Quotulatiousness

May 20, 2026

Canadian politics can be bad for your mental health

Filed under: Cancon, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As a rule of thumb, the more you pay attention to Canada’s political circus, the worse your state of mental health becomes, IMO anyway. On a more serious note, David Clinton got curious about a recent Manhattan Institute project tracing American mental health trends:

Image from The Audit

The Manhattan Institute’s research into the confluence of mental health trends and political leanings in the U.S. generated buzz a while back. Among other things, they discovered that, as of the 2021-22 school year, liberal students were 13-17 percent more likely to seek mental health treatment than their conservative peers. That’s a frightening gap.

I was curious to know if there’s anything like that going on here in Canada. And it turns out that there’s excellent public-facing data waiting for us to drop by and help ourselves. The most recent published version of the Canadian Election Study (CES) dates back to the period around the 2021 federal election — the full dataset from 2025 isn’t yet available.

There were 20,968 respondents in total in the CES survey data from 2021. Having now spent a couple of happy hours with the results, this looks like an excellent representation of Canadian society. The questions go both deep and wide.1

I was able to directly address the political angle to all this using responses to one core question. Participants were asked to situate themselves on a political “scale where 0 means the left and 10 means the right”.

I classified anyone who responded with a number higher than 6 as “far right”, and responses less than 4 were tagged “far left”. The far left cohort had 4,927 members, while there were just 3,891 people in the far right. Those numbers are easily large enough to make distinctions potentially statistically meaningful.

Anxiety

I explored both far right and far left cohorts for how accurately the words “anxious” and “easily upset” applied to them. A response of seven indicates a self-assessment of extreme anxiety, while zero would be Big-Lebowski-level calm.

The average for the right-coded group was 3.47, while those on the left rated themselves 3.88.

Overall Mental Health

Respondents were asked to rate their mental health in relation to their peers where “1” indicates excellent mental health and “5” indicates poor mental health. A total of 3,878 from the far right responded and 3,263 from the far left. The average of all responses on the right was 2.02 (standard deviation: 0.876859) and from the left, 2.32 (0.926268).

  1. In fact, the average survey took two hours and twenty five minutes to complete! I’m definitely glad they didn’t ask me.

I mentioned the other day that the US was fully justified in “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence due to the Canadian government’s continued delinquence on military matters (and Prime Minister Carney’s blatant desire to tweak American noses while neglecting joint interests with the United States. At The Line, Matt Gurney says this won’t be the only tangible sign of American impatience with our ongoing fecklessness:

As I posted on social media when sharing this: “This is another gentle reminder to the f*ckwits in the Canadian government that they are playing with existential fire when they work to actively piss off our American allies.”

First of all, and this will annoy the Elbows Uppers to no end, the undersecretary’s comments are, fundamentally, accurate. Canada has indeed massively underinvested in defence and has also prioritized rhetoric over reality. I completely understand why Canadians hate admitting this — I hate admitting this. Having your flaws pointed out to you by someone you dislike is always a mortifying experience. But I’ve spent almost two decades writing about the very things Colby is pointing out — Canada has allowed its military capability to atrophy to a point, as I noted just a week ago in an episode of On The Line, where we’ll need many years and untold billions of dollars just to rehabilitate the armed forces. Expanding them and adding capabilities will be a whole other level of investment. This is why Canada’s recent major announcements on defence, though good and welcome, are also not enough — it will take a long time and even more money to actually repair what we have allowed to rot.

The other half of what Colby identified is also, alas, accurate. While we were massively underfunding defence and allowing core capabilities to wither and die, or while just totally missing the bus on transformational military developments (hello, drones!), Canada did indeed talk a lot about the rules-based international order and the role of middle powers and punching above our weight and all the rest. Canada focusing on rhetoric instead of reality is, alas, a fair criticism.

Many U.S. administrations called us out on this. We ignored them. Donald Trump is unique in how viciously he is prepared to exploit our weakness, but he’s hardly the first to have noticed it and called us out on it. I carry no water for MAGA or Trump, but they’ve got us dead to rights on this one. The bad orange man didn’t let the navy rust out, repeatedly defer the fighter jet replacement and hobble the army with non-serviceable equipment and recruiting and procurement systems that were actually quite awful at both those things.

We did those things. We did it to ourselves. Colby is simply possessed of the gall to bluntly call us out on our failures, in a way that Canadians aren’t accustomed to and aren’t going to enjoy.

So that’s part of it. But it’s also worth asking why the U.S. is doing this, and especially why they’re doing it now.

Part of it, probably, is just sincere frustration with us. As noted above, Colby’s remarks are accurate. But the timing is interesting. The CUSMA renegotiation deadline looms in early July And in Colby’s remarks, do I detect a whiff of the art of the deal?

The Carney government has made, and continues to make, plenty of announcements about plans, and potential deals, and future capabilities, and so on … but the Americans can’t help but notice that little is actually being done despite all the sound and fury on the PR side. Canada belatedly reached the long-agreed-upon 2% of GDP target for military spending, but most of it was a bookkeeping exercise of moving existing costs onto the Department of National Defence budget (the Canadian Coast Guard and parts of Veterans Affairs) but not much improved in Canada’s actual defence capabilities.

LMG-25: The Swiss Toggle-Locked Light Machine Gun

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Dec 2025

The LMG-25 was designed by Adolph Furrer at Waffenfabrik Bern in the 1920s. Furrer was a devoted fan of the toggle locking system, and also designed a toggle-locked submachine gun that Switzerland (unwisely) adopted in 1941. The LMG-25 was first produced in 1924, adopted in 1925, and remained in production until 1946 with a total of 23,045 standard models and 1,742 optics-equipped fortress models made.

It is chambered for the standard 7.5x55mm Swiss cartridge with a 30-round side-mounted magazine (interchangeable with the later Stgw 57 magazine, incidentally). It is an effective design, if expensive to produce, and served Switzerland well for several decades.
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QotD: “Gilded Age” Robber Barons didn’t have access to what even working-class Americans have now

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Where Marx really went wrong was — and I know this sounds flip, but I’m as serious as cancer — being born in 1818. He lived his entire miserable life in a world where “labor” really was a physical thing. The richest robber baron of the Gilded Age lived a far different life, materially, than the poorest serf-in-all-but-name working in his factories …

… but the robber baron knew he needed the serfs. Their relationship was purely dialectical. Without his factory hands, no robber baron. And in a strange but very real way, the higher up the food chain your Gilded Age robber baron went, the more he was dependent on his serfs for his lifestyle. J.P. Morgan is usually credited as being the first guy to become a Robber Baron purely through finance. Carnegie, Rockefeller, all those guys had most of their wealth in financial instruments, of course, but those financial instruments rested on control of a physical product — Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil.

I’m probably being unfair to Jay Cooke, the Michael Milken of his day, but since more people have heard of J.P. Morgan let’s roll with it. Even though Morgan’s wealth was entirely on paper — he was nothing but a securities trader — his lifestyle utterly depended on a battalion of servants. In a very real way, you yourself, right now, live much better than J.P. Morgan did in his heyday. And not just because you have aspirin, antibiotics, and air conditioning, three taken-for-granted things ol’ J.P. would’ve given half his kingdom for. But because you have more time. If you’re hungry, you can open the fridge or the microwave and have all the food you need in a matter of minutes.

J.P. couldn’t. J.P. had to deploy an army of servants every time he wanted a snack, and those servants were constrained by things like “availability of ice” and “when is the fishmonger at his stall”. You’re hungry at 2am, you jump in your car and get some Taco Bell. It takes ten minutes. J.P.’s hungry at 2am and it’s tough titty, J.P., your ass is going hungry. Because even though you’re the richest man in the world and have legions of manservants at your beck and call, Taco Bell just isn’t there. Even if someone had had the brilliant idea to create a Gilded Age Taco Bell, it still would’ve taken hours:

Wake up the manservant. Wake up the groom and stableboy. Hell, wake up the horse, then saddle the horse, ride to the drive thru window … which in this case means “the house of the guy who runs Gilded Age Taco Bell”. At which point he has to fire up the oven, start pounding the tortillas, send his own legion of valets and stableboys and whatnot out to get the refried beans …

And that’s the other thing, J.P. — you’d best not pull that shit too often, because those people know where you live. Not only do they know where you live, they live with you. Literally under the same roof. You want to sleep easy? You’d best not beat the servants too often, buddy.

There’s only so much “class consciousness” one can develop in that world. Oh yeah, J.P. thought of himself as one of the Masters of the Universe, there’s no denying that. But J.P. lived in what was still a brutally physical world, in a way we PoMo people really can’t grasp. If you can’t imagine what it would take to get some Gilded Age Taco Bell, maybe geography will do the trick. Ever seen Gangs of New York? Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard the name “Five Points”. The worst slum in America in the 19th century, and 19th century American slums were world class …

That was right down the street from Wall Street. Literally. I am not in any way joking, and if I’m exaggerating a little for effect when I say “J.P. could’ve hit Five Points with a five iron from his swanky digs on Central Park West”, I promise you I’m not exaggerating much. You can look it up for yourself. The main reason the Union rushed troops straight from the Gettysburg battlefield, and no-shit shelled parts of the city with gunboats, during the Draft Riots was because Five Points (et al) was right fucking there, and they might’ve gotten it into their heads to lynch a few Masters of the Universe. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight, right? Let’s see how you like it, you bankster bastards …

The PoMo “information economy” removes all that. The other day I joked about colleges like Bennington and Goucher. I cracked some jokes, yeah, but I wasn’t really joking. Those places aren’t for us. Wall Street is still a physical location, but it might as well be on the dark side of the moon for all any of us have access to it. J.P. couldn’t beat the servants too hard, or too often. The modern equivalent of J.P. isn’t even aware that he has servants. He just clicks on a website, and stuff appears at his door. Like magic. Hell, it IS magic for all he knows, and he surely doesn’t care, because all that shit is his by right. He went to Bennington, after all. He has achieved full class consciousness.

All of which suggests, of course, that while Marx was wrong about the end state — the State will not, in fact, wither away — he might well have been right about the solution to the “contradictions of capitalism”, if you follow me. And if that makes me some kind of godless pinko Commie subversive, well … I’ve been called worse by better.

Anybody got the lyrics to La Marseillaise in English?

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

Update, 21 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

May 19, 2026

The War People by Lucian Staiano-Daniels

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Dead Carl and You, Kiran Pfitzner reviews The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War and finds it has value in bringing to life some of the ordinary people involved in that bloody, interconnected series of wars that we group together as the Thirty Years’ War:

“Their word for themselves was People. Early seventeenth-century common soldiers were Die Leute, Das Volk, les gens, or la gente. They were Das Kriegsvolk, Die Kriegsleute, les gens de guerre, the War People.” So begins Lucian Staiano-Daniels’s aptly titled The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War. Using the technique of micro-history, Staiano-Daniels follows the Mansfeld regiment from its raising in 1625 to its unhappy dissolution in 1627. This unexceptional regiment is notable because of the primary source documentation that survives, specifically its original internal legal records — investigations, debts, trials, and last testaments. Through this unusually immediate resource, we gain glimpses of the reality of the 17th century common soldier and so a clearer view of the social conditions he lived within.

One way Staiano-Daniels situates this investigation is in terms of the relationship between military organization and state-building. Describing the existing historiography, he writes: “In this argument, early-modern states increased their control over their civilian populations in part to raise tax money for larger armies that were inhabited by soldiers who were themselves increasingly well-disciplined”. He instead finds, “neither an intensification of military discipline nor unadulterated thuggishness. The military community was made up of systems of relationships that were subtle, intricate, and disorganized.” (7). These findings are well evidenced, and significant, as earlier literature (drawing on more normative sources like manuals and regulations) asserted the intensification of discipline as part of the emergence of the modern state. Instead, we see states forced to engage in the paradoxically complexly and loosely organized world of the mercenary, unable in this time of crisis and state-emergence to fully subordinate the armed forces they employed.

The 17th century and the Thirty Years’ War serve as an important benchmark in understanding the development of war. In witnessing the lives of the kind of men with which wars of the 17th century were fought, we gain a greater understanding of the society that they moved in. In so doing, we can more easily conceptualize the forces that both constrained and enabled war in the 17th century, producing its particular form. This conception provides the opportunity to more easily understand war in other places and times and what conditions reduced or intensified its violence.

Reading this work as a Clausewitz scholar, I could also not help but see a connection between the culture of the war people and Clausewitz’s support for a national militia or Landwehr as a step towards more inclusive governance. There is, of course, a great distance between the unruly mercenaries of the Thirty Years’ War and the “nation in arms” envisioned by Clausewitz and the other Prussian reformers, but at its core we find a common phenomenon: the connection between military service and rights, personal and political.

This book demonstrates well the value of microhistory; in looking closely at the practices and prevalent attitudes of these soldiers of the 17th century, we gain a more concrete view of the prevailing social conditions. This is not just of interest for its own sake (as social history), but because social conditions greatly shape the practice of war, as Clausewitz tells us. This is so because social conditions both reflect and affect the political conditions that create war, as well as the political purpose that exercises a continuous influence upon it.

“That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to a post about the Canadian government’s amazing nonchalance about protecting Canada’s sovereignty:

Canadians voted in a federal election, not in a referendum to turn the country into a Davos policy lab with a maple leaf sticker slapped on the front.

The line “we will never be the 51st state” is easy politics. Most Canadians agree. But then the same elbozos turns around and flirts with every other form of sovereignty dilution they can find.

Join the EU? Canada is not in Europe. Geography still matters, apparently. Joining the EU would mean importing another layer of bureaucracy, regulation, courts, trade rules, and political obligations from people Canadians cannot remove from office. That is not independence. That is outsourcing control with better stationery.

Give China influence over resources? That is even worse. A serious country protects strategic assets: energy, minerals, food, ports, telecom, data, and critical infrastructure. You do not hand leverage over your future to an authoritarian state and then call yourself sophisticated. That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.

The real issue is this:

Canada’s elites love sovereignty when it means rejecting America.

They seem much less interested in sovereignty when it means resisting Brussels, Beijing, the UN, global finance, or climate bureaucrats.

So the question is fair:

Who voted for Canada to stop acting like a country?

Not Canadians. Not directly.

This is elite mission creep. They run on patriotism, then govern like national borders are an administrative inconvenience.

Other items that popped up in the news over the weekend included the United States Department of War announcing that they will be “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a US-Canadian body that has been continuously operating since 1940 when US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King established it in a meeting in Ogdensburg, New York. Is this a big deal? Some people certainly think so:

In a bit of a sudden, surprise move, Under Secretary of War Elbridge “The Biggest Cheese” Colby has announced on X of all places that the Unites States would be pausing participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, the Oldest and most Foundational node of the Canada-US security partnership.

[…]

As we all know, on August 17, 1940, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King met in a railway car in Ogdensburg, New York. They issued the Ogdensburg Declaration, an agreement to create a joint board to study sea, land, and air defense problems.

For over 80 years the PJBD has serves as one of the major intersects of the Canada-US relationship. It has been the forum where we have been able to engage and work collaboratively on matters of National Security, Continental Defence, and Critical Infrastructure.

Obviously, given how late it is for me, I sadly can’t dive head first into things. However, I did wanna get something out there. It’s no doubt a very petty move to make, part of a long line of petty moves between everyone in the last year. The pressure is obviously there to push Canada along, and the inclusion of the Prime Ministers Davos speech by Colby should go as a sign to one of the areas that is troubling the current administration.

Trying to apply pressure through such acts though isn’t something that I think will be successful. Granted, being a bit of a dick and doing petty shit in hopes of manipulating opinions, only for it to backfire due to a general miscalculation, is something this Administration does on the regular, and so I can’t be surprised to see it done here.

Nor is it surprising for the performative PM and his government to be utterly blindsided when one of their petty performances triggers a strong negative reaction from the United States.

Another issue that the Liberals in Ottawa seem to think both uncontroversial and straightforward is one of their batch of anti-civil-liberties bills before Parliament, in this case Bill C-22, which the US Congress considers to be a dangerous attempt to control US companies who do business in Canada:

The government’s plans for lawful access have gone off the rails. In recent days, Signal has warned it would pull out of the Canadian market rather than comply with Bill C-22. Windscribe, the Toronto-headquartered VPN provider, has said it would relocate its headquarters out of Canada and NordVPN has warned it would consider following suit. Apple and Meta have both raised public concerns about the bill’s effect on encryption and cybersecurity. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, civil liberties groups, and a long line of legal and security experts have all called for changes. The chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have written to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree warning that the bill threatens U.S. national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows. Even the bill’s own oversight body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, has told the SECU committee it does not have the access it needs for effective oversight. If the government thought it could push through the bill largely unnoticed, it has been proven painfully wrong as there are now trade frictions with the U.S., the prospect of leading companies exiting the Canadian market, and weaker cybersecurity protections for ordinary users.

[…]

The bill nominally protects against the worst outcome through a systemic vulnerability safeguard, which says that core providers are not required to comply with a regulation if compliance would require the introduction or maintenance of a systemic vulnerability. But the safeguard falls apart on careful reading. First, the term “systemic vulnerability” lacks specificity in the statute, which means the government could define encryption and vulnerability narrowly enough to hollow out the protection. Second, Sections 5(5) and 7(5) state that providers are not required to comply where doing so would result in a systemic vulnerability, but Sections 12 and 13 unconditionally require compliance with orders and provide that orders prevail over inconsistent regulations. The net effect is that providers are stuck with contradictory provisions in a system shrouded in secrecy and which could lead to the weakening of security systems. That is why Signal, Windscribe, NordVPN, Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the U.S. Congress are raising the alarm.

The best approach to address these risks is to go back to the drawing board on Part 2 of the bill. Committee hearings should be extended to ensure that the long list of expert witnesses, industry voices, and international counterparts who have asked for changes receive a full hearing. Further, real amendments should be on the table that better balance law enforcement needs with Canadians’ privacy rights. Failure to do so will result in some of the world’s most privacy-protective services exiting the market, leaving behind a law that is vulnerable to constitutional challenge with millions of Canadians facing genuine privacy and cybersecurity risks.

The Gracchi – socialists avant la lettre?

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Gracchi brothers — Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus — were Tribunes of the Plebs in the Roman Republic during the second century BC. Tiberius had been a rising star within the cursus honorum until he was involved in a military disaster that seriously tarnished his reputation and derailed his political career. His attempt to regain his former upward march through the offices of the Republic involved running for election as Tribune and then forcing a major land “reform” through using tactics that bent or even broke the traditional way things were done (the mos maiorum – the unwritten constitution of the Republic).

Handre makes the case that the Gracchi were indeed socialists before the term was coined:

The Gracchi brothers destroyed Rome’s property rights in 133 BC, then wondered why their republic collapsed within a century. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus seized private land through legislative force, redistributing it to landless citizens under the banner of “reform”. They created the template for every socialist redistribution scheme that followed.

Rome’s wealthy families had legitimately acquired vast estates (latifundia) through conquest, purchase, and development. The land generated wealth, employed thousands, and fed the empire. The Gracchi saw inequality and decided government theft would solve it. Tiberius bypassed the Senate entirely, appealing directly to popular assemblies who voted themselves other people’s property. When senators objected to this constitutional violation, Tiberius had his colleague Octavius deposed. Pure mob rule.

The economic consequences arrived swiftly. Landowners stopped investing in improvements, knowing politicians could seize their property at will. Agricultural productivity declined as redistributed plots went to inexperienced farmers who lacked capital for proper cultivation. Food shortages followed. The Gracchi had broken the link between productive effort and reward, destroying incentives across the entire system.

Worse than the economic damage was the political precedent. Future demagogues learned they could buy votes by promising to redistribute wealth from productive citizens to political supporters. Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar all followed the Gracchi playbook, using land redistribution to build personal armies of grateful beneficiaries.

Property rights form the foundation of civilization itself. When politicians can seize private property through majority vote, you get warlords fighting over the spoils while your economy burns.

The period of the Republic featuring the Gracchi have been discussed at some length before.

How to Eat Like a Medieval Peasant

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Nov 2025

Boiled carp fillets with a thick garlic-walnut sauce

City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1450

In addition to their regular schedule of backbreaking work, medieval European peasants often had to work extra days for their lord, called boon days. The upside to this was that the peasants were given better food on boon days, which could include cheese, good bread, ale, meat, and fish.

While the medieval cookbooks we have today were written for the wealthy, these seemed like good choices if a lord wanted to feed their serfs: good, but not too good, and fancier than their everyday fare, but not heavily spiced like the nobility’s dishes.

I’d never tried carp before and thought it was quite good, and the garlic is by far the dominant flavor in the sauce. All in all, it’s not amazing, but if I was a medieval peasant, I don’t think I would complain.

    Barbell boyled.
    Take a barbell, and kutte him, and draw him round; And pike in the nape of the hede and seth him in water and salt, Ale, and parcely. And whan hit bygynneth to boile, skeme hit clene, and caste the barbel there-to, And seth him. And his sauce is garlek or vergesauce, And then serve him forth.
    — Harleian MS 4016 (c. 1450)

    Take kernels of walnuts, and cloves of garlic, and pepper, bread, and salt, and cast all in a mortar; and grind it small, & mix it up with the same broth that the fish was sodden in, and serve it forth.
    — Ashmole MS 1439

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QotD: Software developers as wizards

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Is it weird that AI coding assistance is not giving me identity fracture?

A lot of software developers are feeling disoriented and threatened these days. Programming by hand is clearly going the way of the buggy whip and the hand-cranked auger. Which is how we’re finding out that a lot of people have their identities bound up in being good at hand-coding and how it feels to do that.

That’s not me. It’s not me at all. Rather to my surprise, I don’t miss coding by hand, not any more than I missed writing assembler when compilers ate the world and made that unnecessary. (That was in a couple years back around 1983, for you youngsters.)

Maybe the fact that I’m not feeling any of this disorientation disqualifies me from having anything to say to people who are. On the other hand … if you can learn to emulate my mental stance and be completely unbothered, maybe that would be a good thing?

So. If you’re a programmer, and you’re feeling disoriented, try this on for size:

I like being a wizard. I like being able to speak spells, to weave complex patterns of logic that make things happen in the world. Writing code is a way to manifest my will.

Yes, I’ve piled up a lot of arcane knowledge over the 50 years I’ve been doing this. But languages of invocation, they come and they go. Been a long time since I’ve had any use for being able to program in 8086 assembler, and that’s okay. I have better spells now, and these days some rather powerful familiars.

What I’m inviting you to do is think of yourself as a wizard. Not as a person who writes code, but as a person who is good at assuming the kind of mental states required to bend reality with the application of spells.

And if that’s who you are, does it matter if the spells are painstakingly scribed in runes of power, versus being spoken to an obedient machine spirit?

It’s all one; it’s all the manifestation of will. Arcane languages come and go, machine spirits appear and then diminish to be replaced by more powerful ones, but you? You are the magic-wielder. Without you, none of it happens.

Same as it ever was. Same is it ever was. And so mote it be.

ESR, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-02-17.

Update, 21 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

May 18, 2026

Isoroku Yamamoto – the admiral and the postwar legend

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Big Serge examines the popular memory of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Japan’s early naval war successes against the United States from 1941 onwards, contrasting the postwar image with the man himself:

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet.
Photo from the National Diet Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Japanese leadership in the Second World War enjoys noticeably lower name recognition than their German counterparts. Most people with a cursory knowledge of the war know the core German leadership group around Hitler — Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Speer, and perhaps Heydrich and Bormann — and the all-star lineup of German generals like Rommel, Manstein, and Guderian. In contrast, the only particularly notorious member of Japan’s nebulous leadership group is General Hideki Tojo, who served as Prime Minister for most of the war and became the centerpiece defendant in the postwar trial. As far as Japanese commanders go, the list of name-brand personnel has but a single entry: Isoroku Yamamoto.

Yamamoto’s life and career present a fascinating trajectory that shapes a particular, sympathetic view of the man. A veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he spent much of his 30’s in the United States, studying at Harvard and serving as naval attache in Japan’s Washington embassy. He therefore had a first hand understanding of America’s industrial depth, and was famously pessimistic about Japan’s prospects in a a war against the United States. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas”, he argued, “knows that Japan lacks the power for a naval race with America”. In one of his more famous and widely recited (though often badly translated) remarks about a war with the United States, he told Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in September 1940:

    If I was told that I had to do it, then you will certainly observe the Navy going all out for half a year to a year. However, I do not hold conviction about the outcome after 2-3 years.

This quote certainly seems remarkably prescient, in light of Japan’s initial wave of operational successes, which slowly faded away as American combat power ramped up. Far more famous still is his remark, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that Japan had “awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with terrible resolve”.

All of this shapes the perception of Yamamoto as a quasi-tragic figure who understood that Japan was unlikely to defeat the United States in the Pacific War, counseled against the conflict, and then dutifully tried to play a losing hand as well as he could once war had been thrust upon him against his own advice. Yamamoto was furthermore a critic of the Japanese Army’s war in China and a particularly vocal opponent of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Japan, lending credence to the idea that he was war-averse.

This is the Yamamoto of American popular memory, and indeed of a great deal of Japanese postwar writing: a sort of samurai Cassandra, too perceptive and cosmopolitan for the militarist regime he served, a man who fired the opening shot of the Pacific War with a heavy heart and no illusions.

It is certainly true that Yamamoto had an appropriately pessimistic assessment of Japan’s prospects in an extended conflict with the United States. What is less often appreciated is that Yamamoto did not, on the basis of this assessment, conclude that Japan ought not to fight. He concluded instead that, if Japan was going to fight, it had to fight differently — with greater boldness, more risk, and an aggressive search for a decisive stroke. He did not spend the eighteen months before Pearl Harbor advocating for peace. He spent them designing what was, on balance, the single most aggressive operational scheme that was possible — and then only barely — within Japan’s kinetic parameters.

This is the critical distinction between Yamamoto-the-man and the Yamamoto of postwar hagiography. He was not a pacifist, reluctant or otherwise. He was a Japanese naval officer of strong patriotic conviction, deeply committed to his service and his nation, who happened to understand the arithmetic of industrial war better than most of his colleagues. Notwithstanding his appreciation for America’s vast industrial base, he shared a broader Japanese disdain for American martial proclivities, dismissing American naval officers as a club of “golfers and bridge players”. His understanding of the United States did not produce pacifism. It produced, rather, a particular kind of operational philosophy — one which held that Japan’s best hope in a war with the United States was to front-load its risk-taking, to achieve a string of dramatic early victories that would either compel American negotiation or, failing that, push the eventual American counter-offensive as far into the future as possible. In either case, the operational prescription was the same: bold, high-risk operations aimed at decisive results.

The American Civil War was “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ben Duval looks at the implications of the quote above (attributed to Moltke the Elder) and shows that there were indeed lessons to be learned from that conflict:

Chief of the Prussian General Staff Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1891).
Photo by Carl Günther via Wikimedia Commons.

A famous, if apocryphal, quote attributed to Moltke dismissed the American Civil War as “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”. There were certainly lessons to be learned — it could hardly be otherwise in so long and intense a conflict. The war showcased many new technologies on a large scale, including rail and telegraph, while the growing accuracy of firearms showed the growing importance of field fortifications in pitched battle. It also gave witness to many expedients and innovations, including the first known employment of indirect fire (although that would take much longer to be appreciated).

Nevertheless, the readiness with which Moltke’s spurious quote was accepted is suggestive of fundamental differences between Europe’s large professional armies and the hastily-raised volunteers that fought for both North and South. The Civil War saw a mobilization of unprecedented scale, expanding from a pre-war regular army of 15,000 to a total of nearly 2 million at its peak.

At some critical battles, like Antietam, many regiments had mustered bare weeks before. At best, these soldiers could handle their weapons reasonably well; large-scale maneuvers in the heat of combat were out of the question. Even long-serving formations did not have much of a chance to redress these deficiencies, as demonstrated by the disjointed conduct of Pickett’s Charge. What immediate lessons could the Prussian and French, efficiently maneuvering under fire at Gravelotte or Mars-la-Tour, have learned from Civil War armies?

Prussian attack at Gravelotte on 18 August 1870.

Lessons at the Right Level

Perhaps not much at the tactical level, but there was plenty to be learned at the operational. Never before had railroads been employed at such scale to shift troops within and between theaters; nor the telegraph, which was used to coordinate such movements. Efficient logistical services allowed both sides to undertake bold maneuvers involving massive numbers of troops (it is noteworthy how many generals had previous experience working for railroad companies, and how many more went on to high management or board positions after the war).

Union supply wagons loading up at a railhead.

But the point also holds more broadly, beyond the particular technical specialties of 1860s America. Whenever tactics alone cannot suffice—either because both sides are extremely skilled, as in the First World War, or because organizational breakdowns rule out more complex maneuvers — decisive action can by default only occur at the operational level. This was an essential point in Saladin the Strategist. Muslim and Crusader armies, through long experience fighting each other, had developed unique fighting styles tailored to blunt each other’s edges: barring a fluke, decision could only be won through some higher-level maneuver.

In such cases, the fighting capabilities of an army matter less in any absolute sense than in their ability to effect a particular operational scheme. Tactical proficiency is but one variable among many, and not necessarily the most important. Whether a general is dealing with poorly-trained militia or long-serving professionals, it is above all their relative odds that factor into his calculations.

Withdrawing the Black Jack Brigade from Europe

Filed under: Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Depending on your point of view, President Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw a US Army brigade from Europe is either Trump having a temper tantrum yet again or part of an overall plan to reduce US deployment to allied nations who should be able to pay for their own defence. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort discusses the formation being relocated back to the continental United States:

1st Cavalry Division, 2nd Brigade – “The Black Jack Brigade”

There’s a lot of drama around Black Jack brigade being ordered back to the U.S. from Europe.

I was in that unit on that same mission from 2019-2020.

We deployed, did training there, went to a CTC. I’ll be honest, it was the most fun I’ve probably had in the Army.

But after the initial training and the CTC rotation, we didn’t do much.

Played a lot of softball. BBQs. PT. Some drinking. Mostly just working on keeping people out of trouble.

It was kind of like being back at Fort Hood, but in Germany.

I suppose one could argue that the simple act of us being there made all the difference. I don’t know. That was above my level.

But I couldn’t help but think then, as I do now, that there are better ways to keep one’s adversaries at bay.

To say nothing of the fact that I do believe we have been a crutch to Europe for too long. Everyone seems to forget that Europe as a whole, dwarfs the GDP of Russia. A country who is barely richer than Italy.

You accomplish nothing providing security for people who refuse to do it themselves.

What are we supposed to do? Defend them forever? Permanently?

What has it gotten us? Europe, by all accounts, has taken advantage of our security blanket and prioritized making a socialist hellscape.

A socialist hellscape that has become their chief export. So the very act of remaining there in force is enabling the destruction of the western world.

Our relationship with those people DEMANDS revisiting in my view. Because whatever good will we generated after the end of the Second World War has dried up.

The free flow of money from us to them has also dried up.

It’s very telling how others treat you when you stop doing things for them. This isn’t mutual respect. It’s been little more than bribery.

And I’m all for keeping our Armored brigades right here, building readiness.

And not running them into the ground for little gain.

There is an age old adage that says you must help yourself before you can help others. Prudence demands that for our country right now.

America first. America always.

“Three Days in Toronto” (1959, 1960 & 1962)

Filed under: Cancon, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Transit Toronto Main Channel
Published 6 Oct 2025

Among the huge collection within Richard Glaze’s archive of 16mm film from the 60s and the 70s were a number of 400 foot reels from the 1950s. These were taken during trips Richard made to Toronto before he immigrated, and they show scenes that have not been witnessed in over sixty years. Now that we’ve moved to the new channel, we’ve taken the opportunity to spruce up this film and make some corrections and minor improvements. Enjoy!

Thanks to the dozens of individuals who raised the funds to digitize the first two-thirds of Richard Glaze’s collection.

Corrections:
12:17 – Caption refers to “Hillcrest Wye” when it should be “Hillside”
(more…)

QotD: Medical ads

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I don’t understand commercials for medicine anymore. I mean, I understand what they’re trying to say when they advertise a medication and list its possible side effects. I just don’t understand why they bother anymore. Nobody takes these advertisements seriously. The other day, I saw a spot for something called Restless Legs Syndrome. I was stunned when it ended without turning into a “Good news; I just saved 15 percent on my car insurance by switching to Geico” commercial. That’s how bad it’s gotten. It doesn’t even matter how legitimate the affliction is. It could be cancer at this point. It could be a pill to stop spontaneous human combustion. Wouldn’t matter. I see these commercials and instinctively shrug them off. I suffer from Grain of Salt Disorder.

Jonathan David Morris, “Thoughts On Health”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-18.

May 17, 2026

French contributions to the development of wokeness

Filed under: Education, France, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brivael Le Pogam offers an apology to the west for France being so significant in the philosophical and political effluvia of 1968 for setting the conditions in which wokeness was born:

Protesters gathered in the Place du Capitole in Toulouse, 11 or 12 June, 1968.
Photo by André Cros (1926-2021) via Wikimedia Commons.

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.

We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality — everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.

For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.

That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.

It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.

What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them — that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.

So, forgive us. And back to work.

Auto-translated by the social media site formerly known as Twitter from the original French post.

Why Didn’t Germans Resist Hitler? – Death of Democracy

Filed under: Germany, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 16 May 2026

Why didn’t Germans resist Hitler? Were they all Nazis, or were they terrorized into silence by the Gestapo?

The truth is more unsettling. The Nazi regime ruled through a combination of targeted terror, social atomization, propaganda, popular support, opportunism, and broad accommodation. This episode examines why mass resistance never emerged — and why millions of ordinary Germans accepted, enabled, or benefited from the Third Reich.

00:00 Why didn’t Germans resist Hitler?
00:33 The myth of the all-powerful Gestapo
01:36 Targeted terror and selective repression
02:39 The Nazi seizure of power
03:09 Gleichschaltung and the destruction of civil society
03:38 Inner emigration and private conformity
04:16 Why early Nazi successes mattered
04:33 Unemployment, rearmament, and national pride
05:39 Versailles, trauma, and German victimhood
06:22 Identity, propaganda, and belonging
07:25 Volksgemeinschaft and the “Hitler Myth”
08:54 Kristallnacht and the failure of collective action
10:40 What the numbers suggest
11:47 Postwar surveys and lingering Nazi support
13:31 Terror, consent, and accommodation
15:07 Did this absolve ordinary Germans?
16:16 Democracy, responsibility, and Never Forget

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