Janet Bufton 🍁🌻

@janetbufton

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

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Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jul 11

OK, who's going? Try to say hi during one of the micro breaks.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jul 7

These Vance excerpts remind me of this story about why Jordan Peterson feels unbound by the normal rules for how we treat each other in his political activism. Source: archive.ph/TKWQu#select...

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jun 26

This might be the least annoying outcome of the options I've seen but I definitely feel like I just fell prey to a high-effort troll.

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)

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jun 23

This passage is treated like a banal list before the review launches into the time the book spends on theory focused on queer women. But I learned most of this as an adult. Understanding that these things are *not* banal is an important part of understanding what's broken about heterosexualism.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jun 7

There is some ROUGH Conservative anti trade content from 1891.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jun 1

@jacobtlevy.bsky.social doing something completely different as the Declaration of Independence approaches 250. www.libertyfund.org/250th/when-a...

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 28

decisions, decisions.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 26

I had an especially lovely first toad of the season.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 23

Spent the day learning about spring foraging. Nettles were the highlight—especially wood nettles, which have to be the best tasting green I've ever eaten. (More punishing to harvest, though.) However, stinging nettles were a childhood nemesis so it was nice to get an adulthood reset.

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

A bunch of wood nettle on the ground, with alternating, rounder toothed and pointy leaves.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 22

Constant is pretty explicit about this, too. (Principles of Politics, Book X chapter 10.) NB he is arguing here for restricting the franchise to owners (which is bad!), but the whole argument changes if this is a progressively expanding and changing class. You can see why it led to a broader split.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 17

Annual anti-Nazi tulip festival visit was a success. #bloomscrolling

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

A large bed of tulips. The front are white with light purple tops. Behind are red tulips with yellow edges and yellow tulips with frilly edges.

A large bed of tulips. Mixed together are yellow double tulips, pink double tulips, and red tulips.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 7

I made salmon salad with yoghurt, tahini, lemon, and tabbouleh and it was as good as I hoped. I may regret eating this much parsley an hour before a video meeting.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 5

I stumbled across a good video primer on fermented tofu (Sam Low) and, armed with knowledge, gave chasiu chicken a try. Very tasty will make again. Enjoyed by 0/2 children but you can't win 'em all.

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

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 4

People whose concept of Reason Magazine is as a voice for genuinely good civil liberties work in the aughts are sad and confused about what's happening there now. It's important to remember that this was also an outlet that did AIDS trutherism well into the 1990s and wasn't disciplined for it.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· May 4

In case you didn't know, this is intermittently a Digression on Silver stan account.

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."

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Apr 29

Despite watching what happens when a US gov runs around ripping out fences (it's bad), I'm grumpy about the newfound enthusiasm for Chesterton's fence. This is much better. (not the point of this piece (it's good), just what I've latched onto) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/o...

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Apr 27

Willow (and buckthorn) weaving, first attempt.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Apr 2

Just look at my handsome little chaos agent.

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

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Mar 29

Anyway please enjoy some still-snowy (but progressively less snowy!) Eastern Ontario landscape.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Mar 20

🙌

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Mar 17

"Mummy, why are you crying?"

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

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Mar 7

The National Post throwing a party for Wealth of Nations warms my nerdy liberal heart.

A two page, full colour spread on Wealth of Nations on pages A12–13 in The National Post, one of Canada's national papers. Pieces are by Robert Dimand ('Bigger than Harry Potter'—does not erase Mandeville but does highlight Smith's least favourite Mandevillian insight), J.D. Tuccille ('The one book Trump must read'), Janet Bufton ('Free markets, freedom to thrive'), and Donald J. Bourreaux ('Wealth has causes, unlike poverty').

Across the top it says,
"ISSUES & IDEAS
The Wealth of Nations turns 250"

Photos are of a bagpiper in front of the statue of Smith in Edinburgh and Adam Smith on the £20 note issued by the Bank of Scotland.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Feb 21

Paul Wells with the numbers on Danielle Smith's claims to need referendum questions to deal with the problem of Trudeau era immigration. Harper era immigration was about 92% the number that came in under Trudeau.

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)

That's a difference of 630,000 people, much higher than the increase of 250,000 people between 2015 and 2020. I'd say the combination of the immigration increase and the consumer carbon tax, skilfully prosecuted by Pierre Poilievre, were the biggest reasons Justin Trudeau lost his job.

You could argue it would be a problem if Alberta's population continued to expand at the 2020-2025 rate.

But Smith chooses a different comparison: between the Trudeau decade ("disastrous... strain") and the Harper decade ("responsible... manageable").

Fair enough: During the decade from 2015 to 2025, by the provincial government's own numbers, Alberta's population increased by about 880,000 people, whereas during the decade from 2005 to 2015, it increased by about 810,000. That's because the half-decade Smith complains about followed a half-decade of much slower population growth. Put it another way: Harper's "responsible... manageable" decade of immigration led to Alberta's population growing 92% as fast as Trudeau's "disastrous" decade.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Feb 8

We get very few fruits with the Ottawa winter light but we do get a few flowers and they're something special.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jan 30

I cannot emphasize strongly enough how here I am for writing like this about the unbelievably boring people on the new right. From: open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jan 28

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

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jan 18

This sounds like the author did not spend time in pre-Trump/pre-X right wing political spaces. It's definitely not the lack of tankies/leftist scolds. (Bluesky exists! And they mock it!) There was always fighting. It was often nasty. It just didn't often attract general public attention.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Jan 10

Got one for the bird butts feed.

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.

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Dec 30

This is the second paragraph of MTG's Wikipedia entry. All of this, and maybe most importantly her support for an attempted coup, needs to be recanted for evidence of liberalism. Not just her political tactics. Liberalism is not just using democratic tactics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjori...

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]

Janet Bufton 🍁🌻@janetbufton· Dec 30

In our FAQ on the far right, @tomgpalmer.bsky.social and I write about the inherent instability of far-right coalitions. When they turn on each other it's an opportunity for liberals opposing them. That opportunity is not that they're liberal after all. www.theunpopulist.net/p/your-compr...