Why the left can’t be funny. By Aimee Terese.
The strongest red flag was when leftists lost the ability to be funny.
Comedy relies on subverting expectations to expose truth. Leftism subverts the truth to peddle lies. That’s why they can’t be funny, they can’t reveal the truth, their entire politics depends on concealing it.
Which is why people look for mates with a good sense of humor.
Feminists and communists were first:
Goodbye funny man
Boomers knew only improvement; Zoomers experience only decline. By John Carter.
Boomer’s experience [born 1946 – 1958, not 1964]:
I don’t want to minimize the hardships that boomers endured when they were young. Boomers worked hard, and they didn’t enjoy the same conveniences that we enjoy now. They fought in the Vietnam War (well, about 3% of them), they spent most of their lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, they suffered through the oil shock and stagflation in the 70s, they were punished by double-digit interest rates in the early 80s, and they spent their working lives trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the skyrocketing inflation that was unleashed when Bretton-Woods fell apart and the last vestigial support of the gold standard was kicked out from under the brrrring money printer.
But, despite all of that drama, the one thing boomers could generally rely upon was that — so long as thermonuclear annihilation was averted — things would generally get better.
- Technology would advance.
- Working conditions would get safer.
- The special effects in movies would become more convincing.
- Houses would get larger.
- Cars would get nicer.
- Air conditioning would get quieter.
- The environment would get cleaner.
- Society would become more just.
- The world would become freer and safer for democracy.
- And so on and so forth.
Baby boomers have enjoyed a charmed life such as no other generation has known: free of major wars, full of technical wonders, in which whatever difficulties you might endure now, you could generally count on the future being a better place. For the boomer, deferred gratification always had a payoff.
The Zoomer experience [born 1997 – 2012]:
For the zoomer — and the millennial [1965 – 1980], and generation X [1981 – 1996] — this has simply not been the case. After 9/11 a police state panopticon settled over society. The 2008 real estate crash pulled the rug out from under the millennials, after which real-estate got ZIRPed to the Moon. Mass immigration pumped real estate demand further, while undercutting wages and rendering public spaces steadily more alienating, unpleasant, and dangerous. Black Lives Matter immolated quaint notions of racial harmony. DEI threw young white men, their careers, their futures, and their unborn children to the wolves. COVID stole two years from young people’s lives so that old people could feel safe from the coof. Now, AI^2 (Artificial Intelligence + Actual Indians) means that the only thing the young expect in their future is gig work in the sex trade industry (until robots take that, too).
If you’re a young person, the only thing you’ve ever known is decline.
- You’ve seen society get digested by the attention economy, human interactions digitized into shares, views, and likes.
- You’ve seen the war of Discourse poison relations between the sexes to a degree never known before in history.
- You’ve seen dating apps replace romance with swipes and monogamy with Tindergamy.
- You’ve seen third spaces disappear.
- You’ve seen culture stagnate.
- You’ve seen music, movies, television shows, video games, and books be converted into hamfisted, poorly written, badly composed, terribly edited agitslop.
- You’ve seen the Internet get enshittified by adware, malware, spyware, engagement bait, and the subscription-model SaaS scam economy.
- You’ve seen food get more expensive, even as the quality of the ingredients declines, and the portion sizes decrease.
- You’ve seen a third of your income get stolen by inflation in a few year’s time.
- You’ve seen the basic elements of a human life – a house, a spouse, children – recede before you like a mirage in the desert.
I’d like to believe that this is all temporary, that things can be turned around, but if you tell me this hope is nothing more than cope it is very difficult for me to argue otherwise. Maybe things will finally improve and maybe they won’t; the point is that, for the young who have only ever known civilizational rot, it is entirely rational for them to lay down and let it rot.
Generation X and the millennials both tried to do everything right, according to what the boomers told them was the path forward: save money, study hard, get a ‘job’. At every stage we got rugpulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that.
Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen-X and the millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that.
That is why zoomers don’t care about ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ or ‘education’ or ‘savings’. They know there’s no such thing as institutional loyalty, that they’ll be cut loose the moment their job can be automated or outsourced to cheap Indian labour, and so why would they be loyal to their employers? Why would they do any more than the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting fired? Especially under the identitarian spoils system of DEI that makes a point of rewarding someone else for your hard work. …
This generational demoralization is a great tragedy. Zoomers have been spiritually sabotaged, and many of them will never recover. Once social trust is broken it is incredibly hard to rebuild.
The big picture — yes, the way money is manufactured corrupted it aall:
This is not entirely the boomers’ fault. They’ve been the primary beneficiaries of the vampire economy, and they are by far its strongest defenders, but they weren’t the ones who set the system up. That would be the ‘greatest generation’, who were the ones that built out the welfare state, passed the Civil Rights Act, dismantled long-standing protections against third-world immigration, and first started letting the money printer rip. Boomers have profited from a kind of generational Cantillon effect: they were born close to the time when inflation first began in earnest, meaning that the money they were lavished with would always be worth more than whatever spare change their children could scrape together. …
The only way to fix this is for things to start improving for young people again, and not in the sense of getting cheaper smartphones or whatever. We are talking about very basic, mammalian necessities: food, shelter, mating. …
Solution?
I don’t know how to solve this. Unless there’s a world-historical economic boom thanks to AI — which there’s no sign of yet, and furthermore it would need to be one whose benefits are not concentrated in the hands of a small number of oligarchs — there’s probably no way to solve it without pain. The only question is how that pain will be distributed. …
If we were sane we’d dismantle the social security system immediately, and start putting in place systems to transfer opportunity, wealth, and power to native-born child-bearing demographics immediately. This is improbable.
The most likely outcome is that, over the next decade or two, the boomers will spend down the last of the West’s national wealth on heroic end-of-life health care, and leave behind a broken mess of insolvency, shattered institutions, lost cultural knowledge, and tribal warfare. None of which will be a problem for the boomers. Après moi, le déluge.
It will be up to everyone else to piece together something resembling a functioning society amidst the ashes and ruins. By that point, millennials will be in their 50s and 60s; most of their lives will be behind them. Zoomers will be hitting middle age. Perhaps you can see why everyone under 50 is so dejected, and prefers treating themselves with the small pleasures they can still afford rather than dwelling upon the long decline that awaits?
Great. If the communists or Islamists don’t succeed in making all their serfs again.
Generation Jones, quietly in-between. By Supersonic Redhead.
There’s a generation a lot of people forget exists. We were born at the tail end of the Boomers, but we are not culturally the same as people born in the 40s and early 50s. We are Generation Jones [see Why People Born 1955–1964 Aren’t Baby Boomers, but Generation Jones].
And honestly, it explains a lot.
We grew up in a world that still felt fundamentally analog, but we were young enough to be dragged headfirst into the digital revolution. We are the bridge generation between rotary phones and smartphones, between slide rules and AI, between Walter Cronkite and algorithm driven media.
We remember when there were only a few television channels and the entire country watched the same thing at the same time. We also adapted to the internet, email, forums, social media, streaming and now artificial intelligence. We lived before and after the technological singularity hit everyday life.
That is not a small thing.
People born in the 40s came of age in a post World War II America that was still industrial, deeply hierarchical and institutionally stable. Their formative years were shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, the civil rights era and a society where information moved slowly.
Generation Jones came later. We inherited the aftermath of all of that.
We were the kids who watched Watergate destroy blind trust in government. We watched manufacturing begin to collapse. We saw divorce rates explode. We were the first truly latchkey generation in massive numbers. We learned independence early because many of us had to.
We grew up with one foot in old America and one foot in whatever this new thing was becoming.
We played outside until the streetlights came on but we also learned DOS commands. We learned cursive and keyboarding. We had card catalogs and Google searches. We went from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming in one lifetime.
We remember maps. We remember memorizing phone numbers. We remember life before GPS and before every human interaction became filtered through a screen.
And because of that, I think Generation Jones developed a very unique perspective. We are adaptable because we had no choice but to adapt. We learned technology as adults instead of being born into it. We remember a slower world but were forced to survive in a rapidly accelerating one.
That creates a very different mindset than either older Boomers or younger Gen X and Millennials.
A lot of us also reject the caricature people now associate with “Boomers.” We were not buying houses for the cost of a sandwich in 1965. The interest rate on my first house was over 14% and that was after buying down a point. Many of us got hit by recessions, outsourcing, pension collapses and economic instability just like younger generations did. We watched promises evaporate in real time.
We understand older generations because we were raised by them. We understand younger generations because we had to evolve alongside them.
That’s why the Jones generation often feels culturally homeless. We are rarely discussed, rarely defined and usually lumped into categories that don’t actually fit us.
But we exist.
We are the human transition point between the industrial age and the digital age.
And frankly, there will probably never be another generation quite like us again.
The Future of Political Advertising. By Matthew Hennessy atWSJ Free Expression.
In Los Angeles, an innovative form of political advertising is getting a real-world test. Spencer Pratt’s upstart campaign for mayor is surging, in part, because of the viral lift he’s gotten from a series of short videos…
The videos are effective because they ignore most of the rules of traditional political advertising. They aren’t trying to make Mr. Pratt, a political novice, seem serious and experienced. They aren’t trying to fill in gaps in his biography. Rather they are aiming to raise the stakes in an election that would typically be a cakewalk for the incumbent. They speak with an original narrative vocabulary. They do things nobody thought you were allowed to do.
Ms. Bass has complained that the videos are “150% fiction,” but it isn’t illegal or unheard of to stretch the truth in a political ad. The real fiction may be the idea that these are political ads at all.
If you notice, the clips don’t come with the usual disclaimer at the end: “I’m Spencer Pratt, and I approve this message.” That’s because his campaign isn’t producing them. These are “fan” videos, made by filmmaker Charlie Curran.
This is something new — videos that look like and do the work of political advertising but that aren’t paid for by a campaign or political action committee and don’t feature any footage or audio from the candidate himself.
The Federal Election Commission regulates political advertising, largely by requiring disclosures and enforcing funding limits and coordination rules. Does any of that apply here? Hard to tell. Mr. Curran has free speech, after all….
Nobody can say for sure how much a 60-second AI-generated spot costs to make. But it’s radically less expensive than hiring a film crew to produce cinematic ads like Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” or Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy.”
Some examples:
These Spencer Pratt videos keep getting better and better pic.twitter.com/21h3As31mh
— kevin smith (@kevin_smith45) May 20, 2026
Taiwan and Japan, the Big Betrayal Underway. By David Archibald.
An interesting speculation:
This is what may be going on in Trump’s brain. He wants Greenland. He thinks that big countries should have the right to swallow small countries near them. Thus he approves of Russia invading Ukraine and has been helping Russia as much as possible. And China invading Taiwan. Those invasions make seizing Greenland seem like the natural course of things.
There was the problem that a great chunk of the world’s high end semiconductor production came from Taiwan. But that has been mitigated by the new fabrication plants being built in the US. When Taiwan’s facilities are destroyed in the Chinese invasion, that will make the US plants more valuable. …
It may be that Trump is getting over his skis, which could yet save Greenland. After the success of Venezuela, he went for another aerial attack on Iran, which has proved intractable. For Trump to win against Iran, there has to be regime change from the current theocracy. The theocracy is looking forward to the battle. It is their life’s work. The 40,000 Iranians killed by the regime in January were just a warmup. So far Trump has desisted from making the lives of ordinary Iranians more miserable by bombing the Iranian power stations and desalination plants. The problem is that it will be hard to win in Iran without boots on the ground, and the US Army isn’t prepared to handle drones yet. They will get chewed up.
See it all.
Who Gets the Credit for Western Civilisation: Christianity or Europeans? By Caldron Pool and Ben Davis.
Western civilisation is often regarded as the greatest and most successful civilisation the world has ever known. It’s a claim that few would seriously dispute. Even today, its appeal is still evident in global migration patterns. There’s a reason why the flow only ever goes one way. …
Western civilisation is the product of the Christian religion working on the European peoples for more than 1,500 years. As such, it is the accumulated work of successive Christian generations, labouring to reshape and sanctify their laws, institutions, and cultures in accordance with the faith they profess.
When Christianity was first introduced in Europe, it did not erase the European people and everything they were and loved. Instead, the Christian faith worked within and alongside them, refining their distinctive traits, customs, culture, and communities, and orienting them towards what is good and beautiful. …
The Western world would not survive the loss of Christianity, nor would it survive the loss of the peoples among whom it historically took root. Western civilisation is the product of the former shaping and forming the latter. Lose one, and you lose the other.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
Why you learn more by handwriting than by typing. By Ihtesham Ali.
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
What happens:
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. …
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. …
Why?
Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. …
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way …
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
This is why you learn more by handwriting notes:
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Zen:
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
Which of course is part of the attraction of a classical Christian education.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
They’re calling you a White Supremacist so they can justify killing you.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, brother of U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is a professor at Ohio State University and who hosts a podcast for the SPLC:
John Brown understood that only way to free America from the scourge of white supremacy was to get rid of white supremacists by any means necessary.
Remember: They’re not trying to kill you because you’re a “White Supremacist.”
They’re CALLING you a White Supremacist so they can justify killing you.
(Actually, John Brown was white guy who sought to end slavery, not “white supremacy”.)
We’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle. By Brivael Le Pogam.
The script is documented, archived, and it repeats itself identically for a century. Before every mass slaughter carried out in the name of Marxism, there are always 5 to 15 years of public designation of a category of people as “the enemy to be taken down.”
Not a debate on public policies. Not a critique of inequalities. A methodical dehumanization of an entire class.
In the USSR in the 1920s, it was the kulaks. Lenin wrote as early as 1918 that the kulaks must be “exterminated as a class,” a phrase repeated word for word by Stalin ten years later. Result: 4 million peasants deported, several million dead in the Holodomor.
In Maoist China, it was the landlords and “class enemies.” Mao orchestrates public “struggle sessions” where neighbors, children, former employees are forced to denounce, humiliate, beat. Tally from the land reform alone: 1 to 2 million executions, not counting what follows.
In Cambodia, it was the “new people”: city dwellers, intellectuals, people wearing glasses. Khmer Rouge propaganda designated them for years as parasites before massacring them. 1.7 million dead in 4 years.
The United States in 2026.
Hasan Piker, who reaches millions of young men on Twitch, speaks openly of the “blood of f***ing capitalists.” Not in 1968 in a Trotskyist cell, in 2026 on the platform most watched by 18-25-year-olds.
Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York, films viral videos in front of billionaires’ buildings, right at the spot where Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated last year by Luigi Mangione. The latter was turned into a pop icon by a segment of the American left in less than 48 hours. T-shirts, fan art, romanticization of the murderer.
This isn’t “political passion.” It’s phase 1 of the protocol. The public designation of a category of humans as legitimately hateable, followed by the valorization of those who take action.
The “normal” reaction of a healthy democracy should be the immediate social and professional isolation of these voices. What’s happening: they top podcast charts, hold elected office, and get sympathetic media coverage.
History doesn’t stutter. It copy-pastes. And the first victims are always surprised to discover, too late, that the rhetoric they found “a bit excessive but oh well” was actually the clear warning that a pit was being dug for them.
Yes, you:
And if you’re reading this thinking, “This doesn’t concern me, I’m not a billionaire”, stop for two seconds and really think about it.
Because that’s exactly what the Russian peasants told themselves in 1918 when people started talking about the “bourgeois”. They applauded, or they looked the other way. It wasn’t their problem. They weren’t rich.
Ten years later, they were called kulaks. And “kulak“, in Stalinist practice, meant any peasant who owned one more cow than his neighbor, who had dared to hire a seasonal worker, who had a slightly better-kept barn. 4 million deported. Several million dead.
That’s exactly what the small Chinese shopkeepers told themselves in 1949, when Mao went after the “great landowners”. Not their problem. They just ran a little store. Five years later, they too were classified as “class enemies”, stripped of everything, publicly humiliated, sometimes beaten to death by their own neighbors.
That’s exactly what the Cambodian schoolteachers told themselves in 1970, when the Khmer Rouge talked about “urban exploiters”. Not their problem. They barely earned enough to live on. In 1975, knowing how to read was enough to sign your death warrant.
The communist mechanism NEVER stops at the ultra-rich. Never. It’s a historical law as solid as gravity.
Why? Because fundamentally, the communist doesn’t hate wealth. He hates individual emancipation. He hates the very idea that a man can build something that belongs to him, decide his own life, refuse the collective. Private property isn’t an economic detail to him — it’s the metaphysical enemy. Because someone who owns something is someone who can say no.
So if you have an apartment you spent 15 years paying off, you’re concerned. If you have a small business, a shop, a sole proprietorship, you’re concerned. If you have a savings plan, a bank book, stocks, you’re concerned. If you have a family home in the provinces, you’re concerned. If you work hard to pass something on to your kids, you’re at the top of the next lists.
Billionaires are just the first course. Always. Because there are few of them and they’re easy to point out. They’re the appetizers for the machine. The main course, historically, is you. …
Every time a society has tipped into this madness, it did so because the reasonable majority stayed silent too long, thinking it would all blow over on its own. It never blows over on its own.
They also try taking your stuff through excessive taxation, because they need it to redistribute to their supporters.
Angus Taylor proposed killing big government. By Paul Kelly in The Australian.
Angus Taylor has made one of the bravest calls in history. His pledge to index the personal income tax rate scales has three consequences — it kills big government in Australia, it transfers future revenues from politicians to the people, and it limits the decision-making capacity of governments.
Taylor’s pledge strikes at the interests and values of the Labor Party. It is no accident Jim Chalmers rejects the initiative. His rejection on the ABC was illuminating: “We’re cutting income taxes five times using three different mechanisms.” In short, Chalmers will decide, when, how and by how much income tax will be cut — no way will Labor surrender that power.
His tax indexation would kill the automatic growth of government
Surrender is the name of this transformation. Higher government spending depends utterly upon personal income tax as a growth tax (unlike either company tax or the GST). Bracket creep — when taxpayers automatically move on to a higher tax rate — is indispensable to sustaining bigger government, the core faith of Albanese Labor. …
Hoist by their own petard:
The Treasurer hammered the argument that Taylor’s policies would add $250bn to the debt … Such a figure merely pointed to the confiscatory capacity of Labor’s bracket creep.
This history is not an argument against Taylor’s budget centrepiece. Indeed, it documents the epic nature of the reform, the tenacity that must sustain it and the in-built tax advantage over Labor that it bequeaths.
Labor’s budget cruelty to young Australians. By Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian.
Many see the younger generation as spenders who don’t save. While that’s partly true, a large number have been buying ETF securities with the aim of making money on the share market to enable them to gain a deposit for a dwelling. It was a high-risk strategy, but Chalmers destroyed that strategy — and the hope of a house — with his capital gains tax on their profits.
Younger people now find career pathways hard to achieve. Increasingly, they are looking at start-ups and using their talents in technology, marketing and other areas to develop a business. … Chalmers plans to hit them with high capital gains taxes that clock in when the business is worth nothing. Those who have succeeded tell me they would now never start a start-up in Australia and are advising others to base themselves in either New Zealand (where there is no capital gains tax) or Singapore. A huge loss for Australian innovation. …
Compulsory sharing, comrades
Young tradies are furious. They don’t buy ETFs but rather seek to buy rundown houses which they repair and rent out. It has been a very profitable exercise for tradies over many generations and now our young tradies are being told they can no longer use negative gearing so it is not economic. I won’t repeat the expletive words they are saying about Chalmers and Albanese. …
Businesses around the country are now looking at converting their trust operations into company structures, creating huge stamp duty obligations. …
The huge hidden obligation:
The total Snowy 2.0-related project is going to cost around the $1 trillion mark, including secret guaranteed investment returns, many of which are nothing short of rorts. (And now that the unions have discovered it could be a honey pot, the $1 trillion current estimate of costs could explode.) …
The $1 trillion that will have to be paid for by the next generation of power users — our young people.
It will slash their job opportunities and keep their cost of living high. The cost was not disclosed in the budget. … This future liability is so enormous that its deliberate concealment made a complete nonsense of the budget.
Australia now has easily the highest capital gains tax of any western country.
If you want more of something you subsidize it; if you want less you tax it (e.g. cigarettes). Now the Labor Government is taxing entrepreneurship more heavily.
A better way to tax capital gains. By Chris Brycki in The Australian.
Supporters of reform are also right about one thing. The current 50 per cent CGT discount can produce overly generous outcomes for short-term windfalls. Someone who flips an asset in 12 months shouldn’t be treated the same as someone who spends 20 years building a business or investing patiently.
The real question is whether Australia can reform capital gains tax without discouraging the productive risk-taking the economy depends on. …
Should labour and capital should be taxed the same? No, and here’s why not:
First, investing involves risk and time in a way ordinary wage income doesn’t. Investors are putting already taxed savings at risk and there is no guaranteed return, no minimum wage, no sick leave, and very often significant losses.
Second, economies rely on people willing to defer consumption and commit capital toward businesses, housing and innovation. If the after-tax reward for taking long-term risks falls too far, less capital gets invested and more gets consumed, parked in lower-productivity assets such as cash or moved offshore.
Third, capital is mobile globally. Entrepreneurs and investors can choose where to build companies and allocate capital. If Australia taxes long-term investment much more heavily than comparable countries, over time that risks pushing investment, businesses and talented workers elsewhere.
Labor’s new taxes are particularly unfair:
The proposed 30 per cent floor is also difficult to justify economically. If the government’s goal is to align capital gains tax more closely with ordinary income tax, then why should someone taking long-term investment risk still face a minimum capital gains tax of 30 per cent, while someone leaving cash in a bank account simply pays ordinary marginal tax on guaranteed interest income?
The proposed indexation model also creates several practical problems.
One is grandfathering. By exempting existing assets while imposing a harsher regime on future investments, the government creates a deep sense of unfairness between generations. Older Australians keep the old system while younger Australians inherit a significantly worse one.
Another problem is the lock-in effect. When investors fear losing favourable tax treatment, they become less willing to sell assets, recycle capital or invest in new opportunities. That reduces liquidity and capital mobility across the economy.
Most importantly, indexing a cost base can become most punitive precisely for those who have taken the greatest risks or used capital most productively. Someone who spends 20 years building a successful company from nothing can end up facing dramatically higher tax because much of their gain reflects genuine value creation rather than inflation.
That’s why so many business founders reacted so strongly, joking they may as well reserve a permanent seat at the shareholder table for the Prime Minister because the government gets an effective 47 per cent claim on the upside they spent decades building.
The 47 per cent figure refers to the maximum tax rate that could apply under the proposed changes to the CGT discount — up from the current ceiling of 23.5 per cent — when a business owner sells their company, lists it publicly, or enables secondary share sales.
this problem extends far beyond technology founders and venture capital.
The architect, physio, newsagent or small-business owner who spends decades building a business to fund their retirement and succession planning faces exactly the same issue.
Creating carve-outs for politically connected or fashionable sectors such as technology only makes the system more complex and more unfair. Australia doesn’t need more special-interest exemptions, it needs a simpler and more broadly defensible system.
So use a tapered system — simpler and fairer:
Under this model, investors would earn a 5 per cent CGT discount for every year an asset is held, up to a maximum 50 per cent discount after 10 years.
Own an asset for two years and receive a 10 per cent discount. Five years would deliver a 25 per cent discount. Hold it for 10 years and the investor receives the full existing 50 per cent discount.
This would solve many of the legitimate criticisms of the current system while preserving incentives for genuinely long-term investment and stopping the perverse outcomes created by an arbitrary 30 per cent CGT floor.
Shorter-term windfalls would receive less generous treatment and therefore generate more tax revenue. But Australians who spend a decade or more building businesses, funding housing or investing patiently would not suddenly face punitive tax increases.
The evil of deconstruction. By Brivael Le Pogam.
Deconstruction is the most effective mental virus ever devised against a civilization. It was manufactured in France between 1966 and 1980 by three men: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. It was exported to the United States, hybridized with American racial puritanism, and returned thirty years later under the name of wokism to paralyze the entire West. …
Denies the existence of truth:
The thesis is simple. Every truth is nothing but a disguised power relation. Every sacred text, every law, every science, every norm, every hierarchy, every identity, every institution actually conceals a domination. To deconstruct is to reveal the power dynamic beneath the veneer of truth….
It doesn’t just say “let’s question norms”; it says “there is *only* power relations.” The difference is civilizational.
Destroys civilization:
A society that questions its norms remains standing. A society that believes its norms are *nothing but* domination collapses. Because it can no longer defend anything. No more borders, no more laws, no more science, no more language, no more history, no more biology, no more family. Everything becomes suspect. Everything becomes negotiable. Everything becomes “constructed therefore deconstructible.” …
Science is patriarchal, so let’s deconstruct it. Language is colonial, so let’s reinvent it. Meritocracy is racist, so let’s abolish it. Sex is a construction, so let’s choose it. There is no more bedrock. Everything is sand. …
Tails I win, heads you lose:
The virus is *non-falsifiable*. If you defend a norm, it’s because you’re the oppressor. If you deny being an oppressor, that’s proof of your unconscious privilege. If you cite facts, your facts are contaminated by the power that produced them. If you cite reason, reason itself is white, male, Western. There is no possible exit. The system is designed to make any objection inadmissible by definition.
A destructive cult that cannot build:
That’s exactly the structure of a cult. And that’s exactly what has taken hold in universities, HR departments, media, administrations, and corporate boards for the past twenty years. …
An entire generation has learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. It knows how to suspect, never to admire. It sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. It can produce a thousand pages on the oppressive nature of Shakespeare and zero lines worth reading in a hundred years. It has confused critical intelligence with critical posturing. It is sterile by construction. A mind fed on deconstruction is a mind that no longer knows how to build anything. …
So don’t give it power:
The good news is that a mental virus only survives as long as we cede it authority over discourse. It dies the moment we stop playing its game. The moment we quietly reaffirm that there exists a truth, a beauty, a good, an inheritance. The moment we stop asking permission from the deconstructors to build. The moment we remake. The moment we pass on. The moment we create.
Builders have always had the last word over commentators. Always. Because in the end, what remains is what has been built, and nothing of what has been deconstructed.
Thousands of Australian scientists ‘supporting Chinese weapons tech’. By Ben Packham in The Australian.
Researchers from at least 80 Australian organisations co-authored papers on technology with military applications with counterparts at China’s National University of Defence Technology and other PLA-affiliated institutions, according to a report by AI-led intelligence company Strider Technologies.
The company does not reveal specific projects or organisations involved, but The Australian has learned details of three, in which researchers at the Australian National University, Melbourne University and the University of Queensland collaborated with Chinese partners developing drone target-tracking and anti-jamming technologies, and new electronic warfare capabilities. …
Australian Research Council data shows the organisation has funded at least 1500 joint projects over the past decade with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. …
Strider Technologies said that in the absence of formal restrictions on collaborating with PLA-affiliated institutes, Australia’s research secrets were exposed.
Great. It’s as if Australia is run by pro-China cliques.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
Liontown founder Tim Goyder warns tax grab threatens minerals exploration. By Brad Thompson in The Australian.
Mining entrepreneur Tim Goyder says the Albanese government has “lost it” and that its capital gains tax changes will have a disastrous impact on mineral exploration as well as the ability of Australians to create wealth.
Mr Goyder, who pegged his first exploration tenement 52 years ago, savaged a government he said lacked vision and had no understanding of how ordinary people made money.
The self-made billionaire and his loyal band of investors have survived a wild commodity ride to claim life-changing fortunes from explorers like the lithium producer Liontown which he chairs.
“What’s the crime about making money?” he asked The Australian. “The government has lost it. They think they can spend the money better than the individual, and that’s not the case.”
Mr Goyder lashed out as the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies warned the tax changes would deter investment in finding Australia’s next big mining project and mineral security.
“The reason why exploration and mining has been successful in Australia is that there’s an underlying investment community made up of super funds and, in the early stages, retail investors,” said Mr Goyder, who says he could never replicate his success as an entrepreneur in a world where the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount is discarded as Labor plans from July 1, 2027. …
“To buy a house, you need money. How can you make money out of wages when you’re being highly taxed and the only chance you’ve got of actually accumulating wealth is through capital gain?”