Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2026

Were the Nazis socialists?

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you’re ever bored and want to kick off an argument online, you can take either side of this statement and watch the signal-to-noise ratio drop precipitously. The NSDAP, the Nazis, began as one of the many, many groups of angry young Germans in the days after the end of the First World War. The full name of the party — the National Socialist German Worker’s Party — indicates who the original party founders thought would be the engine of their political rise. They were explicitly anti-communist, as the spectre of the Russian Revolution terrified many Germans, but German socialism was still within the Overton Window of political debate.

Lots of arguments about this one.

Many people assume Nazis could not have been socialists, despite all the time and energy they devoted to jumping up and down screaming “We are socialists!”, because they were “right-wing” and socialism is supposed to be “left-wing”.

Except “right-wing” and “left-wing” don’t have rigid definitions outside the context of the French revolution. In any other context, they’re just a metaphor.

So why did the NATIONAL Socialist German Workers’ Party and the INTERNATIONAL Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers’ Movement hate each other so much?

It’s pretty obvious when you look at the names.

National.

International.

To Nazis, the race and culture of a people are everything. They are what the state is supposed to represent. Ein Volk, as they would say. The purpose of Nazi socialism is to control capital assets, subordinating them to the will and welfare of the ethnostate.

But Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish all ethnostates. They are a globalist movement, seeking to place all capital assets under the control of a universal proletariat in theory, which is in practice represented by one world government.

Thus, Nazis sought to use socialist policies for the welfare of the German people and Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish “German” as a meaningful distinction, along with all other cultures.

The antipathy between Nazis and communists was a sectarian struggle within socialism. Same methods, but different sacred groups.

Since the defeat of National Socialism by International Socialism in WW2, all modern socialism is pretty much of the international variety.

This does, however, suggest that there is a contrast between National Capitalism and International Capitalism as well.

Which is the source of the current sectarian struggle between elements of the American right wing.

Update, 12 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.

“We’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle”

Filed under: China, History, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

You have to have noticed that progressives all seem to have recently decide en masse that we need to liquidate eliminate expropriate the billionaire class. It’s been done in the past, and modern progressives seem to be unable to spot the pattern, even as they work hard to bring it back to life by constantly scapegoating the wealthy (machine translated from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post):

Lydia is putting her finger on something that no one wants to name clearly: we’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle.

The script is documented, archived, and it repeats itself identically for a century. Before every mass massacre carried out in the name of Marxism, there are always 5 to 15 years of public designation of a category of people as “the enemy to be taken down”. Not a debate on public policies. Not a critique of inequalities. A methodical dehumanization of an entire class.

In the USSR in the 1920s, it was the kulaks. Lenin wrote as early as 1918 that it was necessary to “exterminate the kulaks as a class”, an expression repeated word for word by Stalin ten years later. Result: 4 million peasants deported, several million dead in the Holodomor.

In Maoist China, it was the landlords and “class enemies”. Mao orchestrates public “struggle sessions” where neighbors, children, former employees are forced to denounce, humiliate, and beat. Tally from the land reform alone: 1 to 2 million executions, not counting what follows.

In Cambodia, it was the “new people”: city dwellers, intellectuals, people wearing glasses. Khmer Rouge propaganda designated them for years as parasites before massacring them. 1.7 million dead in 4 years.

Now look at what’s happening in the United States in 2026.

Hasan Piker, who reaches millions of young men on Twitch, speaks openly of the “blood of f***ing capitalists”. Not in 1968 in a Trotskyist cell, in 2026 on the platform most watched by 18-25 year olds.

Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York, films viral videos in front of billionaires’ buildings, exactly where Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated last year by Luigi Mangione. The latter was turned into a pop icon by a part of the American left in less than 48 hours. T-shirts, fan art, romanticization of the murderer.

This isn’t “political passion”. It’s phase 1 of the protocol. The public designation of a category of humans as legitimately hateable, followed by the valorization of those who take action.

The “normal” reaction of a healthy democracy should be the immediate social and professional isolation of these voices. What’s happening: they top podcast charts, they’re elected officials, and they get favorable media coverage.

History doesn’t stutter. It copy-pastes. And the first victims are always surprised to discover, too late, that the speech they found “a bit excessive but oh well” was actually the clear warning that a pit was being dug for them.

Lydia is right to say it. And she’ll be even more right in five years when we reread these tweets.

And more:

And if you’re reading this thinking, “This doesn’t concern me, I’m not a billionaire”, stop for two seconds and really think about it.

Because that’s exactly what the Russian peasants told themselves in 1918 when people started talking about the “bourgeois”. They applauded, or they looked the other way. It wasn’t their problem. They weren’t rich.

Ten years later, they were called kulaks. And “kulak“, in Stalinist practice, meant any peasant who owned one more cow than his neighbor, who had dared to hire a seasonal worker, who had a slightly better-kept barn. 4 million deported. Several million dead.

That’s exactly what the small Chinese shopkeepers told themselves in 1949, when Mao went after the “great landowners”. Not their problem. They just ran a little store. Five years later, they too were classified as “class enemies”, stripped of everything, publicly humiliated, sometimes beaten to death by their own neighbors.

That’s exactly what the Cambodian schoolteachers told themselves in 1970, when the Khmer Rouge talked about “urban exploiters”. Not their problem. They barely earned enough to live on. In 1975, knowing how to read was enough to sign your death warrant.

The communist mechanism NEVER stops at the ultra-rich. Never. It’s a historical law as solid as gravity.

Why? Because fundamentally, the communist doesn’t hate wealth. He hates individual emancipation. He hates the very idea that a man can build something that belongs to him, decide his own life, refuse the collective. Private property isn’t an economic detail to him — it’s the metaphysical enemy. Because someone who owns something is someone who can say no.

So if you have an apartment you spent 15 years paying off, you’re concerned. If you have a small business, a shop, a sole proprietorship, you’re concerned. If you have a savings plan, a bank book, stocks, you’re concerned. If you have a family home in the provinces, you’re concerned. If you work hard to pass something on to your kids, you’re at the top of the next lists.

Billionaires are just the first course. Always. Because there are few of them and they’re easy to point out. They’re the appetizers for the machine. The main course, historically, is you.

And meanwhile, a lot of people read threads like this, nod their heads, and don’t share. Don’t comment. Don’t take a stand. Out of fear of being labeled “right-wing”, “reactionary”, “too political on LinkedIn”. Out of comfort. Out of social cowardice.

Know that this silence has a precise historical cost. Every time a society has tipped into this madness, it did so because the reasonable majority stayed silent too long, thinking it would all blow over on its own.

It never blows over on its own.

A tale of how the people lost faith in the Oracle

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Keneinan tells a story about a people who once depended on the words of the Oracle and why they eventually stopped listening:

Once upon a time, the people of a certain land were blessed with an oracle of uncanny precision and depth in its predictions and information.

The people rose to prominence and prosperity thanks to consulting the oracle.

However, the people were never allowed to consult the oracle directly, but only through the priests that carried their questions to it, and brought the oracle’s responses back to them.

Eventually, the priests began to confuse the virtues and gifts of the oracle as their own, and began no longer to bother asking the oracle questions before deciding on what “its” answers would be.

Thus it transpired that, while the oracles was a reliable and beneficial as it ever was, since its true answers no longer reached the people, but merely the false and self-serving answers of the priests, the act of “consulting the oracle” became no longer beneficial.

So people stopped consulting the oracle.

The priests were mystified by this.

“The oracle is as reliable as ever,” they said amongst themselves. “Why do the people then no longer trust it?”

And yet they had done it themselves.

The History of SPI: Part 1 / Simulations Publications Inc. / Wargaming History

Filed under: Business, Gaming, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Legendary Tactics
Published 18 Dec 2025

Remember the golden age of wargaming? This is THE definitive history of SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), one of the most influential publishers in tabletop gaming. From its groundbreaking magazine Strategy & Tactics to iconic titles like War in the East, StarForce, and Terrible Swift Sword, SPI reshaped what board wargames could be — and built a passionate community along the way.

This is Part 1, where we delve into the origins of SPI and Strategy & Tactics Magazine, and the people and games that were part of it.
(more…)

QotD: The cultural importance of the church in early Medieval Europe

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We should start by charting the broad outlines of the place of the medieval church in Western Europe. I should start off by noting that this is a huge topic – as will swiftly become clear, there was almost no part of society in which the Church did not play a significant role – and I will only be offering a broad-strokes overview here, sufficient to provide a basis of comparison for [Game of Thrones]. Most of this discussion will principally concern the Latin Church (what today is the Catholic Church) in the West. Since this discussion is – importantly! – about the state of affairs before the reformation, I will tend to refer to the Latin Church simply as “the Church” for brevity’s sake.

The very first thing to note is that the Church (in this case, both the Latin West and the Greek East) pre-dated the Middle Ages themselves. The Church arrived in the Middle Ages as relic of the Roman Imperial past. It inherited Roman Imperial organization – the diocese, for instance, derived from the boundaries of Roman super-provinces called dioceses (Greek: διοίκησις). Unlike the new medieval aristocracy, which tended to rule from fortified estates in the countryside, the Church remained centered in towns and cities, many of which had been major centers under the Romans. As the Roman provincial administration collapsed, it largely fell to the Church – as one of the few surviving literate institutions – to replace some of the core functions, like record keeping and the preservation of literature and learning. This was less true [in] Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, places where the Church was a relative late-comer, but for most of Western Europe, the Church was not some new institution grafted on to a pre-existing society (as it had been under the Romans), but rather part of the bedrock cultural foundation upon which that new society was constructed (fellow pedants! – please note carefully the phrase part of in the previous sentence; I am aware there were other things).

That said, the institutional power of the Church (and here we really do mean what would be the Roman Catholic Church) begins to change dramatically in the 11th century, right as we enter the High Middle Ages, and continues for the next several centuries (keeping in mind that Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire really evoke the High and Late Middle Ages, rather than the Early period). In short, the institutional heft of the Church grows dramatically. Quite a few things begin happening which are linked together: the Popes begin trying to wrest control over the Church’s hierarchy (specifically, the investiture of bishops) from secular rulers. Clerical celibacy was more stringently enforced. The Church intruded into warfare (as we’ve discussed with the Peace of God / Truce of God movements). It began to more directly attempt to regulate marriage, especially among the powerful (marriage was a made a sacrament in 1184). By the 1300s, this included keeping detailed records in many parts of France about births, deaths and marriages, in part to ensure no one married a close relative.

(And, of course, for those of you thinking, “wait, isn’t this also the period of the Crusades – military expeditions called by and at least nominally (but not in practice) under the auspices of the Pope?” Yes, it is, and that’s not an accident either).

In my experience teaching this, it is the next step that baffles my students the most. This vast increase in the institutional power of the Church was made possible, not by armies or shrewd real-politic (though both were involved), but by belief. The primary weapon wielded by Popes in this effort was the threat of excommunication, which (under Catholic doctrine) cut off the excommunicated individual or community from salvation, potentially damning them for all eternity. But of course that threat is only real if you believe the Pope has that power. And therein is the key point: most of Europe did believe. As I tell my students, it is safe to assume, as a general matter, that people in the past believed their own religion. Of course there are exceptions, but the general rule remains.

In the conflicts that arose – because, as you might imagine, secular rulers were unwilling to give up their prerogatives – it did not actually much matter if the king or emperor believed in the power of excommunication, because no one rules alone. Thus when the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII in 1076, the audience for this act wasn’t Henry himself (who had already declared Gregory illegitimate anyway). It was directed at all of Henry’s vassals and supporters, releasing them from their oaths of allegiance and essentially saying, “stick with this guy, and he’ll take you to hell with him”. It worked, sparking a major rebellion and forcing Henry to humiliatingly apologize the following year.

(History note: this would be “round 1” in a multi-round fight that wasn’t settled until 1122 with the Concordat of Worms; in the end the Papacy mostly won, sharply limiting the Holy Roman Emperors’ power over their bishops).

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.

May 10, 2026

Quotulatiousness at year twenty-two

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 06:00

In 2004, my friend and co-worker Jon installed some blogging software on his site and asked if I’d like to set up my own blog there. (Hard though it may be to believe, blogs weren’t free to operate back in the dark ages of 22 years ago … free blogging sites started to pop up, but didn’t really take off for several years, and most of them were ad-supported.) I named my new blog by patterning it on Jon’s Blogulatiousness. Jon soon decided that blogging wasn’t for him, so it wasn’t long before he shuttered it, leaving mine the only active blog on the server. If I had any inkling I’d still be blogging in 2026, I assure you I’d have put a bit more thought into naming — and ease of pronunciation. But I didn’t, so we’re both stuck with my silly choice of name.

I’d been collecting online and offline quotations since the mid-80s, so I naturally thought it would make sense to focus my blogging efforts on sharing at least a few of those quotes. Some bloggers just naturally churn out brilliant and incisive essays on the issues of the day. Others post quick-hitting news or funny comments with links to other resources. I’m neither witty nor incisive, so I settled on the laziest way to fill the page: linking to a lot of those other sites run by far better writers, but including at least a few paragraphs from the linked article to entice my reader (or readers, on a good day) to click on the link and go read the entire original post.

Initially, the blog was kind of an adjunct to my quotation collection, but the blog soon ate the original quotes site … I’m ashamed to admit just how rarely I edit anything there these days.

Typical blog content is really an online incarnation of what used to be called “commonplace books” where a writer would collect information of interest that didn’t necessarily relate to the writer’s main interests or to anything else added to the book, as this summary explains:

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.

“Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós) which means “a general or common topic”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton’s example. Scholars now understand them to include manuscripts in which an individual collects material which have a common theme, such as ethics, or exploring several themes in one volume. Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.

I think that’s a pretty good description of most blogs, and certainly is true of Quotulatiousness.

Earlier anniversary postings:

Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon’s site — aren’t accessible any more. With the move to my own site, I switched from MovableType to self-hosted WordPress (currently running version 6.9.4).

The state of Britain – “Where did it all go wrong?”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Reposted from Samizdata with Patrick Crozier’s kind permission. Parallels to the same period of history here in Canada or in Australia or New Zealand should be fully evident to my fellow former colonials:

The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak.

So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates:

2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis.
Had the banks just been allowed to go bust and the banking regulation that reduced their numbers abolished we would not be looking at 20 lost years.

1997. Opening the borders.
Allowing the establishment of hostile communities in your country is not a good idea.

1987. Leaving the NHS untouched.
By 1987, the Thatcher government had privatised just about everything. Only the NHS and education were left. And they flunked it. Mind you it would probably have been electoral suicide.

1969. Failure to defeat the IRA.
If you reward terrorism you get more of it.
[NR: Canada did defeat the FLQ‘s campaign of terrorism and murder … and then basically conceded everything short of full independence that the FLQ had demanded. This is a classic example of winning the war but losing the peace.]

1965. Race Relations Act.
Keir Starmer is wrong. Britain does not have a “proud tradition of free speech”. But it did have some free speech. This act along with various successors outlawed some forms of speech. Those successors progressively outlawed freedom of association which might have gone a long way to taking the sting out of the Integration Crisis.
[NR: Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech seems ever more relevant to the daily lives of everyone in the west …]

1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty.
I appreciate libertarians tended to be divided on this issue. We may have a lot to say about what the law should be but very little about what should happen when it is broken. But if you are going to end a long-standing tradition it had better work. It didn’t.
[NR: I used to be fully against capital punishment. I’m much less doctrinaire about it now. Some people cannot be rehabilitated, and capital punishment is a better solution than life in prison.]

1963. Robbins Committee.
This led to the subsidisation of higher education and the subsidisation of student living costs. Where you get subsidy you get communism.
[NR: Universities have always been hotbeds of progressive thought. From the 1920s onward, they’ve been taken over by ideologues who want to utterly destroy western civilization … and we’ve been handing them ever more money to indoctrinate our young in their beliefs.]

c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm.
I got this from the late Brian Micklethwait but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Brian’s point was that if you couldn’t use guns to defend yourself there was very little point in having one and so it became easy for the state to ban them.
[NR: Canada is in the middle of yet another spasm of anti-gun hysteria triggered (you saw what I did there) by events in the United States. There are hopeful signs that Canadian gun owners may yet indulge in peaceful civil disobedience over the the latest attempts to disarm us.]

1948. Nationalisation of rail.
Along with coal, steel and many others along the way. Losses, strikes, decline, waste, unemployment.
[NR: Patrick and I began communicating a few years ago when I asked him for additional information about both the 1920s forced consolidation of British railway companies into the “Big Four” and the subsequent full nationalization into British Railways. We clearly agree that this was, whatever its intentions, a bad move for both the railway companies and the nation at large.]

1947. Town & Country Planning Act.
Pretty much stopped building anywhere where people might want to live. A huge contributor to putting home ownership out of the reach of millions.
[NR: I heard much more about the zoning issue from American libertarians, but the Town and Country Planning Act was a major leap in bringing government regulation into everyday life in Britain.]

1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard.
Inflation and boom and bust became the order of the day.
[NR: In retrospect, this may have been Winston Churchill’s biggest blunder: putting Britain back on the Gold standard at the pre-WW1 rate of exchange.]

1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law.
I mean to write about this one day but TL;DR while the Poor Law had many shortcomings it did at least keep people alive while keeping the costs down.
[NR: Orwell’s eloquent writing about the plight of the poor between the wars illustrate a lot of the negatives for the jobless poor of the interwar era. Far be it from me to claim Orwell was wrong … but he didn’t show the entire picture.]

1922. Creation of the BBC.
A monopoly communist propaganda organisation using the most powerful media then in existence which non-communists were forced to pay for. What could go wrong?
[NR: The BBC was for a long time constrained in its advocacy for socialist ends, but they kicked off the traces at some point. Canadians will be more familiar with the power of state-sponsored media now that the Canadian government will be paying one-third of the salaries of all the mainstream print and broadcast media outlets … and the media have already transformed into sad parodies of Nazi German or North Korean state media.]

1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs.
Other than the crime and changes to the drugs themselves (making them more dangerous than ever), the persistent failure of the War on Drugs gave the state the excuse for ever greater assaults on civil liberties.

1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise.
This meant that people could vote themselves other people’s money. It very quickly led to the replacement of the (not very) Liberal Party by the (not-at-all liberal) Labour Party. Mind you, it should be pointed out that a lot of the damage was done well before.

1910. People’s Budget et al.
In introducing the state pension, a state GP service and unemployment benefit this laid the foundations of the Welfare State that is currently doing such a good job of bankrupting the country.

1910. Payment of MPs.
I put this one in tentatively. I would like to say it meant Members of Parliament no longer had to have made something of themselves but given that a large number of them came from rich families that is not quite true.

1906. Taff Vale Judgement.
This effectively put trade unions above the law leading to endless strikes, uncompetitiveness, industrial decline and unemployment.
[NR: This was an understandable concession when unions were all in the private sector. Now that the plurality, if not outright majority of union members are government workers …]

1890s. Death Duties.
Bit by bit this destroyed the aristocracy by forcing a fire sale every time the head of the household died. [And that did what exactly, Patrick? Summat! It did summat!]

1875. Trade Union Act.
This allowed picketting or the intimidation of non-striking workers by trade unionists. I have to thank Paul Marks for bringing this one to my attention.

1870. Forster Act.
This established state education along with all that went along with it such as indoctrination, poor quality education and the opportunity costs involved in children not being able to earn money or learn a trade.

1845. Banking Act.
This began the extension of the Bank of England’s monopoly to the whole of the country.

Anything I’ve missed?

How to Make Nazi Germany Look Normal – Death of Democracy 15 – Q4 1936

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

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 9 May 2026

How did Hitler use the 1936 Berlin Olympics to make Nazi Germany look peaceful — while preparing the country for war?

Berlin, September 30, 1936. Under the Olympic flame, Nazi Germany staged one of the most successful propaganda spectacles of the twentieth century. Foreign visitors saw order, ceremony, technology, pageantry, and athletic triumph. But behind the facade, the regime hid antisemitic persecution, rounded up Sinti and Roma, intensified police repression, intervened in the Spanish Civil War, and moved toward a massive new war economy.

In this episode, Spartacus Olsson looks back at the third quarter of 1936: the Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens’ victories, Hitler’s secret war memorandum, the Four-Year Plan, Nazi propaganda, Germany’s growing involvement in Spain, and the dictatorship’s attempt to sell peace to the world while preparing for conquest.

The Olympics gave Hitler international validation. The Four-Year Plan revealed what he truly intended.

In this episode:
– How Nazi Germany sanitized Berlin before the Olympic Games
– How the regime temporarily hid antisemitic violence from foreign visitors
– How Sinti and Roma were forced out of sight before the Games
– How Jesse Owens challenged Nazi racial mythology on the track
– How Hitler moved Germany toward a war economy
– How the Four-Year Plan tied German recovery to rearmament
– How Germany’s intervention in Spain marked a new stage of escalation
– How propaganda, spectacle, and controlled media helped normalize dictatorship

This is not just a story about the 1936 Olympics. It is a story about how authoritarian regimes use spectacle, national pride, media control, and international complacency to hide what they are becoming.

Never Forget.

The “death of the reader” is how art stops being for people and becomes just for artists

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When I first got interested in Jazz, I bought all sorts of music from multiple musicians and groups, liking some more and some less. But it seemed that at some point in the 1960s, I was finding less and less of the music to be interesting and entertaining. More and more from that point on, the music seemed to be deliberately less accessible, more intricate without being pleasant or compelling to hear, and (as I characterized it years ago on the old blog) more oriented to other musicians rather than the non-musician general listening audience. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen shows that this happens in many artistic and creative pursuits and groups them all together in a phenomenon he calls “the death of the reader”:

This is what I call “The Death of the Reader”.

Authors write for readers, who aren’t authors. Artists paint for non-artists. Musicians play for non-musicians.

This keeps fiction, art, and music grounded.

But when any group stops creating for an external audience, and starts trying to impress only each other, they create a weird, self-reinforcing feedback loop.

This isn’t clothing, or even fashion. It’s a costume party. They’re all trying one-up each other with something weirder and more eye-catching.

So when an athlete, of recent and topical celebrity, who isn’t a part of their Bored Billionaires’ Club, shows up in a dress that’s just a dress, of course they are going to mock her. She’s just revealed that she didn’t get the memo. That she’s not an insider.

How she looks to the world at large is not the point.

This is why 99.999…% of copies of Infinite Jest have never been read. This is why John Cage “wrote” four minutes of silence. This is why competitive bodybuilders from the 80s looked like Greek gods, and modern ones look like gargoyle freaks.

It’s all the Death of the Reader.

Hollywood doesn’t make movies for you now. They hate you. They make movies for each other.

And then cry about how you didn’t buy a ticket, because they think your only role is to pay for their onanistic circle of self indulgence.

This game isn’t going to stop. It’s just going to keep getting weirder until someone’s dress malfunctions and catches fire, and the rest of us all have a good laugh.

The Ancient Greeks: 01 – What Made Them Special? (b) Slavery, Violence, and the Reality of Greek Life

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

seangabb
Published 31 Jan 2026

This section confronts the social realities of Greek civilisation that are often ignored or idealised.

It examines the position of women, the central role of slavery, ritualised violence against children, infant exposure, and what we would now describe as widespread paedophilia. Drawing on ancient sources such as Plutarch, Demosthenes, and Aristotle, it shows that these practices were not marginal, but embedded in Greek social norms and justified as rational policy.

Victorian and modern idealisations of Greece are critically dismantled in favour of historical evidence.

The aim is not moral condemnation, but historical clarity.

QotD: The cavalry

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

These chaps, and very recently gals, used to be stylish troops on horses who charged into the infantry and hacked them to bits. Until the infantry all stood in squares, then they needed artillery to kill them. Once weaponry got advanced enough, they decided to give all our tanks to the cavalry. Now we have few tanks, the cavalry are in denial about being infanteers and cling to the old ways by driving around in trucks claiming to be recce or other jobs. They are just posh infantry. Better tattoos but spelt correctly and mostly not DIY ones, traditions dating back to the Tudors, officers wear lemon cords and soldiers still fight each other on Friday nights.

Combat Boot, “So, ‘capbadges’, what’s that all about then?”, combatboot.co.uk, 2020-11-13.

May 9, 2026

Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I think it’s fair to say that Enoch Powell is having a moment, nearly sixty years after he shocked the establishment with his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. He became a pariah even in his own party, and his political career never recovered … but his warnings have more than been fulfilled over the intervening decades. In The Critic, Jeremy Black reviews the recently reprinted 1998 biography of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer:

Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.

The new imprint of this important biography provides an opportunity to reread one of the most skilful works on British political history published over the last half century. As with Heffer’s other books, it is also very well written — although might I offer a plea for leaving aside sentences such as “He still saw no reason to lay off Heath”?

Before turning to the substance, it is worth considering the Foreword. Written this January, it underlines Powell’s significance to many issues, notably: “His deep scepticism about the confluence of America’s interest with those of Britain”. I am, however, dubious about the proposition that “Powell was, quite simply, one of the foremost Conservative thinkers in living memory, possibly the greatest since Burke”. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke can be described as Conservative or even, prior to the 1790s, as conservative, and, separately, the implicit dig at claims for Disraeli whom Heffer is on the record as describing as a Charlatan, I myself would make the case for Salisbury, while agreeing that Macmillan, Hailsham and MacLeod did not measure up to Powell. He returned the damage done him by Macmillan with “bilious” reviews of his Memoirs.

While I am sceptical of the claim that Powell was a great Conservative thinker in the cosmic sense, he was an impressive critic of many of the shibboleths of establishment Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1980s, including on immigration, the nuclear deterrent, the Common Market, the American alliance, Northern Ireland, and economic policy.

A significant aspect of the intellectual character of Powell was the return of this one-time atheist to the Church in the late 1940s, the subject of the “Interlude” “Powell and God” in the book. There is, as Salisbury and Cowling among others underlined, a significant link between Conservatism and the Church of England, and Powell, like Thatcher, can be profitably discussed in these terms, with Thatcher far less convincing.

The discussion of Powell’s elision from public debate is also interesting. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998, the biography was kept on print-on-demand until cancelled in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Heffer compares the treatment of Powell to that of Orwell in facing difficulties in publishing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For several years, Heffer found it impossible to persuade a publisher to republish the book and suggests that this was due to a craven fear of public opinion “real or perceived”, one about which Orwell had warned not least when referring to “intellectual cowardice”. The publisher he has found, it has to be said, is another instance of the very valuable work being done by non-metropolitan concerns.

Starmer thinks local elections’ message is for Labour to move faster on their progressive agenda

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer — who many commentators have for months been describing as a “dead man walking” — somehow manages to find an interpretation for the Labour Party’s disastrous local election results, and thinks voters just sent a message that he needs to move faster and more vigorously to implement their vision. That’s certainly a take.

Nigel Farage is certainly enjoying the outcome:

Partial council election results in England, 8 May 2026.
Graphic from the Daily Mail

Hurrah for the Tealshirts! Nigel Farage emerged from Havering Town Hall looking smug even by his standards. For years, he has been written off, denied the respect — and peerage — he feels he deserves, forced to scrape by on gifts from well-wishers, and now he was showing them all, wreaking havoc on both Labour and Conservatives.

Nothing could hold the party back, not the endless terrible comments from Reform candidates who for some reason believe Farage agrees with them, not even a huge bribery scandal involving the party leader in Wales. Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster!

Elsewhere, people were gloomier. James Cleverly explained to the BBC that winning elections isn’t the goal of politics. The Conservatives aren’t interested in here today, gone tomorrow popularity, it turns out. They just want to govern well. Which leaves a couple of questions about the last decade and a half.

David Lammy told anyone who would listen that you don’t change pilot mid-flight. Better, he didn’t add, to wait until the plane has hit the ground.

The real show of the morning was the confrontation on the BBC between Cleverly’s colleague Vicky Atkins and their former fellow Tory, Robert Jenrick. Atkins and Jenrick have a long friendship going back to the time when he was the anti-Farage candidate in Newark in 2014, through the time he was an anti-Brexit MP supporting David Cameron, his days in Theresa May’s government, his early backing of Boris Johnson, his years in the Cabinet, all the way to his realisation this year that he’d never believed any of the things he’d been telling the voters.

“Robert and I haven’t actually spoken to each other since I supported his leadership campaign,” Atkins announced, and the rest of us fastened our seatbelts for a bumpy ride. “I’m surprised that he’s so quick to can all of the work that he did when he was in government.”

Next to her, Jenrick looked like a man who has arrived at a school parents evening to discover that his ex-wife got there first and has been filling people in on the reason she cut the crotches out of all his suits. But Atkins was just getting started. “Nobody should believe the snake oil salesmen,” she said. Jenrick had accused the Tories of messing things up. “Rob was part of the team that made those mistakes.”

Jenrick made another bid to get the conversation back on track. “The question is about honesty and trustworthiness,” he said. You could have used Atkins’ expression at that moment to freeze lava.

At the time of this Daily Mail report from James Tapfield and David Wilcock, the demands from Labour MPs for Starmer to resign hadn’t quite reached the “red alert” level yet:

Partial council election results in England, 8 May 2026.
Graphic from the Daily Mail

Keir Starmer is desperately fighting to subdue a Labour revolt tonight after a local elections bloodbath saw the party routed on English councils, and destroyed in Wales and Scotland.

Loyalist ministers and MPs have been deployed in a frantic bid to prop up the PM, after a series of backbenchers broke cover to demand his resignation.

So far no Cabinet ministers have publicly joined the mutiny – a moment that many believe would be the final nail in Sir Keir’s coffin.

Rachel Reeves and David Lammy were among those backing Sir Keir – but there has been an ominous lack of vocal support from Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood. London Mayor Sadiq Khan released a statement saying the results in the capital were ‘bitterly disappointing’ and the threat to the party is ‘existential’ – without mentioning the PM.

The civil war reignited this evening after Labour’s Welsh leader, Baroness Morgan, humiliatingly lost her own seat as the party’s tally of the 96 Senedd members was slashed to just nine. In a jibe at the PM, she said the Government nationally must ‘change course’.

Until yesterday Labour held nearly half the seats at the Welsh Parliament, and has never failed to top an election in the country – regarded as its birthplace.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has also conceded defeat at Holyrood, saying they had ‘lost the argument’ and pointing the finger at Sir Keir.

Meanwhile, the Greens have dealt a hammer blow by taking the mayoralty in deep-red bastion Hackney, as well as Lewisham – signposting more misery to come in London. The Labour leader in Camden – Sir Keir’s own council – has been defeated by Zack Polanski’s candidate.

Even some Labour stalwarts are reading the tea leaves correctly:

Argentina not in the news

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martin Varsavsky illustrates the real situation in Argentina after Javier Milei was elected as opposed to the dystopian nightmare imagined by the western media:

“Argentine flag” by papajuan74 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

After more than two years of Milei, the international press still does not understand what is happening in Argentina.

The narrative abroad is “shock therapy, social pain, fragile coalition”. That frame misses the actual mechanism. Argentina did not have a budget problem. It had a printing problem. From 2003 to 2023 the central bank financed deficit after deficit until the peso lost 99 percent of its value against the dollar. Annual inflation hit 211 percent in 2023. Half the country was poor. That was the floor.

What changed is not vibes. It is arithmetic. The fiscal deficit was eliminated for the first time in 16 years. Monthly inflation fell from 25 percent to low single digits. The central bank stopped printing to fund the Treasury. Country risk dropped from over 2,500 basis points to a fraction of that. Argentine sovereign debt, which used to trade like a default option, began behaving like normal emerging market paper.

Critics say poverty rose. It did, briefly, because removing price controls and subsidies revealed the real prices of energy, transport and food that the state had been hiding with debt. Once measured honestly, poverty has been falling fast. Real wages are recovering. Mortgages in pesos are reappearing, something that had not been possible in a generation.

This matters beyond Argentina. It is the clearest live experiment in whether a developed-style economy can be rebuilt by pulling the state out of places it never belonged. Spain, Italy and France should be paying attention. A country does not get poor because it lacks resources. It gets poor because its political class learned to live off printing money and calling it social policy.

Argentina spent 80 years proving that. It is now spending two years proving the opposite.

M1E5 Experimental Paratrooper Garand

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Dec 2025

In January 1944 men of the 93rd Infantry Division field-modified an M1 to give it a shorter (18″) barrel, and the rifle was sent back to the US and tested by the Infantry Board. The idea was that a rifle like this might be of use to paratroopers, being more powerful than the M1A1 Carbine they were already using. The job of exploring the idea was given to John Garand at Springfield Armory, and he began work that same month.

One example was made in the spring of 1944, using an underfolding stock designed by Garand (for which he received a patent in 1949). It was 5″ shorts and 1.2 pounds lighter than a standard M1, but exhibited excessive blast and concussion. The initial design used the folding stock with a traditional grip, and this was found uncomfortable (no surprise there). The rifle was refitted with a rather odd steel pistol grip, but this was also not a great solution. By this time testing found the whole thing undesirable and it went no farther.

Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this truly unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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