Collected Ink

18 August - 21 September 2025

Sep 21, 2025

It’s time for another link post ot everything I have been posting here and there around the interwebs. The internet is actually a series of cobwebs, old spiders’ webs that have conglomerated and become dusty. Or else explain why the ‘dead internet’ theory seems increasingly confirmed. You know what that means: just in time for Halloween the internet will be haunted.

The Distance

Norman Spack Was Focused On Cosmetic Results In 'Trans Kids' From The Start

Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told a TED Talk audience in 2014 of “cases in which there are mismatches in the externals, or between the externals and the internals, and we literally have to figure out what is the description of your sex.” These patients were ‘born in the wrong body’, in other words…

Listen now

a month ago · 5 likes · Matt Osborne

This essay is available only to premium subscibers of Polemology.net until October.

Polemology Positions

Pokrovsk And The Gambler's Fallacy

Timed to coincide with the Alaska summit, Russia’s offensive east of Dobropillya sought to exploit a gap in Ukrainian anti-tank ditches on the New Donbass Line through a combination of infiltration tactics and rapid advances using motorcycles. The operation has transformed into a cauldron battle, with Russians cut off by a concentration of Ukrainian units, including the famed 1st Azov Corps…

a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

American Ports See Record Traffic

“The Port of Los Angeles recorded its busiest month in its 117-year history this July, handling over 1 million Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) as retailers and manufacturers accelerate shipments amid concerns over impending tariff increases,” the…

a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Somehow Everyone Forgot That Zelenskyy Is A Comedian

So this Oval Office meeting went much better than the previous one. Brian Glenn, the Real America’s Voice reporter who gave Volodymyr Zelenskyy a hard time about his military garb in February, noted the Ukrainian leader’s black ‘suit.’ Zelenskyy noted in response that Glenn was wearing the same suit a…

a month ago · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Ukraine Intensifies The Drone Campaign Against Russian Rail Logistics

“There is no more Russian rail service through occupied Zaporizhzhia,” Petro Andryushchenko, head of the Center for the Study of Occupation, wrote on Telegram Tuesday. Promising proof “when the sources are safe,” Andryushchenko had reported on Monday…

a month ago · 6 likes · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Fans Of Space Jesus: The Conversation About The Urantia Book On YouTube

Three weeks ago, I published my essay on The Urantia Book, perhaps the most famous example of a genre of occult literature that was popular in America for almost two centuries before the first flying saucer sightings. As I explained in that essay, the ‘Space Jesus’ religion presented in the…

a month ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Rep. Sarah McBride Tells Dems To Double Down On Totalitarian Genderwoo

Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride went on At Our Table, the podcast of former DNC chair Jaime Harrison, to encourage Democrats to speak up in defense of transgender sports cheats. McBride complained that Democrats “don’t know how to respond, not because they don’t know what they believe or how they feel, but because they feel like there is no way to respond in a way that doesn’t result in everyone yelling at them…

a month ago · 12 likes · Matt Osborne

The Distance

So Your Child Wants To Be Our Next Sacrifice To The Gender Gods

Lisa Bellot, pseudonymous author of She/Him/Us: A Psychiatrist's Search for Her Daughter in the Transgender Sea, notes that “people in zombie apocalypse movies aren’t particularly good at making obvious, commonsense decisions. They cock their heads, listen to the sound of snarling coming from the old, abandoned warehouse, and say, ‘I wonder what that could be. I think I will go investigate…

a month ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Disney Wants Men Back

Disney has been searching Hollywood “in recent months” for creatives who can win 13-28 year old males with original content, according to Variety. “The calls come as the Star Wars machine struggles to produce any film project and the superhero genre sheds audiences by the minute…

a month ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

This post is available exclusively to premium subscribers of Polemology.net until October.

Polemology Positions

Why Ukraine's New Cruise Missile Is Actually Kind Of A Big Deal

The long-range war has been an occasional focus of this website since 2023, when Ukraine began their deep-strike campaign with a spectacular, though ineffective, attack on the Kremlin. More an announcement than an attack, it was spectacular because Ukraine had managed to repurpose cheap flight technology to send explosives a very great distance. It was ineffective because the drone could only carry a small payload…

a month ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

This post is available exclusively to premium subscribers of The Distance until November.

The Distance

The VA Governor's Race Is Becoming A Referendum On 'Trans' Policy Demands

Political races usually do not heat up until after the summer season peaks. Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears was trailing far behind Abigail Spanberger in the Virginia governor’s race until last week, when a surprise poll showed the gap had narrowed from 17 points to just 7. This has been interpreted as Trump voters coming home to Earle-Sears. The race has turned red-hot…

a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

The Distance

National Lawyers Guild Has A Resistance Plan For LGBTQ+ Activists In Schools

If you have ever been to a public protest event in the United States, you may have seen someone walking alongside the march or standing near the rally in a yellow hat. They are volunteers with the National Lawyer’s Guild, a storied progressive institution…

a month ago · Matt Osborne

Judge Dredd And The Art Of Moral Panic

Matt Osborne

Aug 27

Of all the comics I read as a child of the 1980s, the one that stands out today as the most prescient is Judge Dredd. In his pop culture history of the Dredd character and Mega City One, Michael Molcher writes that the creators intended “a satire that would both cut to the heart of the historical moment and track the slow, steady march toward authoritarianism that had already begun.” These stories were meant to be “a warning, not a manual,” Molcher writes, lamenting that the “fine line between satire and mockery” has sometimes been crossed, hurting the marginalized communities of the present-day through cartoonish representation in the future.

Read full story

The Distance

The Gender Jonestown Is Here

Robin Westman, a 23 year-old transgender-identified man, fired on Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota this morning with a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol, killing two children and wounding 17 others before taking his own life…

25 days ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

This essay is EXCLUSIVELY for premium subscribers of Polemology.net until August 2026

Polemology Positions

How The Russian Railroad Ate Itself

On the eve of the First World War, the state of Russian railroads was not great. “By the end of 1913 the railway network measured 71,000 kilometers,” economic historian J.N. Westwood writes in A History of Russian Railways. Imperial politics held back track expansion, while the tracks that Russia did build were not meant to last. A “policy of building railways to low technical standards until growing traffic demanded improvements was, in theory, justifiable and no doubt permitted lines to be built which otherwise would have given impossibly low returns on capital,” but it also made expensive reconstruction necessary…

24 days ago · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

The Temu Apocalypse Has Been Postponed

“August 22 saw record large tariff collection of nearly $23 billion on the day, bringing the August total to nearly $30 billion with the month not yet complete,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on X this week with the chart above. “The best part: no consumer price inflation. Since the tariff surge began in April, household goods prices are up…

23 days ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Terrible Without A Cause

“I am sick of my hair, I want to chop it off. I only keep it because it is pretty much my last charade of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself. I can’t cut my hair off now as it would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably chop it on the day of the attack…

23 days ago · Matt Osborne

The Distance

The Beth Bourne Identity: How The 'Trans Community' Made A Mom Into A Warrior

When gender ideology took her daughter, Beth Bourne was free to go to war with it. She has confronted the ideological indoctrination and capture of her entire community, alone at first, but now with an increasing number of people in support. As a result, she faces intensified opposition…

Listen now

19 days ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne and Beth Bourne

This content is exclusive to premium subscribers of Polemology.net until November.

Polemology Positions

Distrusting Z-Patriots, Putin Is Replacing Russian Volunteerism With Terror

The special military operation was supposed to be short and victorious. It has been neither, and now civilian volunteer support is collapsing. “Donations are very scarce, people are fed up,” Elena, a volunteer fundraiser in Kursk Oblast, tells The Insider…

17 days ago · Matt Osborne

The Distance

X Suspends Fake Expert Jon Uhler For Inauthentic Activity

Jon Uhler, a subject of our reporting here at The Distance in 2024, has been suspended from the X app for inauthentic activity after apparently purchasing thousands of follows from suspicious accounts that liked and retweeted him (‘bots…

14 days ago · 12 likes

This content will unlock for free subscribers to Osborne Ink on 29 September.

Osborne Ink

Why The Politics Of 2024 Were So Personal

Contrary to the public perceptions of hard-nosed politics and a foregone conclusion, “the true story of the 2024 campaign is not so impersonal, and the outcome was not so predetermined,” write the authors of this book. Donald Trump “was not going to run until the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago” in 2022, Republican donor Doug Deason tells us. “He was pissed, he was stunned, he then was going to run and he was going to clean house at the DOJ…

13 days ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

The Distance

How Trump's Team Made The Perfect Ad

It was certainly the most memorable ad series of the entire election cycle. “Kamala Harris is for They/Them, Trump is for you” perfectly captured public frustration with the identitarian politics of the Democratic Party. In their new book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America…

13 days ago · Matt Osborne

This is exclusive to premium subscribers to Polemology.net until the end of October.

Polemology Positions

The Pokrovsk Gambit

The First Battle of Pokrovsk began more than a year and a half ago. Since then, up to 60,000 Russians have been killed trying to take the Donbas stronghold, according to a spokesman for the Dnipro Operational Strategic Group. Starting the second week of August, a new Russian offensive east of Dobropillya sought to exploit a gap in Ukrainian anti-tank ditches on the New Donbass Line with a combination of infiltration tactics, long-range fiber optic drones, and rapid advances on motorcycles…

12 days ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Prepared To K.O. Administration Rivals

Scott Bessent, one of two men considered to be closest to President Donald Trump as architects of his trade and tariff policies, went on an expletive-filled tirade against an administration rival in the middle of a swank private dinner last week…

12 days ago · Matt Osborne

This essay is exclusive to premium subscribers of The Distance until November.

The Distance

'Trans' Is A Dangerous Gnostic Philosophy

We all feel frustrated with the world. “The gnostic’s flight from a truly dreadful, confusing, and oppressive state of the world is understandable,” Eric Voegelin wrote in Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays. “But the order of the ancient world was renewed … by Christianity.” The late historian of philosophy finds the cult of Christ sublimating and transcending the cult of philosophy in the first millennium A.D., with civilization-shaping consequences. Political philosophers have been fighting back against Christianity ever since…

12 days ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

It Is Better To Be Feared Than Loved

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action, four times is stupidity. The Jews are blessed with stupid enemies. Having watched the IDF systematically target gatherings of the top officials of (1) Hezbollah, (2) the IRGC, and (3) the Houthis, the political leadership of (4) …

11 days ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

This content is exclusively available to premium subscribers of Polemology.net until 2026.

Polemology Positions

Male Socialization And The Warrior Path To Enlightenment In 'Circle of Iron'

“Bruce set the story in a land that never was and always is,” a title card informs us at the opening of the 1978 film Circle of Iron. Unfolding as a series of Zen koans, the movie is ostensibly a kung fu flick, becoming a meditation on communication between the generations, specifically between older and younger men. Which is ironic, given that Jeff Cooper, the actor who plays the protagonist Cord, was the same age as David Carradine, the elder blind man that Cord meets and follows. But that is why they call it ‘acting…

10 days ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Everyone Who Disagrees With Me Is A Literal Nazi Who Deserves To Die

A 22 year-old man, Tyler Robinson, has been arrested for the murder of Charlie Kirk. According to early reports, he had become increasingly politicized, complained Kirk was “spreading a message of hate”, and confessed the crime to his father, who turned him in. It is a picture of radicalization in the most d…

9 days ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Turning Point

Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre led the bloody terror of the French Revolution until his fall from power in 1794, a turning point that historians refer to as the Thermidor. No revolution ever reaches its Thermidor phase without consuming its revolutionary vanguard first. Those who had ruled by the guillotine had to die by the guillotine before the tumbrils could stop rolling…

6 days ago · Matt Osborne

This podcast will unlock for free listening on 30 September.

The Distance

Dr. Invalidation: José Duarte Explains How Genderwoo Produces Junk Data

Dr. José Duarte is a data scientist, social scientist, and social psychologist who studies the methodological validity of the alleged science that has shaped our public discourse on many contentious issues. We discussed how and why scientists use data to lie, what makes genderwoo junk science different from other liberal policy areas where invalid science is common, and what it would be like to put Ayn Rand in the same room with J.K. Rowling to discuss transgender ideology…

Listen now

5 days ago · 9 likes · Matt Osborne and José Duarte

This content will unlock for free subscribers in October.

Osborne Ink

Housing Is A Verb

“This has been the best experience thus far,” Gary Noakes tells the San Francisco Chronicle about his new rehab facility, Hope House. “It’s the safest and cleanest environment, and now I’m able to really work on myself…

5 days ago · Matt Osborne

This essay is exclusively available to premium subscribers of Polemology.net until 2026.

Polemology Positions

The Revenge Of Chief Doublehead For The Killing Of His Brother Pumpkin Boy

“Invincible threat on the southern plain …

4 days ago

This essay will unlock for free reading in November.

The Distance

Dems Still Don't Understand Why They Have Lost Ground In VA Gov Race

Adam Jentleson, former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, tells the New York Times that the Democratic Party has lost its way by putting “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and L.G.B.T.Q. rights” while giving “far too much deference to the powerful liberal organizations championing those causes at the expense, some argue, of appealing to voters in battleground states…

3 days ago · Matt Osborne

The Bloody Shirt Of Jimmy Kimmel

Matt Osborne

Sep 19

The assassination of John F. Kennedy by a confirmed communist resulted in decades of ridiculous fables assigning blame to the CIA and a murky conspiracy of Vietnam warmongers. Leftists could not accept that it was one of their ideological own who pulled the trigger. Prominent leftists in the entertainment world, most notably Oliver Stone, have pr…

Read full story

Collected Ink

18 August - 21 September 2025

Judge Dredd And The Art Of Moral Panic

The Bloody Shirt Of Jimmy Kimmel

Discussion about this post