature of property is enough to dispel this fear. Since the birth of commerce, proprietors have no longer formed a distinct class, separated from the rest of men by lasting prerogatives. The membership of this class renews itself constantly. Some people leave, others enter it. If property were immobile and always stayed in the same hands, it would be a most improper institution. It would split the human race in two. One part would be everything, the other nothing. Such is not the essence of property, however. In defiance of those who possess it, it tends to a continual changing of hands. The eventuality to be studiously avoided, as I will say presently, is anything which could stop this salutary changing of hands.

A large bed of white tulips with streaks of red bordered by yellow coming up the centre of the petals.

A sandwich sits on a plate, overfilled because I am constitutionally incapable of being delicate with a white and green filling. Also on the plate are some pickled peppers and turnips.

Deep brown glazed chicken is sliced and sitting on top of white rice. It's served with stir fried celtuce and steamed bok choy.

Mean Girls (and the 18th century philosopher and political economist Adam Smith) in a car say "Get in, losers, we're reading the Digression on Silver."

Conservatives once understood that societies are complex systems and that the reason to try to preserve certain norms and traditions was to avoid needless chaos and disruption as we change and progress. We cannot predict the full consequences of what we do and so we should choose carefully and deliberately as we navigate the world. We should be modest in our ambitions, aware of our own fallibility and mindful of the way things can go wrong.

A woven wood basket sits on the arm of a bench. The branches alternate in threes between a light yellow-pink willow and purple speckled buckthorn branches. Trimmed ends are a bit messy because yes I know I need to sharpen my tools but it's not too bad.

A black masked blue lovebird in a coffee tree with orange and red balloons behind him.

Early spring Ottawa greenbelt. Snowy landscape around a small creek. There is running water again and some of last year's vegetation has been exposed by the intermittent thawing. Deciduous trees are bare but there are some conifers (mostly white pine and spruce) along the crest of the hill on the other side of the creek.

Today will be warmer.

Highlighted text reads: [Adam] Smith isn’t rejecting systematic reform; the book is nothing if not an excavation of the sometimes obvious, often obscure sources of immiseration that are within our power to change. Rather, as Jacob Levy has argued, Smith is stressing the need for reform to work with, and not against, human attachments, and cautioning against promises to sweep aside the social order. Smith would have us seek fewer Cromwells and more Wilberforces.

Here we arrive at the distinctively liberal element in critical liberalism: an orientation toward iterative reform—what Shklar called “damage control”—that is itself subject to critique. Where the practices of any institutions—markets, states, civic associations, trade unions, even organized religions—promote emancipation as recognized by the emancipated, we can encourage and even celebrate their work. Where their practices harm or protect harm, they should be opposed.

Critical liberals thus hold institutional commitments lightly, conditionally. They have no truck with utopian schemes. They recognize institutions as the work of human hands, with all the good and evil that those hands do. They hold every claim to power and every call for reform to the same emancipatory scrutiny. A Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat gets ruled out by its violent means and ends; the institutions of liberal democracy—competitive markets, constitutional government, popular control—justify themselves by working in the opposite direction. Yet even their authority remains provisional. The provisionality is the point.

The Statue of Liberty in front of a light blue sky with clouds.

I want to close by addressing Smith's claim of disastrous open borders and unprecedented strain on services.

I'm a big fan of the Alberta government's dashboard that gives basic information on a bunch of questions. Here's the page for Alberta's population, going back 35 years and ending last October.

As the premier says, the province's population grew quickly in the last five years, from 4.41 million in October 2020 to 5.04 million in October 2025. ...

(Screenshot also shows a chart with relatively steady growth, with a flattening and then moderate uptick near the end)

Deep green leaves coming down and delicate white flowers coming up from a branch inside a sunny window. Outside there are bare trees and snow. This is a coffee tree's flowers in Ottawa in February. The smell is as lovely as citrus flowers.

The most important thing about Matt Goodwin is how boring he is.

This is not how he is usually covered. He has had an unusual career path, from an academic who studied the populist right to a member of the populist right who sneers at academics. So naturally we tend to cover him with headlines like Gone Native or Matt Goodwin’s Fall Into the Abyss. I myself wrote that he “became his own doctoral thesis”.

It’s a compelling narrative. And because it’s a compelling narrative, it serves to obscure the much more central fact about Goodwin, which is that he is very boring.

Captain Holt claps and yells, "HOT DAMN!" in celebration.

Without that shared target, Keeperman added, conservatives are increasingly turning on each other. “In the absence of like people on the left, you create these sorts of factional arguments in their place, and you go after people who are otherwise on your own side,” he said. “People want to mix it up and have some arguments and debate, and if not the left, it’s just the guy standing next to you.” That’s how you end up with, say, a vicious, multi-day feud between two conservative podcasters who otherwise agree on the majority of issues.

Tutu the black masked blue lovebird looks down from perching on a lamp shade. On the bright (top of the image) side is his fluffy, light blue butt. He is very cheeky, and not only because of the butt.

Greene has promoted Islamophobic, antisemitic, and white supremacist views including the white genocide conspiracy theory,[8][9] as well as QAnon, and Pizzagate.[10][11] She has amplified conspiracy theories[12][13] that allege government involvement in mass shootings in the United States, implicate the Clinton family in murder, and suggest the attacks of 9/11 were a hoax.[14][15][16] Before running for Congress, Greene supported calls to execute prominent Democratic Party politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.[17] As a congresswoman, she equated the Democratic Party with Nazis, and compared COVID-19 safety measures to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust,[18][19][20] later apologizing for this comparison.[21] During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Greene promoted Russian propaganda and praised its president Vladimir Putin.[22] Greene identifies as a Christian nationalist.[23]

Despite their alliance against the live-and-let-live philosophy of liberalism, the groups making up the far right are often aware that they are also potential enemies. To take an obvious example, ultra-nationalist identities clash, since the followers of each assume that their nation is better than the others and should dominate them. If their common enemy of liberal tolerance were to be dispatched, so would their reasons for cooperation. In turn, these groups would be primed to fall on one another in violent conflict over control of territory.

Descending into violence is not, from the perspective of many far-right groups, such a bad thing—their worldviews share a common belief in the superiority of the warrior ethic to “bourgeois” life in tolerant and cooperative civil societies. Violent conflict, in their view, makes for manly, robust, strong, and powerful societies by revealing through struggle the power hierarchies that should govern our social existence.

Yakko is launching Wakko on a rocket. This is a McDonald's Happy Meal toy from 1994.

Nondistinct shapes completely encased in rainbow sprinkles on a paper plate.

Delving into your ancestry will not reveal that you spring from a natural aristocracy. It will show that we have all been brothers, like it or not. We’re all more closely related than we know, and our family has been murdering its own.

I’d think a realization like that should send every nationalist running for the shelter of cosmopolitan liberalism. Here we will treat you as a man and a brother, no matter who you are, and nowhere else can promise that. Let’s build a polity that’s faithful to the memory of all of our ancestors.

I feel fucking mental because I’ve written about it multiple times on here and multiple times elsewhere but it’s not done anything, and yet I feel like I have to keep saying it because I’m watching those people fall further and further down the rabbit hole and I have no idea what else to do. I’m watching the fascists win not by being especially cunning or clever but by instead standing around and holding a big sign that says “jump in this hole if you’re an easy mark!” and somehow guiding around two thirds of our political elite directly into the big hole.

A graphic of muscle strains. Grade 1 shows a red area on the muscle. Grade 2 shows a partial tear, with visible separation on either side of the tear. For the grade 3 tear, the muscle is completely torn, with the two halves separated.

We are in a struggle against populism. That is the story of our age. It desires a closed society: closed to people, and goods, and ideas. It would impoverish us, then use the hatred and anger which results to target immigrants in ever more grievous ways.

The open society has the ability to improve people’s lives in a way populism never will. But to do so, it must commit to its principles: rationality, transparency, sober policy-making and national responsibility. We need a tax policy which is geared to growth, an economic strategy which desires growth, and a political agenda which is prepared to face down the nativist complaints which get in the way of growth. That is how we will improve people’s lives. That is how we can kill populism.

The Budget may have had some welcome policies, but on the core issue of our time it was an act of criminal negligence.

A giant puppet of Domer, the OG mascot of the Sky Dome. He's dark green with a blue and yellow shell and he's a bit of a goober tbh.

Wherever you go, his eyes follow you.

A blue masked lovebird looks approvingly on efforts to free trade from his perch on a basket under a mirror.

White beans in a skillet with what might approach cassoulet with meat and more time but is perfectly sufficient for Their Majesty Thing 2.

A bluish pot with a mixture of onions and cranberries and a wooden spoon sticking out. Some sugar and warm spices coat the berries and onions.

Mean Girls waiting in a car with Adam Smith for you to hop in and try to figure out how rich or poor people were over long stretches into the past by using grain prices while workers earned near subsistence wages.

A blue masked lovebird sits on top of a bunch of bananas hanging from a banana stand. He is in front of a tile backsplash that kind of matches his body and the white trim that kind of matches his breast but his head is black and in front of the white trim so he's really not fooling anyone. He's a naughty bird not a master of disguise.

Two pages from Mo Willems' book Knuffle Bunny

On the left page, a man stoops over a toddler in overalls. The caption says, "'Now, please don't get fussy,' said her daddy.
"Well, she had no choice..."

On fhe right page are two frames. In the left one, a man is holding the hand of a wailing toddler dragging her feet with a huge "WAAAA!" speech bubble. The caption says, "Trixie bawled."
In the right frame, the man looks worried as he conforts himself to hold a toddler flopping over backwards above the sidewalk. The caption says, "She went boneless."

Standards for School Library Materials
2. A school authority is required to implement the following Standards for the selection,
availability, and access of school library materials:

a. The school authority must not select for inclusion in a school library, or make available
to any children or students in a school library, materials containing explicit sexual
content.

d· 'explicit sexual content" means content containing a detailed and clear depiction of a
sexual act. This includes, but is not limited to, a detailed and clear depiction of

i. masturbation including touching of a person's own genitals or anus with a
finger, artificial sexual organ or other substitute for a sexual organ,
iii. penetration of the penis into the vagina or anus,
iii. contact of a sexual nature between the genitalia, mouth, hand, finger or other
body part with the clothed or unclothed genitalia, pubic area, buttocks, anus, or
if the person is female, the breast, of another person,
iv. ejaculation onto another person, or
v. the use of artificial sexual organs or substitutes for sexual organs on the clothed
or unclothed genitalia, pubic area, buttocks, anus, or if the person is female, the
breast, of another person,

but does not include non-sexual content, non-explicit sexual content or any depiction of
any nature contained in religious texts or scriptures;

And the simplest, one-line refutation of it is to look at the men who were arrested for offences in the various race riots that followed events at Southport last year. Of those men, a staggering 40% had been reported to the police for domestic violence. There is, in other words, probably no single group of people – not in Britain or anywhere else – who are more prone to violence against women than the people now standing outside the hotels denouncing refugees.

This, rather than shouting Nazi, is the argument most likely to undermine the anti-refugee protests. We need to be using it in our leaflets, when we talk to people, and on our protests.

Population panic – worries about “depopulation” linked to low birth rates – has become pervasive, with dire predictions in both the short and long term. Yet demographers like us – experts who explicitly study population size, composition, and structure – are generally not highly concerned. Why is this? It’s because we understand the strengths and limitations of population projections. Projections can accurately describe how populations will change if we know future birth, death, and migration rates. But demographers are well aware that they don’t have a crystal ball – we can’t fully anticipate economic shifts, political changes, global events, or how future generations will respond to their changing worlds. That’s why the farther we project from the present, the less accurate those projections are likely to be.

"If I find men who worship trees, not because they are symbols of fertility or because they are divine, with a mysterious life and powers of their
own, or because this grove is sacred to Athena – but only because they are made of wood; and if when I ask them why they worship wood they say ‘Because it is wood’ and give no other answer; then I do not know what they mean. If they are human, they are not beings with whom I can communicate..."

From Isaiah Berlin's The Pursuit of the Ideal.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On asks what we still consider strange in 2025.

He begins telling me about how America’s biggest problem is “decades of mass immigration”. I point out that the US is, you know, a nation of immigrants, to which he responds: “It was originally founded by people of north-west European ancestry.” I note there were people there before them. “There were native Americans, and they lost out,” he replies. “Sucks for them.” This is an odd comment from the spokesperson of a party claiming one of its key beliefs to be that “indigenous people have an inseparable bond with their homeland and are its natural stewards” to make.

in the United States and Europe alike, voters repeatedly said they wanted a slowdown in immigration. A rule of thumb is that whenever the foreign-born share of a population surges to somewhere around 15 percent, there is discontent. In the United States, the foreign-born share has tripled since 1970 and is now around 15 percent. The top estimate, 15.8 percent, would constitute the highest level of immigrants in America since at least 1850.

“Whatever Trump says is irrelevant, because that’s not what he’s going to end up doing. Do we like it? No. It’s a terrible way to do business. Do we have to accept it because that’s all there is? Yes,” said David Kotok, a strategic adviser at Cumberland Advisors.

Some market strategists expect the bull market to endure. Trade policy should become less volatile later this year, as the administration cinches deals with U.S. trading partners, Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi, global head of equities for UBS financial services, told clients recently.

Deleted skeet by me: But for all his flaws, Brennan is not pro-Trump, unless I missed something. Maybe not everybody's favourite ally at the end of the day, but he's still a liberal and he didn't end up where Caplan did.

At its best, an anti-state attitude is an insufficient guide for continuing the struggle for liberty and liberalism in the 21st century. At worst, it is a strategy that can (and has been) consciously manipulated to expand the scope of unaccountable private power, leaving individuals even less free than before. This is especially relevant given that state and corporate power have become enmeshed and increasingly complement—rather than check—each other, complicating the clean distinction between state and market on which the anti-state view rests.

On Wednesday the State Department issued a cable to embassies and consulates advising them to halt student visa interviews "in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting." And on Friday, the department announced it would be starting this program with Harvard. *Even the lack of a public-facing social media presence would be used by the government as evidence against student applicants*, as it "may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant's credibility."

(emphasis mine)

"Bystanders have no standing in this struggle. Neither side is listening to anything we say. It is their reality, not ours. The best we can do is send money to the agencies--Red Cross and Red Crescent-- to provide that girl and her family with food, clothing and water."

"I developed an appreciation for the sinking feeling I got when I suddenly realised I'd been limited in my thinking—an appreciation bolstered by the vigorous approach my classmates and professors brought to debates."

The Policy Horizons Canada people assign only the vaguest guesses about the probabilities of each of these scenarios, for the simple reason that they’re guesses. But one plausible future that the little shop thought deserved its own report was the possibility of “A Crisis of Certainty.” Given the Conservative leader’s little display of theatre in Woodbridge, this is worth quoting at some length.

“Many more people may struggle to tell real from fake,” the report says. This opens public debates up to “new vulnerabilities to attacks from malicious actors.” Indeed, “Authoritarian or anti-government movements may grow when trust is low.”

To me, this is no more certain a future than the global war or the homemade bioweapons. All that’s needed to avoid it is an outbreak of good faith and reasonably minimal standards in our democratic discourse. One thing we could hope, for instance, is that a 45-year-old man aspiring to high elected office would resist the urge to engage in the cheapest flim-flam to distract from the fact that his numbers don’t add up.