Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2026

Leading the grassroots revolt against AI … Homer Simpson

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia posted this a couple of days back, but if you haven’t read it it’ll still be new to you:

Last November I suggested that 2026 would witness a tech backlash of unprecedented intensity. And it’s now happening with a vengeance. Silicon Valley is getting skewered everywhere, and to a degree inconceivable just a short while ago.

Just yesterday, The Economist finally grasped how rapidly tech antipathy is mounting — and made AI backlash its cover story.

The latest survey numbers are devastating. Every demographic group is now opposed to AI—especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.

[…]

Not every pushback to encroaching tech is quite so gentle.

Consider the case of “Mr. Daniels,” a 25-year-old man from England. He knows that AI will rob every music file on the web for training — so he decided to poison the data.

How did he do it? According to Tuned Into Tech, it happens like this:

    He took his entire music library of 2,000 records, stripped out the original vocals, and replaced every single one of them with the voice of Homer Simpson. Then he uploaded all of them to Soulseek. He didn’t change the metadata, the file names, the artist tags, the album information. They all stayed exactly the same.

A listener might not notice at first. Some of these songs have long intros, and those are unchanged. But as soon as the singing begins, Homer Simpson takes over. When AI tries to steal this for training, it gets fooled—and contaminates its own data set.

    So somewhere deep in a training algorithm’s data set is the audio of Homer Simpson which the AI will assume sounds like [for example] Madonna, Rihanna, or maybe even Sean Paul. The model doesn’t know the difference. It just ingests the data and treats that like the truth.

    And that is exactly what Mr. Daniels is hoping for.

He wants “to introduce noise, chaos” into the bots that are putting human musicians out of work.

“Mr. Daniels” is not an isolated example. Musician Benn Jordan has also been “poison-pilling” music files in hopes of disrupting AI.

In recent months, he has watched in horror as “tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent”. They now use his own work to generate “shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name — and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music”.

As a result, he has stopped releasing music. But he hasn’t walked away from the battle — instead Jordan has developed “a type of encoding that not only makes a music file more or less untrainable by generative AI companies, but actually has the ability to decrease the quality and efficiency of their entire data set”.

“Unethical generative AI companies have made artists feel incredibly powerless for quite some time now”, he adds, “but all of that is about to change”.

A World Cup “first” – no new stadiums built just for WC matches

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

The 2026 World Cup broke new ground in several different ways, not least of which was that none of the venues for matches were built just for the tournament:

The 2026 World Cup is one for the books, a tournament of firsts. The first to be hosted by three different countries—United States, Mexico, and Canada. The first to feature 48 teams. The first time a single country, Mexico, has hosted the World Cup three times. The first time one stadium, the Azteca, opens a World Cup for the third time. The first time the final will stage a halftime show. And the first time since USA 1994 that no stadiums were built exclusively for the occasion. And while many stories are worth covering with the World Cup, let’s talk about stadiums.

World Cups, like many major competitions, face backlash for their heavy government funding, because once the fans leave, the citizens are stuck footing the bill. For most of these international tournaments, the model is first to build stadiums for the sole purpose of hosting, and then to figure out what to do with them afterward—that’s where most of the funding goes. South Africa built Cape Town Stadium from scratch in 2010, and it barely survives today as a rugby and concert venue, rebranded DHL Stadium. Brazil, the 2014 host, spent more than $3 billion on 12 stadiums, with its priciest venue, the Mané Garrincha in Brasília, a city with no major club, ending up as a parking lot for buses. While 2026 seems to have broken the pattern, at least for now, 2030 and 2034 already have preparations underway and are, in fact, building stadiums. But this time, not one venue was built for the occasion. Every stadium already existed: NFL stadiums in the United States, soccer grounds in Mexico, multi-use venues in Canada. It almost seems like the responsible version.

Almost, because even when you don’t build a stadium, hosting still sends a bill. Take Monterrey, where the stadium is privately owned and was renovated by FEMSA. Public money went elsewhere. Governor Samuel García’s administration poured billions of pesos into the city’s metro — 25 billion pesos — for three new lines to carry fans from the airport to the stadium, but it won’t be finished until 2027, a year after the fans have gone home. And in the weeks before kickoff, the government raised walls along the avenues tourists would travel, in order to hide the poor neighborhoods. Regios called them the walls of shame. It is the whole logic of the tournament in miniature: cover what you would rather the world not see. This isn’t new; hiding the poor before the international crowds arrive is an old Olympic habit.

Most of the stadiums today carry a corporate name, and because of that, most assume that the money behind them was private, too, but it wasn’t. Most US venues for the World Cup are publicly owned, all three Mexican stadiums are private, and both Canadian venues are public. Of the 30 stadiums that normally host NFL teams, only three were built entirely with private money. The rest took public subsidies, even as the name on the façade says otherwise. This wasn’t always the model.

Through much of the last century, private money built and ran arenas, and public funding for them was almost unthinkable. The shift is fairly recent. As historian Frank Andre Guridy tells it in his book The Stadium, grounds that once carried the names of places and local stories became corporate billboards. This modern wave is usually traced to 1985, when Sacramento developer Gregg Lukenbill sold the naming rights to the Kings’ new home to the Atlantic Richfield Company, and ARCO Arena was born. Naming rights themselves go back further, to Rich Stadium in Buffalo in 1973, but it was only after ARCO that the practice became the rule. Today, nearly every arena in the country answers to a sponsor.

Sparta vs Athens 2(d): Athenian Freedom – Drama, Free Speech, Trade, and the Economy

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

seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026

Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD

This final segment links culture to economics and asks what Athenian “freedom” actually looked like in practice. Drama was not a private pastime. It was a civic institution performed before the citizen body. Comedy could be brutally obscene and politically personal, naming living leaders on stage — evidence of a public culture far less timid about speech than most modern states.

From there I move to Athens as a maritime power: trade, grain dependence, Piraeus, coinage, state pay, and the economic dynamism that supported participation in Assembly and law courts. The images on the slides matter here: artefacts and “industrial art” show what Athens valued in daily life.

I end by returning to Sparta’s deliberately restrictive economy — iron currency, limited trade, enforced uniformity — and why that system could produce discipline but not lasting intellectual fertility.

This is also where I state plainly what we owe to Athens.

QotD: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The founders of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were just two of many radical critics of the industrial society. But it was their achievement to devise the first internally consistent blueprint for an alternative social order. A mixture of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy, which represented the historical process as dialectical, and the political economy of David Ricardo, which posited diminishing returns for capital and an “iron” law of wages, Marxism took Carlyle’s revulsion against the industrial economy and substituted a utopia for nostalgia.

Marx himself was an odious individual. An unkempt scrounger and a savage polemicist, he liked to boast that his wife was “née Baroness von Westphalen” but was not above siring an illegitimate son by their maidservant. On the sole occasion when he applied for a job (as a railway clerk) he was rejected because his handwriting was so atrocious. He sought to play the stock market but was hopeless at it. For most of his life he therefore depended on handouts from Engels, for whom socialism was an evening hobby, along with foxhunting and womanizing; his day job was running one of his father’s cotton factories in Manchester (the patent product of which was known as Diamond Thread). No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton.

The essence of Marxism was the belief that the industrial economy was doomed to produce an intolerably unequal society divided between the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital, and a property-less proletariat. Capitalism inexorably demanded the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands and the reduction of everyone else to wage slavery, which meant being paid only “that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer”. In chapter 32 of the first tome of Capital (1867), Marx prophesied the inevitable denouement:

    Along with the constant decrease of the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class …

    The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

It is no coincidence that this passage has a Wagnerian quality, part Götterdämmerung, part Parsifal. But by the time the book was published the great composer had left the spirit of 1848 far behind. Instead it was Eugene Pottier’s song “The Internationale” that became the anthem of Marxism. Set to music by Pierre De Geyter, it urged the “servile masses” to put aside their religious “superstitions” and national allegiances and to make war on the “thieves” and their accomplices, the tyrants, the generals, princes and peers.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

June 29, 2026

“The state of 24 Sussex Dr. [is] a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction”

Filed under: Architecture, Cancon, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For the vast majority of my readers, the address “24 Sussex Drive” might as well be “99 Sunset Strip” or “12 Grimmault Place”, but it’s a real place with some minor importance to Canadians: it’s the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada. It’s also, famously, a dump (rather like the country has been allowed to become). It finally reached the point of structural decrepitude that the current and previous PMs never bothered to move in. Now, as related in the free-to-cheapskates portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, it’s supposed to be renovated.

The official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada, 24 Sussex Drive, as seen from the Ottawa River. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (La résidence officielle du Premier ministre du Canada 24, promenade Sussex vu de la rivière des Outaouais).
Photo by sookie via Wikimedia Commons.

Hallelujah.

We’re responding to the announcement on Friday that the Canadian government will finally deal with the mess that is 24 Sussex Dr., the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada (at least in theory). Successive Canadian prime ministers have refused to spend the money necessary to keep the building, which dates to the 1860s, in a state of good repair. PM after PM has been too terrified of the optics of spending taxpayer money on their own mansion.

Rather than solve this problem like a grown-up country by pushing control of a reasonable maintenance budget to a non-political body — something like the National Capital Commission, come to think of it — we instead simply sat around and allowed the building to decay to the point where it was no longer habitable. Stephen Harper and his family gritted their way through their time there. Justin Trudeau and his family never bothered moving in, settling instead at Rideau Cottage, on the grounds of the Governor General’s residence.

Mark Carney, God bless him, has decided that enough is enough and it’s time to bite the bullet and just fix the damn thing.

We repeat: hallelujah.

We are actually fairly agnostic on one of the central debates here, namely whether the mansion should have been rehabilitated or simply knocked down and replaced. You can make the argument fairly either way. In making his announcement on Friday, Carney indicated that he had chosen rehabilitation because Canadians need to do more to stand up for their heritage and their history, and that includes 24 Sussex.

That struck us as an astute reading of where public sentiment is, and a way to buy at least partial political cover for what will remain controversial.

We were less impressed by the rest of what he announced. Instead of simply hiring a reputable firm to come up with a new design for the renovated building, getting some quotes and then proceeding directly, the government will instead dramatically overcomplicate things, as Canadian governments tend to do, by commissioning some kind of design competition to be overseen by eminent Canadian designers and architects. We wouldn’t be shocked if David Johnston shows up somehow. Louise Arbour is, of course, recently spoken for, but we’ll see if any other retired Supreme Court justices end up giving their design skills a whirl.

Renovated building this way is dumb. But we think the next part of what was announced was weirder, and certainly riskier for the government. To offset the costs, this will become something the government fundraises for.

Okay. We guess?

Hey, The Line has no problem with fundraising. (Ahem. See below.) But we aren’t a national government? The devil will be in the details here. If this is structured in a way that limits donations to Canadian citizens and residents, caps donations at a set dollar value, and includes strong transparency requirements, we guess it’s fine. Canadians have been feeling patriotic of late, especially boomers and Liberals. If the prime minister has figured out a way to offload the financing of this project onto them, we’ll find a way to live with that.

Gosh, there’s risk here. Will foreign donations be permitted? Corporations? If corporations are allowed, must they be Canadian? Will Canadian subsidiaries of foreign corporations be able to contribute? What about foreign governments? Will the future dining room of the official residence of the prime minister of Canada be brought to you by the People’s Republic of China? Will the front foyer be a gift of the people of Qatar?

We’ll see. Those details are still pending. We suspect, or at least hope, that the government was smart enough to foresee the optics of having the prime minister’s official residence sponsored by Brookfield Asset Management, to pick one example out of thin air.

So we don’t love the process, but we love that we’re at least doing this. The state of 24 Sussex Dr. has not only been a long-standing national embarrassment, it’s been a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction. Taking care of the damn house, or fixing it or replacing it, is a really easy thing by the standards of the problems the federal government is often faced with. But both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau curled up into tiny little balls and melted into jelly instead of just doing their jobs and taking care of a national infrastructure asset. That they did this simply to avoid the optics of spending a little money on themselves and future prime ministers is easily understood through the lens of politics, but no less pathetic for it.

For the record, I have no problem with the government spending the money to maintain or even upgrade the PM’s official residence, but it’s been a political liability for so long that fixing the place up will likely be far more expensive than any amount of deferred maintenance might have cost if we’d just committed to keeping the place in good condition. I’ve always been puzzled why it isn’t in the purview of the National Capital Commision anyway, so that it wouldn’t become a cheap political point-scoring opportunity every time it springs a leak or needs a window pane replaced.

The Line editors also declare they’re on Team Art Deco against the anti-human monsters of Brutalist architecture and point out that there actually is a uniquely Canadian architectural style:

Look, if the decline of 24 Sussex had become symbolic of Canadian vices like dysfunction and cheapness, there was an opportunity here to signal symbolic virtues like decisiveness and seriousness by just — announcing the government was going to fix a known problem using an architect that Carney had personally approved. There is absolutely no reason to use this building as an opportunity to create a travelling roadshow of the country’s architectural “greatness” by holding a design competition that will produce 15 different varieties of the AGO Crystal or the Edmonton Public Tank/Library. To be blunt, this country’s talent pool in architecture is as shallow as every other cultural industry we can name. It can be summed up thusly; we produce the odd star in the field who moves elsewhere. What gets left behind is derivative government-funded schlock that allows us to keep up appearances and maintain our national illusions. Our ability to create world class art of any kind at present is right up there with our ability to build a pipeline, scale a company, or manage an efficient regulatory process. Our decline is a universal problem.

“Chateau Laurier, 1927 with the new extenstion” by Ross Dunn is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Meanwhile, Canada already has a unique and rich architectural style that we should be using on all federal buildings intended to convey authority and heritage — it goes by many names, ranging from Railway Gothic, to neo-Chateau. It can be seen in beloved buildings ranging from the University of Toronto’s Hart House, to the aforementioned railway hotels that spread across the land. It’s turn of the century gothic revival meets French Chateaux and Scottish Kirk; romantic, a little ornate, and always grounded in the landscape and climate, and using the local materials. In other words, we already have a uniquely Canadian aesthetic language. We just stopped designing buildings this way when our cultural institutions decided that our history was a problem rather than the prima materia of our complicated national identity. We’ve been stuck with glass buildings and cheap concrete Soviet suicide boxes ever since.

And to be clear, we don’t think every Canadian building needs to look like it was built in 1919. Form ought to meet function. For buildings that are trying to convey modern values, or to align with environments sporting an updated aesthetic, there’s nothing wrong with a modern style. Museums and art galleries, for example, offer fine opportunities to push artistic envelopes. But when we’re considering buildings intended to convey government power, institutional authority, and the establishment of democratic legitimacy through continuation and heritage, that’s when we ought to be leaning back into our shared historic design languages. That’s the time to convey gravitas, solidity, and confidence; stone, ornate woodwork, traditional aspects and classical symmetry.

An updated version of Railway style, working in tandem with the existing structure of 24 Sussex, is the very obvious answer to the problem of the Prime Minister’s residence. If we can incorporate First Nations motifs or building materials, all the better.

But this country’s current architectural culture is profoundly derivative and fundamentally uncomfortable with the very institutional heritage this building needs to convey. Restrained and old fashioned is not the kind of thing that wins international acclaim. So instead, what we’re going to get is the generic, omnipresent, and pathologically insecure style better defined as “Modern Canadian Try Hard”. Think updated farmhouse, black window frames and white walls à la Studio McGee. Wavy glass Eurotrash that makes no sense for the climate of Canada and offers no gesture toward the symbolic value of the building.

A “good guy with a gun” is responsible for stopping a lot of crime in the US

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

If you’ve paid any attention, you’ll have been told that private gun owners are rarely if ever able to stop a crime, and even that you’re somehow in more danger if you carry a gun than if you go unarmed. The FBI certainly contributed to that message with their annual Active Shooting Reports, which seemed to indicate that civilians with guns were only responsible for stopping gun attacks 3.7% of the time. This understates the frequency by a very large margin:

The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a public place, not involving gang violence or some other crime such as robbery. Such an incident could be something as minor as one person being shot at and missed up to a mass public shooting.

While the FBI includes cases where civilians stop active shooters, the news media frequently relies on the limited number of these cases to argue that such interventions are rare. Headlines illustrate this framing: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander” (Associated Press); “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting” (Washington Post); and “After Indiana mall shooting, one hero but no lasting solution to gun violence” (New York Times). The FBI’s reports acknowledge that armed civilians stopped active shooting attacks in seven of the eleven years they reviewed.

When John Stossel asked the FBI about our claim that they had omitted many cases, the Bureau responded: “[Our data is] not intended to explore all active shooting incidents but rather to provide a baseline understanding …”

[…]

Between 2014 and 2024, citizens stopped 178 out of 339 potential or actual mass shootings where we could identify that guns were allowed in the area. So 52.5% of attacks were stopped by people legally carrying concealed handguns.

The numbers indicate that if we didn’t have gun-free zones, we would have more people stopping these attacks.

Finally, even these numbers underestimate the usefulness of legally carried concealed handguns in stopping mass public shootings because many of these active shooting incidents involve only one person being targeted. For example, suppose one person is targeted and only one person may be present. In that case, there is relatively little opportunity for people to stop attacks compared to a mass public shooting where many potential victims are present.

The general public seems to agree. A July 2022 survey by the Trafalgar Group showed that a plurality of American general election voters believe that armed citizens are the most effective element in protecting you and your family in the case of a mass shooting. First on the list was “armed citizens” at 42%, followed by “local police” (25%) and “federal agents” (10%). [“None of the above” was the answer chosen by 23% of respondents.] A survey by YouGov in May – before the Uvalde, Texas, attack – found that by a margin of 51% to 37% American adults supported letting schoolteachers and administrations carry concealed handguns.

King Charles disclaims the title “Defender of the Faith”

Filed under: Britain, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

His Majesty has been hinting of his preference for Islam since at least his thirties … becoming formal head of the Church of England fits poorly with his likely personal beliefs. This isn’t really a surprise, as the Church of England has been drifting a long way from its roots for generations now, but symbolically it is quite important, as Donna-Louise Flowers writes on Substack Notes:

This Is the End of Britain: King Charles Just Formalised the Surrender

This is absolutely shocking. It is an absolute outrage. And it feels like the beginning of the end for Britain as we have known it.

In the latest Sovereign Grant report, Buckingham Palace has ditched the ancient title “Defender of the Faith”. No more defending the Christian foundation of this realm. Instead the King is now described as protecting “the space for Faith within the multi-faith nation”. What utter nonsense. Britain is a Christian country. That is not up for debate or negotiation. If the monarch abandons that core duty, then the institution itself has abandoned the British people.

Other faiths exist here, yes. But their presence does not require the Head of State and Supreme Governor of the Church of England to water down his role into some vague, multi-faith referee. His job is to defend the Christian faith of this nation. Full stop. Not to bend over backwards for every new arrival.

King Charles has spent decades signalling exactly this shift — praising interfaith dialogue, building ties across communities, and even calling Islam a religion of peace. Now it is baked into official Palace language. While we watch our Christian heritage eroded, churches close, and British identity dissolve, the monarchy chooses accommodation over duty.

This is more than infuriating. It is a profound betrayal. We see the reality on the ground: halal meat quietly served in the NHS and in schools to everyone — often without proper consent or even basic awareness. Islamic practices are increasingly imposed on the wider population while native Britons are expected to stay silent and pay for it. Everything is tilting. Sharia norms creep in, demands multiply, and our own traditions are treated as optional extras.

We do not fly to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or anywhere else and demand they rewrite their entire way of life, abandon their religion, and serve us bacon sandwiches in their institutions. Why then must Britain endlessly accommodate, dilute, and apologise for existing as a Christian country? Why are we expected to change everything while others refuse any compromise?

This multi-faith rebranding is not progress. It is cultural surrender dressed up in polite language. A monarch who stands for everything stands for nothing. Britain had a specific, Christian character that allowed it to become the tolerant society it once was. Hollow that out and you do not get harmonious diversity — you get the slow erasure of the host culture.

I am deeply offended. Millions of ordinary Britons are deeply offended. This feels like the end of Britain as a coherent nation with its own history, faith and identity. The King’s role was never to manage a neutral spiritual marketplace. It was to defend the faith of this realm.

Enough of the euphemisms and the quiet capitulation. Call it what it is: a disgraceful abandonment of duty at the very top. If this continues, there will be nothing left worth defending. Britain deserves better.

Amusingly, the title “Defender of the Faith” was granted to King Henry VIII by Pope Leo X for a book (almost certainly co-written if not ghostwritten) refuting Martin Luther. King Henry “forgot” to disclaim the title when he broke with Rome a few years later …

Stupid Super Heavies: Germany’s Biggest Tanks

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

The Tank Museum
Published 27 Feb 2026

By late 1943 Germany was losing the war …

They needed tanks, and lots of them, if they were going to wrestle back the initiative. Instead, they became obsessed with wonder weapons they hoped could change their fate

From the logistical paralysis of King Tiger, growing ever bigger and more unwieldy with the Maus, ultimately reaching the madness of the thousand tonne Ratte.

Like Augustus Gloop, German tank development in the Second World War greedily ate up more and more resources.

While an absolute boon for historians working at The Tank Museum, it made no logical sense … What were they thinking?

This is the bewildering story of the “Super Heavies”

00:00 | Introduction
00:48 | The Panther Problem
02:27 | Bigger is Better
05:42 | Pushing the Limits
09:19 | Gigantic Fantasies
12:03 | Losing the War (and the Plot)
(more…)

QotD: Roman Imperial frontiers and “defensive barbarism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here I can’t resist a digression that touches on several of my favorite topics: where do you put your defensive lines? One obvious guess is what Luttwak calls “scientific frontiers”, geographic or other natural features such as rivers, mountains, the edges of deserts, places where the land is already bottlenecked. And that’s not bad as a first order approximation, but there are times that other considerations dominate. For example, placing your borders right along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube is actually quite awkward, because the headwaters of those two rivers come together in a sharp “elbow”. [Image from original post] This results in a kind of reverse-salient poking into your territory, and making it a much longer journey from one side of the intrusion to the other. Much better to conquer that wedge and push the border out a bit. Yes, the frontier is now marginally harder to defend, but it’s more than made up for by the reduced travel time for the army to get anywhere.

Here’s another one — why is Hadrian’s Wall where it is? There’s a much shorter and more defensible alternate location to the north, where the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde create a natural bottleneck. In fact at one point the Romans did build a wall there and claimed all the intervening territory. On paper, the Antonine Wall looks better in every way than Hadrian’s Wall. [Image from original post] It’s shorter, so requires less military “output” to defend. And it encloses more area, so brings to the “inputs” of the machine of state both additional arable land and additional people who can be taxed and conscripted. But as it happened, the Antonine Wall was quickly abandoned, and the empire retreated to Hadrian’s Wall. Why?

It all had to do with the people living between the two walls. They were … hill people who had perfected the art of not being governed. They managed to be so thoroughly intractable, so impossible to control or corral, so very unpleasant to be around, that the Romans eventually threw up their hands in disgust and left them alone. It’s important to understand that this means they must have been true outliers, because the Roman Empire had “unit economics” like an enterprise SaaS business, where “customer acquisition costs” are financed on the assumption that they’ll be paid back in the distant future. Every Roman bureaucrat understood that newly conquered territories would be a drain on fiscal and military resources for a while, until a generations-long process of pacification and Romanization slowly made them net contributors in both departments. But in the case of the lands between the two walls, the payback timeline was so long, and the implied interest rates so high, that even a people as meticulous and relentless as the Romans decided there were better opportunities elsewhere. I count this as a serious victory for the theory of defensive barbarism.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.

June 28, 2026

Multiculturalism in Australia: theory and practice

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Australia, like the rest of the Anglosphere (with the notable exception of the United States) has adopted multiculturalism as a secular national religion, yet all is not well Down Under, as Celina illustrates:

Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club address last week has thrust the conversation of multiculturalism back into the centre of Australian politics. With One Nation now the most popular party in the polls, her pledge for a “monoculture” is no longer being pushed into the fringes. Yet, as it stands One Nation doesn’t really have any concrete policy on how to abolish multiculturalism.

Firstly, we must distinguish what is meant by multiculturalism in relation to politics. Multiculturalism is not just the presence of different cultural practices in Australia. That is a deliberate straw-man. “Abolish multiculturalism and you lose your Bah mi or Chinese takeaways” is a lazy reductionism pushed by people who are either stupid or as a sarcastic question from the left about the lack of One Nations ability to provide actual policy.

Multiculturalism, as it operates in Australia, is the institutionalisation of minority ethnic and religious lobbying. It is a system in which governments treat organised ethnic, religious and minority identity-based groups as permanent stakeholders with privileged access to policy-making. These groups receive taxpayer funding, sit on advisory bodies, submit formal recommendations, and see their priorities turned into law on hate speech, anti-discrimination, social cohesion and diversity policy. The broader Australian public is expected to accept the resulting consensus.

The Machinery That Actually Exists

Australia maintains a Minister for Multicultural Affairs, an Office for Multicultural Affairs inside the Department of Home Affairs, an Australian Multicultural Council, and a Ministerial Forum on Multicultural Affairs. States have their own legislation: the Multicultural NSW Act, Victoria’s Multicultural Victoria Act, South Australia’s Multicultural Act, Queensland’s Multicultural Recognition Act and others. They create recurring funding streams, annual reporting obligations, advisory councils and grants programs that sustain an entire ecosystem of peak bodies, settlement providers and advocacy organisations.

Commonwealth multicultural grants run into tens of millions annually. Additional streams exist for “social cohesion”, security upgrades for specific communities and settlement services. Peak bodies such as the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA), the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) and the Hindu Council routinely prepare submissions, appear before inquiries and maintain ongoing relationships with ministers and bureaucrats. Personnel overlap between federal and state advisory structures is visible and recurring.

This is what political scientist Theodore Lowi called “interest group liberalism“.1 Lowi’s insight was that the pluralist system does not represent the public interest but rather rewards whichever organised groups can gain access to the machinery of government. The democratic problem is that the state has granted specific groups a structural position that ordinary, unorganised citizens do not enjoy. This results in something called mobilisation of bias, as coined by E.E. Schattschneider. described this form of power as the “mobilisation of bias“, where “some issues are organised into politics while others are organised out“.2,3

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_group_liberalism
  2. https://www.powercube.net/analyse-power/forms-of-power/hidden-power/
  3. (2011). “Mobilization of bias”. In K. Dowding (Ed.) Encyclopedia of power (pp. 424-424). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412994088.n234

“Human writing has a unique shape” and the the end of social media

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Ryan Levesque explains the major differences between human writing and AI-trained-on-human-writing:

Graphic from The Digital Contrarian

It turns out, slop has a shape.

And it’s the reason why AI generated writing sounds the way it does.

In a new study, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind ran an experiment.

They took 10,272 writing prompts and gave each one to a human author and to five AI models: Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Kimi.

They generated 61,608 stories, at around 5,000 words each.

Then, they looked at the underlying structure of each story: how the plot progresses, where the tension and conflict is placed, etc. etc.

And from that structure, they could identify a human-written story from AI-generated slop nearly 93% of the time.

Graphic from The Digital Contrarian

What you’re seeing here in that image is the shape of AI Slop vs. Human Writing.

And there are five distinct ways that the shape of human writing is decidedly different from the so-called slop generated by today’s AI models:

  1. AI over-explains its themes. (instead of letting readers infer)
  2. Human writing is less linear. (more time-jumps and flashbacks.)
  3. AI relies on bodily metaphors to explain emotion. (81% vs. 38% human)
  4. Humans reference specific texts, brands, places. (nearly 2x the AI rate)
  5. AI narrative is less diverse. (fewer subplots and scenes, less dialogue)

[…]

The Beginning of the End of Social Media?

The clearest place to watch this shape materalize?

Social media.

This week, Farah Cormack mapped the predictable sequence, in a piece called “The Beginning of the End of Organic LinkedIn“.

Her argument is that every platform moves through the same five stages:

  1. Early adoption. A small group forms around something they love. It feels like a secret.
  2. Scaling. The crowds show up, and so does the money.
  3. Critical mass. Everyone’s here now. Organic and paid are both running hot.
  4. Enshittification. The business model takes over the product. The feed fills with ads, and the place starts to feel like every other place.
  5. Decline. The people who made it worth showing up for get fed up and leave.

Her read is that LinkedIn just crossed into stage four. The tell is its new Creator Marketplace, a feature that literally puts your reach openly up for sale.

(If your own posts have been reaching fewer people lately, you’re not imagining things … this has been engineered.)

The shape of Enshittification is a five-stage decline, and most of the social media platforms we use are somewhere at stage 4 or 5 right now.

Futurist Sinead Bovell goes further, and argues we’re watching the beginning of the end of the social media era itself.

The reality is that people don’t really post for friends/social circles like we used to even just a few short years ago.

Bovell argues that the entire reason we post is to be seen by other humans.

That’s the whole deal.

We post to signal that we’re employable, or interesting, or worth following, or because we want to sell something …

And we do that, because real people are on the other end, watching us.

Take those real people away, and the entire thing stops making sense …

But that’s exactly what’s happening.

Personally, I think LinkedIn hit stage four a lot sooner than this, almost certainly because it originated as a business-oriented platform. The owner of a company I worked for in the 2000s required that all managers have active LinkedIn accounts, so I was “active” there for a couple of years, but I felt it quickly lost any actual benefits and became a forum of boastfulness and sycophancy. There were serious people on the platform, providing useful and insightful posts, but the vast majority of content was self-promotion and empty flattery.

How to Steal a Country Without a European War – Death of Democracy 21 – Q1 1938

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

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 27 Jun 2026

In early 1938, Adolf Hitler turned a military scandal into personal control over the Wehrmacht — and within weeks used that power to pressure, invade, and annex Austria in the Anschluss. This episode follows the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis, Hitler’s February 4 command takeover, the Berchtesgaden ultimatum, Schuschnigg’s failed plebiscite gamble, the German invasion of March 12, and the terror that followed in Vienna.

This was not just a border crisis. It was the moment Nazi Germany moved from internal dictatorship to open territorial expansion. Britain and France did not intervene, Austria was erased as a sovereign state, and Hitler’s next target — Czechoslovakia — was already coming into view.

This historical documentary examines Nazi Germany, the Anschluss of Austria, the Wehrmacht, appeasement, antisemitic terror, propaganda, and the collapse of the post-1919 European order.

Educational documentary. Nazi symbols and imagery are shown only in a historical, critical, and anti-fascist context.

George R.R. Martin left “a smoking crater” where the epic fantasy market used to be

Filed under: Books, Business, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Full disclosure, I’ve never read any of George R.R. Martin’s novels from which the Game of Thrones TV series began (I did read some of his earlier work). His failure to complete the book series has had serious negative consequences on the ability of other authors, as Larry Correia explains:

I’ve been telling people this for years.

GRRM pissed off millions of customers but he don’t give a shit. He got his bag. But his legacy is being such an epic bum ass bum that he crippled an entire genre, ruined consumer sentiment, and killed off an entire generation of epic fantasy authors.

Romantasy and LitRPG grew as a direct result of filling the smoking crater George left in the industry. New writers could no longer get deals to write epic fantasy unless the entire series was in the bag, and nobody can afford to gamble that much time to write that many books they may never sell.

Publishers no longer took chances on new series because customers had got burned by lazy shirkers like George and Pat. Agents wouldn’t represent new epic fantasy unless the whole thing was done. It hurt Indy because dudes had to convince customers that they weren’t bums too. Except when book one makes $50 total, because customers said I’m not starting a new series until it’s done! they sure as shit ain’t writing book two. So it’s a self fulfilling prophesy of suck.

In the comments Dunning-Krugerands are saying this isn’t true. Look at guys like Brandon Sanderson. Wrong. Guys like him, or me, who already had established names, reputations, and fan bases were fine. We had enough customers who trusted us we could still do new things and people would come along to make it economically viable.

For example, the only reason my epic fantasy series got picked up is because I was already successful and could guarantee a viable level of sales off my existing fans. Newbs don’t have that. And over the ten years it took for me to write the six books to finish it, the entire time I heard from potential customers, nope, not gonna start a new series that might not finish because of George.

I am fine during this because I’m still gonna make a couple hundred grand off each of those just off my existing fans. Newbs make two bucks an hour, say to hell with being a writer I’m going back to my day job, and you all missed out on the next great author and his absolutely brilliant series, because you were too mad at billionaire George shoving twinkies in his mouth instead of writing.

Nope. Guys like me and Brandon are fine. George’s profound laziness screwed over the new guys. Customers and the industry quit taking chances on new guys. We will never know how many excellent fantasy series we missed out on, robbed by George’s laziness burning so many customers.

Some writers gave up, but others moved into different genres. Which is good. But it sure does suck if epic fantasy is your jam. LitRPG is close but different enough it blew up during this time frame because that’s where the talented went.

Being such a pretentious, bloviating bum that you damage an entire industry and strangle a generation of aspiring artists is quite the legacy.

Kal (who is a good writer btw, check out his books) asks what can we do about this? For me personally I’m just gonna continue mocking George’s work ethic in the hopes more normies realize what an outlier he is, and how they should expand their horizons to read other authors who aren’t stuck up, know it all, dickheads.

And before anybody starts barking at me that I’m such a hypocrite because I’ve not finished all my series, sorry I’ve only finished three of eight so far, and have only written THIRTY books since George’s last one, the next MHI comes out in December, and the last two books are next year, and I’m not planning on retiring anytime soon (if ever).

Bannerman, the Father of Gun Collecting: Tales from the Golden Age of Surplus

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Feb 2026

Francis Bannerman is really the father of the modern military surplus industry, and in many ways a father of gun collecting as we know it today. Before Bannerman, “gun collecting” was generally something for the wealthy and revolved around fancy and bespoke guns. It was not about have representative pieces of normal arms, it was about having the fancy and exclusive things. Bannerman changed that by offering all manner of ordinary surplus at affordable prices to anyone who was interested. In addition to complete guns and other equipment, Bannerman also dealt in huge numbers of bits and pieces, and sometimes assembled them into various odd hybrid guns for sale, which we still see occasionally today …

Sample Bannerman catalog (1903):
https://archive.org/details/francis-b…
(more…)

QotD: Getting cloth to market in the ancient and medieval world

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

Transport costs remain a significant factor in the organization of textile trade. Prior to the invention of the steam engine and thus the train, moving lower value goods in any kind of bulk overland any significant distance was prohibitively expensive. In contrast, seas and rivers represented blue roads and highways, allowing for far cheaper and faster transport of bulk goods. The typical estimate, derived from the Diocletian’s Price Edict (and thus dating to the Late [Western] Roman Empire, so this is with the system of Roman roads; take those away and things get even worse for land transport) is that the ratio of the cost of land, river and sea transport was roughly 20:4:1, with sea transport thus being four times cheaper than river transport and twenty times cheaper than road transport for bulk goods (like fabric).

It should thus be of little surprise that regions involved in major textile production for export were often concentrated either on coasts or on rivers that were navigable to the sea (one may map the regions Pliny lists as major wool and linen exporters to find that they are all accessible by sea). While the sheep themselves may be grazed part of the year up in the uplands far from the coast, one of the great advantages of transhumance is that the sheep may transport themselves under the care of their shepherds to villages and lower pastures not too far from coastal towns which may serve as centers of textile production and major points of sale.

Now those transport costs become less and less significant the more valuable the goods being transported are. For a bulk good like grain (or common wool), transport may represent a majority of the costs. But if one is shipping something extremely valuable (particularly valuable per unit weight), the cost of acquisition at the source (and the profits of final sale) are much larger relative to the transport costs and less efficient methods of transportation become useful, thus the viability of silk and other expensive luxury goods being transported overland across Eurasia on the famous Silk Road.

Very high value fabrics didn’t need to come from so far afield though. In the Roman world, the province of Asia (corresponding roughly to western Turkey today) had several notable centers of production for particularly high valued textiles (on this, see I. Benda-Weber, “Textile Production Centers, Products and Merchants in the Roman Province of Asia” in Gleba and Pásztókai-Szeöke, op. cit.). Thyateira’s guild of purple-dyers (the πορφυροβάφοι) seem to have had trade contacts for their wares – wool dyed Tyrian purple via the murex snail – all over the province as well as in Macedonia and Italy. Weavers in the region were also known for producing fabrics with complex woven patterns and Miletus, one of the major ports in the region, had as noted the reputation for producing the best dyed wool in the Mediterranean. Such fabrics were highly valued and we find evidence that such fabrics were bought not merely by the Roman elite, but also made overland as far as Persia where such wares were valued at the Achaemenid (550-330 BC) court.

Neverthless, not all fabrics moving through trade in antiquity or the middle ages were rare or high value fabrics. As Jinyu Liu notes in a study of inscriptions relating to the textile trade, “coarse wool and wool of medium quality, and products made of these non-luxury wools dominated the market” in the Roman Empire, often being “pulled” through trade towards both large population centers in the interior of the empire and towards the Roman armies in the frontier provinces, both of which must have outstripped local production in their demand for textiles (Liu, “Trade, Traders and Guilds (?) in Textiles” in Gleba and Pásztókai-Szeöke, op. cit.). This trade included not just fabrics but also ready-made products like garments or blankets which must have been aimed at fairly modest people, neither the very poor (who couldn’t afford them) nor the wealthy (who wouldn’t have been caught dead in “ready-made” one-size-fits-no-one clothing), but rather the middling urban workers and common soldiers (and perhaps small farmers, though we might assume their households would produce most of their own textiles in the countryside where wool and flax, being agricultural and pastoral products, might be more available).

In Medieval Europe, just as in the ancient world, the centers of textile trading tended to follow the water as it made transport easier. England was a major wool-producing center in the high and later Middle Ages (and into the Early Modern period), with J.S. Lee (op. cit., 9) estimating production per capita exploding from around 1.3 pounds per person in the early 1300s to 7 pounds by the 1550s as the textile production system in England reoriented towards export. Wool products, produced in towns mostly in towns that were nearly coastal or had river-access flowed down by coastal trade and up the Thames to London to either be sold and used there or to be further exported to the dyers and fabric markets of the Low Countries (where fabrics could use the Rhine to travel further into the continent) or to be bought by the merchants of the Hanseatic League and so head into the Baltic.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVb: Cloth Money”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-04-09.

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