Reality vs Gender Dogma

For years now we’ve been told something that flies in the face of common sense: that men and women are essentially the same, and that any differences we observe are merely the result of “social conditioning”. If only parents, teachers and society behaved differently, boys and girls would turn out the same.

Anyone who has raised children of both sexes knows this simply isn’t true.

John Stossel’s recent video tackles this taboo head-on, and it’s refreshing precisely because it says out loud what most people quietly observe. From a very early age — long before schooling, media influence or “gender norms” can reasonably explain it — boys and girls behave differently. They gravitate toward different toys, different types of play, different levels of risk and competition. These are not moral judgements. They are observations.

The argument that these differences are entirely “learned” collapses even further when you look beyond humans. Baby monkeys, raised without pink aisles or toy trucks, display sex-based behavioural differences almost immediately after birth. If that’s “societal conditioning”, then society has extended itself remarkably into the animal kingdom.

Stossel revisits decades of research that has been quietly sidelined because it conflicts with modern ideology. On average — and averages matter at a population level — men are more risk-taking, more competitive, more drawn to novelty. Women, again on average, are better at reading emotions, more nurturing, and more risk-averse. There are, of course, exceptions in every direction. But pretending the averages don’t exist doesn’t make them disappear.

This matters because entire institutions are now being reshaped around the denial of these differences. Universities, workplaces and even schools are being redesigned under the assumption that unequal outcomes must be evidence of discrimination. If men dominate certain fields, it must be sexism. If women dominate others, it is celebrated as progress. The possibility that different choices, preferences and temperaments play a role is treated as heresy.

Stossel also highlights a deeper problem: the refusal to talk honestly about sex differences has consequences. Boys are falling behind in education. Merit and excellence are being replaced by quotas and “equity”. Academic freedom is sacrificed to emotional safety. And institutions meant to pursue truth increasingly shy away from it.

None of this is an argument for inequality before the law. Quite the opposite. Equal rights, equal protection, equal opportunity — these are pillars of a free society. But equality does not require sameness. And trying to force sameness, especially by denying biology, ends up harming everyone.

The video is worth watching in full, not because it offers a neat ideological answer, but because it restores something badly missing from the debate: honesty. You don’t have to agree with every point to recognise that silencing discussion about biological differences between men and women is neither scientific nor humane.

Reality, inconvenient as it may be, has a way of asserting itself. The question is whether we choose to acknowledge it — or continue pretending that chromosomes don’t matter, even as the evidence keeps piling up.

(Watch the full John Stossel video below.}

https://youtu.be/HFXRoKzWFR0?si=3OjAPr9S28WG5GiQ

Australia's Mass Immigration Causing Lower Living Standards

For years now, Australians have been told that record immigration is an unquestionable good. It boosts GDP. It keeps the economy “growing”. It fills skills shortages. It’s framed as both an economic necessity and a moral virtue.

Yet for ordinary households, the lived reality tells a very different story.

Both major political parties have quietly embraced mass immigration as a convenient lever to inflate headline economic numbers. More people means more consumption, higher aggregate GDP, and the illusion of prosperity. But GDP growth is not the same thing as rising living standards — and Australians are increasingly feeling the gap between the two.

Falling Behind, Even While the Economy “Grows”

While total GDP has expanded, household income per person has gone backwards. Australians are working harder, competing more fiercely for jobs, housing, and services, yet finding themselves worse off in real terms.

This isn’t accidental. When population growth far outpaces the ability of an economy to provide housing, infrastructure, and productivity-enhancing investment, the result is dilution. Wages stagnate. Bargaining power weakens. Costs rise faster than incomes.

An economy can grow while its citizens become poorer. That is exactly what has been happening.

Housing: The Pressure Point Everyone Feels

Nowhere are the consequences clearer than in housing.

Rents have exploded across the country. In many cities, the average rental cost now consumes around a third of the average weekly income. For younger Australians, single-income households, and renters with families, the burden is crushing.

This is not a mysterious market failure. It is basic supply and demand. When governments import hundreds of thousands of people each year while restricting land release, slowing approvals, and failing to invest in social housing, rents and prices were always going to surge.

Home ownership — once a realistic aspiration for working Australians — is drifting further out of reach. A generation is being locked into permanent renting, not because they are lazy or entitled, but because policy choices have stacked the deck against them.

Infrastructure Strained to Breaking Point

Housing is only one piece of the puzzle. Roads are clogged. Public transport is overcrowded. Hospitals are stretched. Schools are bursting at the seams. Waiting lists grow longer while service quality declines.

These pressures are routinely blamed on “unexpected demand”, yet the demand has been entirely predictable. What hasn’t kept pace is investment — or political honesty.

Instead of planning for population growth responsibly, governments have treated infrastructure as an afterthought, leaving communities to absorb the costs.

Social Cohesion Is Not Infinite

There is another cost politicians are reluctant to discuss: social cohesion.

Australia has been one of the most successful multicultural societies in the world precisely because immigration was historically managed, paced, and broadly supported by the public. That social contract is now fraying.

When people feel ignored, crowded out, and economically stressed, trust erodes. Communities retreat inward. Resentment grows — not necessarily toward migrants themselves, but toward a political class that appears indifferent to the consequences of its decisions.

Importantly, Australians have consistently said — through polling over many years — that immigration levels are too high. These views have been stable, moderate, and persistent. Yet they have been ignored by both major parties.

The Political Consequences Are Now Visible

It should surprise no one, then, that parties like One Nation are seeing a surge in support. When mainstream politics refuses to acknowledge a problem, voters will turn to those who at least name it.

This is not an endorsement of every policy or tone used by such parties. It is a warning sign. A signal that large numbers of Australians feel unheard, economically squeezed, and dismissed as morally suspect for raising legitimate concerns.

Suppressing debate does not make these pressures disappear. It simply drives them elsewhere.

A Choice That Didn’t Have to Be This Way

Australia is a prosperous country with abundant resources, strong institutions, and a history of successful immigration. None of this required the reckless population growth of recent years.

Immigration should serve the interests of the nation as a whole — not be used as a shortcut to pad GDP figures while households struggle. Sustainable migration, aligned with housing supply, infrastructure capacity, and wage growth, is not radical. It is responsible governance.

The real question is not why voters are pushing back.

It is why our political leaders ignored them for so long.

Weekly Roundup - Top Articles and Commentary from Week 6 of 2026

Here are links to some selected articles of interest and our posts from this week.

• Australia Day - A Country Worth Celebrating
  
• Russiagate - A Conspiracy to Overthrow the President
  
• Perverse Incentives (Part 2): How Good Intentions Go Bad
  
• Iran has Lost All Legitimacy - The Free World Must Act
  
• Australia's Mass Immigration Causing Lower Living Standards
• Reality vs Gender Dogma
• A poignant exposure by Konstantin Kisin on the silence of the noisy Pro-Palestinian activists on the Trump Gaza Peace plan currently being implemented. Worth the 5 minutes!

• Almost 10 years ago now, I posted a piece titled "Towards Heaven or Hell?" It covered the age-old debate about the direction of our future: are we heading for a better future, or will the many threats to our civilisation become a reality? Even after 10 years it remains worthy of a re-read.

We welcome all feedback; please feel free to submit your comments or contact me via email at grappysb@gmail.com or on X at @grappysb 

Iran Has Lost All Legitimacy — The Free World Must Act

There comes a point when moral ambiguity ends.

Iran has crossed it.

Following weeks of demonstrations by tens of thousands of Iranian citizens across multiple cities, the regime did what it always does when its grip on power weakens — it turned its weapons on its own people. Soldiers and security forces were ordered to fire on unarmed civilians. Protesters were hunted, arrested, disappeared, and executed.

A government that murders its own citizens forfeits any claim to legitimacy.

The exact death toll is deliberately obscured by the regime. Official figures whisper “a few thousand.” Independent reports, leaked footage, eyewitness accounts and intelligence assessments suggest the number may be far higher — possibly multiple tens of thousands. As always with totalitarian regimes, the truth will emerge slowly, but the direction is unmistakable.

This was not law enforcement.
This was not crowd control.
This was mass political violence.

Once a regime uses its military to murder its own people, it has no right to sit among the community of nations. In an ideal world, such a regime would be instantly isolated. Trade would cease. Diplomatic recognition would be withdrawn. The leadership would be removed, and the people freed to decide their own future.

But we do not live in an ideal world.

Authoritarian regimes survive precisely because they know democracies hesitate. They rely on process, delay, hand-wringing, and the fiction that “stability” is preferable to justice. Iran’s rulers have mastered this game. They chant about sovereignty while exporting terror. They demand non-interference while executing children in the streets.

At some point, hesitation becomes complicity.

Iran’s regime is not merely oppressive at home — it is a global exporter of terrorism. Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, Shiite militias across the Middle East — all funded, trained, and directed by Tehran. The same hands that pull triggers in Iranian streets arm proxies that murder civilians abroad.

This is not a regional problem. It is a civilisational one.

The buildup to decisive action has been relatively fast, and it is now largely in place. Militarily, politically, strategically — the window is open. What remains is not capability, but will.

The United States and its allies face a stark choice: continue pretending that sanctions and statements will restrain a fanatical theocracy, or finally accept that the Iranian people cannot free themselves while the regime controls the guns.

History is unkind to those who watched and did nothing.

Saving Iran’s people does not mean occupying their country. It means removing a murderous regime that has proven it will never reform, never moderate, and never stop killing to preserve power. The Iranian people have shown extraordinary courage. They have done their part. They have risen, knowing the cost.

Now it falls to the free world.

I do not make this argument lightly. War is always tragic. But there is a difference between war and surrender — and allowing a terrorist regime to butcher its own citizens while we issue statements is surrender by another name.

Once a government wages war on its own people, it becomes an enemy of humanity.

The mad mullahs are clinging to power through bloodshed. The Iranian people deserve better. And for once, the world has the opportunity — and the responsibility — to act.

I, for one, am voting for action.

Perverse Incentives (Part 2): How Good Intentions Go Bad

In the first post of this series, I introduced the idea of perverse incentives — situations where rules, rewards, or pressures push individuals or institutions to act in ways that ultimately harm the very people or outcomes they were meant to serve.

The concept is simple but powerful.

When incentives are misaligned, rational people will pursue their own interests in ways that produce irrational outcomes for society. Importantly, this does not require bad people or evil intent. Quite often, it is entirely predictable behaviour responding to a flawed system.

Perverse incentives sit quietly beneath many of today’s most contentious issues: political dysfunction, declining trust in institutions, poor public policy outcomes, and social fragmentation. They are rarely discussed because doing so often exposes uncomfortable truths about how our systems really work.

To make this concrete, below is a non-exhaustive list of perverse incentives operating across politics, law, media, business, academia, and public administration. The examples are varied, but the pattern is consistent.

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A Catalogue of Perverse Incentives

Person / Group	Perverse Incentive	Consequence for Society
Elected politicians	Prioritise re-election over long-term policy	Short-termism, growing debt, unresolved structural problems
Judges elected by voters	Appease public opinion to win votes	Compromised justice and unequal application of the law
Political parties	Pander to vocal minorities for electoral gain	Policy capture and loss of majority representation
Bureaucrats	Avoid risk to protect careers	Inaction, box-ticking, and policy paralysis
Public servants	Spend full budgets to avoid future cuts	Wasteful or unnecessary expenditure
Media outlets	Maximise clicks and outrage	Polarisation, misinformation, loss of trust
Journalists	Align with ideological peers	Homogenised narratives and suppressed dissent
Universities	Chase government funding and rankings	Ideological conformity, erosion of academic freedom
Academics	Publish fashionable conclusions	Biased research and declining credibility
NGOs / advocacy groups	Inflate crises to secure funding	Distorted priorities and perpetual alarmism
Corporations	Focus on quarterly earnings	Underinvestment in innovation and workforce
CEOs	Inflate share price for bonuses	Long-term damage to company health
Tech platforms	Optimise engagement algorithms	Addiction, social division, radicalisation
Social media influencers	Reward controversy over accuracy	Cultural coarsening and misinformation
Activist organisations	Escalate demands to remain relevant	Social division and zero-sum politics
Law enforcement leadership	Manage optics over enforcement	Declining public confidence and deterrence
Human rights bodies	Expand mandates to justify existence	Mission creep and politicisation of rights
Welfare systems	Disincentivise work unintentionally	Long-term dependency and intergenerational poverty
Immigration policymakers	Maximise intake without integration	Social fragmentation and infrastructure strain
International institutions	Avoid accountability to member states	Democratic deficit and public disengagement

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None of these outcomes are mysterious. They follow directly from the incentives in place.

When judges must campaign, justice becomes political.
When media revenue depends on outrage, outrage becomes the product.
When institutions are rewarded for expansion rather than outcomes, they expand — regardless of effectiveness.

The tragedy is that these systems often began with good intentions. Transparency. Representation. Compassion. Inclusion. Yet without careful incentive design, good intentions can rot into harmful results.

The uncomfortable implication is this: many of our social problems persist not because we lack solutions, but because powerful actors benefit from the status quo.

In the next post in this series, I will turn to the harder question: how do we reduce or neutralise perverse incentives without creating new ones? That is where reform becomes difficult — and unavoidable.

Understanding the problem is the first step. Fixing incentives is the only path forward.