Quotulatiousness

June 4, 2026

“It’s called Starship Troopers, not The Big War with the Bugs“

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen explains why filmgoers still identify with the humans in Verhoeven’s unfaithful-to-the-story film of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers:

Here’s a hint:

It’s called Starship Troopers. Not The Big War with the Bugs.

There’s a reason for that. Heinlein was one of the 20th century’s greatest authors, if not THE greatest, and he was also the 20th century’s greatest philosopher and it’s not even close.

So he didn’t name things by accident.

Starship Troopers isn’t about the war. It isn’t even about war. And it’s certainly not about the fucking bugs.

All that shit is just stage dressing for the story is really about. That’s why the book doesn’t end with defeating the enemy. It ends with Rico meeting his father again, facing future fights together.

Starship Troopers is about the military life, the relationship between armies and the civilizations they serve, and what it means to be a soldier and a man.

Eurotrash communists failed to get the point, not merely because they have the “media literacy” of a sack of wet hammers, but also because they don’t understand soldiering, civilization, or manhood.

So, yes, Verhoeven tried to make fun of Heinlein and failed miserably because Heinlein was a better storyteller, a better man, and a better human being by a margin so great that the Earth can barely encompass it.

But even though his failed satire makes humanity clearly the good guys, the war clearly righteous, and soldiers clearly cool and heroic, it still doesn’t recapture the actual meaning of Starship Troopers.

Because the real themes were so invisible, so incomprehensible, to Verhoeven that he couldn’t even see them to disagree with.

So enjoy the film for what it turned out to be … a fun, campy, morally unambiguous story of heroes squashing disgusting bugs. Suitable for popcorn consumption.

Then, read more Heinlein.

Update, 6 June: 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.

Sci-Fi and the WWII Mythos Part II : The Political Element

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

Feral Historian
Published 16 Jan 2026

Last time I was focused on cultural aspects, but what about the direct political manifestations today? Is there a resurgence of neo-nazi attitudes or is just an artifact of the ubiquity of digital media preserving everything? Why might those ideas resonate with the young, and how does it fit with my argument that the old myths are breaking down?

00:00 Intro
01:42 Right, Left, and Gen-Z
02:56 Patterns of Force
04:25 Rambling about Economics
05:48 Efficient? No.
06:39 Bifurcation
08:00 Loss of Perspective

This one is a direct result of a conversation on the Talking History program on KSMU (I’ll link the episode when goes up) and covers something that came up but wasn’t really addressed well.
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QotD: Demographic decline in the late western Roman Empire

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

As we’ve seen, the evidence – largely archaeological evidence, by the by (Liebeschuetz thus fits with many other historians in the “decline and fall” counter-reformation in relying heavily on archaeological data) – suggests that urban centers declined markedly beginning in the fourth century, with that decline accelerating as the empire crumbled. That of course raises the fairly obvious question: where did all of the people go? One possible theory is that the population mostly ruralized, moving out of the city and into the countryside. That might even suggest a positive change, if one accepts the view that ancient cities were mostly “consumer” cities which didn’t produce much value but instead survived off of taxes and rents extracted from the countryside. In that view, the decline of cities could simply be a product of the collapse of systems of exploitation as the political order which maintained them weakened.

It’s a plausible theory and the only problem with it is that it doesn’t appear to have actually happened.

Here the key archaeological method is what is called “field survey“. While readers are probably more familiar with the intensive excavation work done at famous sites like Pompeii or Vindolanda, one tool archaeologists have to study the past is to survey large areas, sometimes by air, sometimes by on foot, sometimes with ground penetrating radar, in an effort to map out larger scale settlement patterns in the past than would be possible by labor-intensive single-site excavation work. Dateable remains (pottery most often) allow for archaeologists to get a rough sense of the dates in which sites were inhabited and in some cases building remains and the like can give some sense of what kind of settlement was present. The “error-bars” on some of this data can of course be large, but they offer a tool for tracking long-term changes in land use patterns. On the flip side, these sorts of studies really become valuable only when you have a lot of them to create a robust data-set over a fairly large area that lets you adjust for purely local patterns and distortions. Fortunately in much of the former Western Roman Empire and especially in Roman Italy (where these studies are very important for the study of Roman demography and agriculture) we’ve hit the tipping point where there is enough archaeological data to begin reaching for conclusions.

Now there is an immediate difficulty with using this kind of evidence, which is that for reasons we’ll get to in a moment (though they are reasons that tend to also be bad for the “change and continuity” argument), we have a major confounding variable here: site visibility. Our ability to see a site, archaeologically, is heavily dependent on factors like building material and the quantity of imperishable goods (especially pottery) that people are using. For reasons we’ll get to, compared to, say, second century AD communities, sixth century AD communities tended to build their buildings in far more perishable (and thus less visible) materials (like wood) and also tended to use a lot less imperishable household goods. Consequently, it is substantially harder to see a sixth century village than it is to see a second century villa.

Nevertheless, the decline is so marked and so consistent as to strongly suggest there is something real here. R.P. Duncan Jones (in “Economic Change and the Transition to Late Antiquity” in Swain and Edwards (eds) Approaching Late Antiquity (2006)) assembles some of the site data from around the empire; there is unsurprisingly a lot of regional variation (with some regions, like Syria, actually moving against trend), but in the western Empire (except N. Africa; decline there comes later) the trend is fairly clear, with site numbers declining (often drastically by half or more) beginning in the late third or fourth centuries. Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome notes a field study outside of Rome in which the number of sites declines by three quarters. Site data accumulated like this isn’t often very chronologically precise, so we’re dealing with centuries, not decades, but the clear trend suggests rural population decline, not an urban population ruralizing. To be visible to us in this way, the decline must have been quite severe.

To give a sense of the scale of the decline, here is an abbreviated version of a chart from Bruce Friar’s “Demography” chapter in the second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, which breaks down the estimated population of the Roman Empire by region and adds the dates when each of those regions got back to their Roman-era population:

Chart from Frier, “Demography” CAH2 XI (2000), 814. Some of these figures would likely see some revision today, mostly downward revisions of growth combined with upward revisions in population reflecting a somewhat (but generally not massively) higher estimated pre-Roman population.
Note that the decline in the East was, as noted last time, both later and generally slower. The reason for the later times to reattain Roman population here in many cases is that the major medieval Islamic population centers were further East (e.g. Baghdad under the Abbasids) placing them outside the traditional bounds of the Roman Empire, but also that the Roman East was much more urbanized and densely populated compared to its land area than the Roman West in the second century (or at any time during the Roman Period) so the “population to attain” bar on the East was much higher. After all, the cities of places like Syria or Egypt were in many cases centuries or even millennia old when the Romans showed up.

Now the long times there to regain the Roman population can be a bit deceiving (and are very approximate). For reasons we’ll get into shortly, population growth from 600 to 900 or so in Europe was very low, so the issue here isn’t that the decline was so steep that it took many centuries to recover from, but rather that the decline was from a high population equilibrium to a low population equilibrium, both of which were, under their own conditions, stable (if that is confusing, don’t worry, we’ll delve more into it in a moment). Second, the apparent gap between places that “caught up” before 1300 and those that “caught up” after it is smaller than it looks, because of course the mid-1300s represent a massive population discontinuity over the entire broader Mediterranean world due to the Black Death such that a lot of those places “catching up” in the 1200s probably fell behind again due to the plague and then caught up again in the 1400s or early 1500s.

But this now raises two related questions: first, why did population decline so sharply and second, what was the impact on quality of life that resulted? The old answer to the first question was of course “the barbarians killed everyone” but as we’ve seen, while the fifth century was a violent time, the violent discontinuities were not that extreme. Surely the violence of the period has something to do with some of this declining population, but as noted, the underlying population (with their language and religion) didn’t much change (and the raw number of “barbarians” coming over the frontier was, in demographic terms, fairly small). Most of those Roman cities decayed, rather than being burned. But if the “barbarians” didn’t kill everyone, what did and why did that somehow have a negative impact on the survivors? The answers to these two questions are actually linked in that they depend on the same evidence, so that is where we will go next.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-02-11.

June 3, 2026

China’s pirate fishing fleets

Filed under: Americas, Books, China, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

John Carter was really impressed with a recent self-published novel by Frank Kidd, and takes the time to set up the real-life situation the novel imagines being kinetically addressed:

A few years ago a photograph taken by a pilot over the Pacific went viral. It showed a mysterious red glow spreading ominously out over the water.

Initially people thought it was aliens, and to be fair, they weren’t far off. The glow belonged to the closest thing humanity has yet invented to a Tyranid hive fleet: a Chinese fishing fleet raping the seas in search of seafood. The glow is from huge banks of LEDs, which the ships use to draw marine life to the surface, where they trawl it up with nets. Much, maybe even most of the indiscriminate catch is discarded.

China has over half a million fishing vessels. Their vast fleets comprise thousands of ships, and can often be seen from orbit.

The triangular lights inside the red circle are a Chinese fishing fleet.

China has long since eaten its way through its own territorial waters, and therefore sends its fleets out into the rest of the world’s oceans. As a rule marine life is much more abundant close to the shore, since this is where most of the nutrients are. Fishing in another country’s territorial waters is illegal under international law. The Chinese do not care. Their fleets park just on the edge of a country’s Economic Exclusion Zone, and then turn off their Automatic Identification System transponders so that they can sneak inside and poach. Turning off an AIS transponder is also illegal: maritime law requires these to be activated at all times, for collision avoidance and search and rescue. Organizations which track this regularly observe Chinese ships on EEZ borders disappearing from the AIS network, and reappearing a few hours later on the right side of the border.

Here we see the scum pillaging the ocean around the Galapagos. Yeah. I know. Billions must die.

The consequences for local fishermen are disastrous: the Chinese scoop up all the fish, and lead the local fisheries towards ecosystem collapse. When they’re done pillaging they just move on, leaving an oceanic wasteland in their wake.

Environmental groups generally don’t seem very bothered about this, perhaps because the ocean is a CO2 sink whether or not there are fish in it, and the only thing that matters about the environment is how much carbon is in the air. National governments are reluctant to take action, because they are often dependent upon Chinese investment for their economic growth. The only people who really seem to care are fishermen and Internet racists.

This is the set-up for Frank Kidd‘s immensely satisfying debut mercenary novel, Once Upon A Time In Argentina.

“… basically it’s a plan to make power more expensive while campaigning on affordability”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John Robson examines a few of the ways the Ontario government (and other provincial and state governments) frames what they call “affordability”, yet somehow it always seems to cost more afterwards and nobody is ever held responsible:

In many areas of life, the devil is famously in the details. And it presents both an opportunity and a frustration because there is so much out there deserving readers’ attention that you can’t even follow it all let alone cram it into a newsletter. Including former banking executive Parker Gallant‘s vigilance about the absurdities of the power system in the Canadian province of Ontario that the aspiring Conservative premier Doug Ford promised to fix in the 2018 campaign and then has smugly done nothing about. These things might seem uninteresting if you do not live in Ontario … until you realize it’s just as bad wherever you live. And when we say bad we mean both the cost and the deviousness with which it is presented to, or hidden from, the public. On this very point we like to quote the late great P.J. O’Rourke that “Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud … when someone creates a system in which you can’t tell whether or not you’re being fooled, you’re being fooled.” Which brings us to the shiny new buzzword “affordability” which refers to policies that make everything more expensive and the beneficiaries hide the fraud in tangles of complex bureaucracy.

If you want to get a headache, stay with us while we explain what it is that Gallant tracks. Ontario has what they call the “Independent Electricity System Operator” so politicians can claim whatever disaster is unfolding isn’t their fault. Sure, they make the laws and oversee the creation of the regulations. But heck, these things are “arms’ length” and “impartial” and independent and expert and wise and wonderful so shut up.

Including this nutty system where the province buys power we don’t need at grossly inflated rates from wind and solar virtue-signallers and then sells the surplus at deep losses to the neighbouring province of Quebec and some American states including New York and Michigan. So he looked in depth (we promised a headache) at just half a day, May 19, 2026, because a post by another of the people who keeps an eye on this stuff for the benefit of an indifferent or baffled populace alerted him to something fishy in the IESO forecast of generation by Industrial Wind Turbine operators. But it seems to be hard to find out exactly how much the taxpayers, via this wonderful “Independent” system with its hand in their pockets via the arm of the state, actually paid these IWTs not to produce power.

Paid them what? Yup. It’s how it works. And the idea is that if they didn’t produce the original forecast rather than the revised one we’d have had to pay them even more for what they didn’t do. Weird even by the standards of government. And expensive. As Gallant sums it up:

    The net result is that those IWT cost us Ontario ratepayers almost $2.6 million for NOTHING over just the first 12 hours but we should rest assured the IWT owners loved it!

You read that right. The citizens of Ontario paid $2.6 million to the energy producers of the future not to produce energy in the present in just half of one day. If it were typical, it would be over $5 million a day times 365 days in the year so yes indeedy folks nearly $2 billion a year.

[…]

He then looks at various efforts to try to figure out the cost to consumers, including one by “my friend Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York)” based on the auction price of “allowances” in March 2025:

    Roger’s conclusion at that time was that the RGGI auctions were adding about $8-11/MWh to the wholesale cost of electricity, for electricity produced by natural gas. That would mean an addition of about 1 cent/kWh on a consumer’s bill. A penny may not seem like much, except when you realize that the average price in the country is less than 18 cents/kWh, so the penny is about 6%.

Imagine if people knew. As he concludes:

    remember that the structure of the program is that the amount of allowances goes down every year and the price is intentionally driven up. And data centers are going in all over the place. And the Northeastern states have refused to build new power plants for a couple of decades now in the midst of the climate hysteria. So the 10-15% extra cost being experienced now is only the beginning of much worse to come. The worst part of the RGGI ‘cap and invest’ scheme is that the consumers get absolutely nothing for the increased cost. It is just a gratuitously inflicted injury brought about by completely artificial scarcity. Keep this in mid when you hear a politician from an RGGI state talking about how they care about energy ‘affordability’.

Or, we add, transparency. Or accountability.

The Korean War Week 102 – American Bioweapons on Korean Soil? – June 2, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 2 Jun 2026

The Chinese continue their campaign of accusing the US of practicing germ warfare in North Korea and Manchuria. Meanwhile in South Korea, Syngman Rhee has declared martial law in Pusan as part of his campaign to remain in power.

00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:23 Germ Warfare Charges
11:17 Bull Boatner
15:34 Holding POWs
17:58 Summary
18:13 Conclusion
19:21 Call to Action

Brits and Americans mispronounce foreign words differently, film at 11

Filed under: Britain, Food, Italy, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR explains why American mispronunciations of Spanish or Italian words tend to be less offensive to those cultures than equivalent British linguistic manglings:

Ah, yet another round of the great pasta-pronunciation debate.

My credentials to speak on this: I am American. I have lived in Great Britain. I have lived in Italy. I pay attention to descriptive phonology. And I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish.

These facts make me an expert witness on this issue.

Yes, Brits do in fact systematically mispronounce words like “pasta” and “taco” in a way Americans find amusing. But the interesting part of this story is the reason *why* Americans pronounce these words in a way much closer to the Italian and Spanish originals.

It isn’t superior virtue or worldly sophistication or anything like that. It’s the result of an important feature of the American linguistic environment that it doesn’t share with the British one, and which Americans themselves seldom even notice.

Many Americans have heavy exposure to the phonology of Spanish. Brits do not. The result is even that even those of us who are completely monolingual (which is most of us) tend to have models for two phonological systems in our heads rather than one; the second one being Spanish.

There’s a video about this somewhere on YouTube by a linguist, an English one as it happens, who explains that Americans attempting to reproduce the vowel sounds of a foreign language often bend it to try and fit it into the five-vowel system of Spanish. And this is true even when they don’t actually speak Spanish themselves.

One consequence is that even Americans who don’t know Spanish pronounce it tolerably well. Intelligibly, at least. Same goes for Italian, the phonology is slightly different but similar enough.

We crash-land on languages that have vowel systems quite unlike either English or Spanish. There are good reasons that when an American says “pasta” or “taco” his pronunciation is quite unlikely to make a native wince or laugh, but there is no such guarantee about French. Or German. Or Russian. Or just about anything else.

We’re just as lost as the Brits are trying to pronounce those languages. The difference is that, unlike a Brit, we may not mispronounce the local language in a way that makes it sound like a mangled version of English. Americans are likely to make it sound like a mangled version of Spanish instead.

What is Turkish Delight? How to make real Ottoman Turkish Delight

Filed under: Europe, Food, Greece, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 9 Dec 2025

Beautiful red Turkish delight dusted with powdered sugar and starch and flavored with rose water and musk

City/Region: Ottoman Empire
Time Period: 1844

I don’t know about you, but I first learned about Turkish delight from The Chronicles of Narnia, where Edmund sells out his family for a box of the confection. True Turkish delight, made in Turkey or Greece, is made of sugar and starch, but when other countries tried to copy it, they often added gelatin, which gives it a completely different texture.

While we can’t be absolutely certain which kind Edmund liked, I hope it was the true Turkish kind that melts in your mouth beautifully. If you’ve never tried musk, it’s a unique flavor that reminds me of clean laundry and perfume, and mixes with the rose water to make a flavor profile unlike anything else I’ve had. All in all, I wouldn’t sell my family out for it, but it is very good.

Rose water or musk aren’t your thing? Feel free to change the flavorings to whatever you like. Almond, orange blossom water, and pistachio were popular at the time.

    Rahatu’l-hulkum
    Method: Take one kiyye of the finest sugar and prepare a syrup with three kiyyes of water in a tinned pan … take 75 dirhems of the finest pounded starch and slowly stir into the syrup. It must be stirred constantly so that it does not form lumps or stick to the bottom of the pan … Then blend 35 dirhems of rose water with a grain of musk and after adding to the mixture stir a few more times before removing from the heat. Oil a tray with almond oil and pour in the cooked mixture. When cool cut into pieces of the desired size and toss into a mixture consisting half of sieved starch and half of powdered sugar, and stir until they do not stick together. It will be delicious.

    — Melceü’t-tabbahîn by Mehmet Kamil, 1844

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QotD: Rhodesia and the suicide of the West

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

The history of the twentieth century is a graveyard of nations, but few corpses refuse to stay buried quite like Rhodesia. To the modern liberal consensus, the short-lived republic in southern Africa is a pariah state, a moral stain on the map of history that was righteously erased to make way for the “liberation” of Zimbabwe. It is dismissed by them as a racist anachronism, a desperate attempt by a White minority to hold back the tide of history. Yet, for those willing to look past the cordon sanitaire of “accepted historiography”, Rhodesia remains a haunting and prophetic presence.

The story of Rhodesia is not only a regional tragedy, it is a civilisational warning. It is the story of a state that was functional, prosperous, and militarily superior, yet was dismantled not by its enemies in the bush, but by the “kith and kin” of its own civilisational bloc. It serves as a controlled experiment in the “Suicide of the West” , illustrating what happens when a civilisation loses the will to defend its own outposts and succumbs to a “politics of cultural despair“.

Today, as the nations of Europe and the Anglosphere grapple with their own crises of identity, demographic replacement, and institutional decay, the Rhodesian experience has moved from the periphery to the centre of conservative analysis. The arguments made by Ian Smith (former Prime Minister of Rhodesia) and his contemporaries, no longer appear as the reactionary pleas of a dying regime. Instead, they appear as the desperate warnings of men who saw the abyss before the rest of the world was willing to look.

The Philosophical Crisis and the Suicide of the West

To understand the fall of Rhodesia, one must look not to the Zambezi Valley, but to the intellectual salons of London and the university campuses of the United States. The doom of the settler state was engineered by a profound shift in the Western psyche, a shift identified by the philosopher James Burnham as the “Suicide of the West.”

James Burnham’s thesis, articulated in his 1964 classic Suicide of the West, provides the essential diagnostic framework for the Rhodesian tragedy. Burnham argued that liberalism had mutated into an ideology of Western suicide, a system of belief that systematically dismantled the defences of its own civilisation while valorising its enemies. In the context of Rhodesia, this manifested as a perverse diplomatic double standard. As the American economist Milton Friedman observed after his visit to Salisbury in 1976, the West seemed intent on destroying a pro-Western, anti-Communist state that upheld property rights and the rule of law, while simultaneously “welcoming the ministers of the Gulag Archipelago with open arms”.

Friedman explicitly linked the Rhodesian situation to Burnham’s concept, noting that the sanctions imposed on Rhodesia were a clear act of self-immolation by the Western powers. By strangling Rhodesia, the West was not advancing human rights, it was handing a strategic victory to Soviet and Chinese proxies (ZAPU and ZANLA) and signalling to the world that loyalty to the West was a liability. The Rhodesian settler, who had fought for the British Empire in two World Wars, found himself cast as the villain, not because he had changed, but because the West had lost faith in its own legitimacy.

Celina 101, “We are all Rhodesians Now”, Celina’s Substack, 2026-01-31.

June 2, 2026

Judging Javier Milei’s work by the numbers

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Thanks to automated translation from the original French on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Laurent outlines what he sees in the data from Argentina before and after Javier Milei became president:

I’ve been wondering for a while now about the (provisional) balance sheet of Milei in Argentina. You read everything and its opposite. So I stopped reading the commentary and looked at the raw numbers.

Argentina is the full-scale experiment that economists have been waiting for for 50 years. Same country. Same people. Same culture. We change ONE variable: the economic method.

Before: decades of statist and Peronist management, “redistributive”. The concrete result? 211% inflation, 42% poverty, a state in permanent deficit that funds its lifestyle by running the printing press.

Then Milei arrives. The opposite method, brutal, acknowledged: we cut, we deregulate, we stop printing.

Two years later ([snapshot] at his arrival (end of 2023) vs today):

Annual inflation: 211% → 31%
Monthly inflation: 25% → ~2%
Public deficit: −5% of GDP → +1.8% (surplus)
Growth: −1.6% → +4.4%
Poverty: 42% → 28%

No debate. Judge for yourselves.

And the essential point: these gains don’t go “to the rich” or “to the markets”. They go first to the poorest.

Inflation is the most unjust tax that exists — it hits those who have no assets to protect themselves. Dividing it by 7 is giving back purchasing power to those at the bottom. And 14 fewer poverty points means millions of people, not an Excel line.

For a century, Argentines were told that the state would protect them by spending more and more. Result: one of the richest countries in the world in 1910, ruined. We’ve just reversed the method. Look at the result.

At some point, you have to accept what the facts say: on the economic front, the liberal method has delivered in two years what decades of socialism promised without ever delivering. And it benefits the most modest first.

You can hate Milei’s style — the chainsaw, the excess, the improbable outbursts, he’s nothing like a classic statesman. But you don’t judge an economic policy by the style of the one who leads it. You judge it by what it does to people’s lives.

And the numbers have spoken.

Low IQ, mens rea, and actus reus

Filed under: Britain, India, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For those like me whose legal Latin isn’t great, “mens rea” is “the mental state of a defendant who is accused of committing a crime”, while actus reus is a “guilty act” (from Wikipedia). On his Substack, William M. Briggs discusses how legal systems decide when an accused person’s IQ is so low that they lack the ability to understand that their action is illegal:

A gang of gypsies in England gang raped a young girl (and another previously) at knifepoint while filming the deeds, laughing all the while and even posted one of the rapes on social media. At their trial, Judge Nicholas Rowland excused their crimes because he said the criminals were “‘very young’, had low intelligence, a ‘limited understanding of consent’ and were susceptible to ‘peer pressure'”.

    [Rowland] said that the second boy fell into the bottom one per cent in IQ for his age, and he had been diagnosed with ADHD, while the third boy had ‘low intellectual capacity’ and he had a ‘limited understanding of consent’.

Iryna Zarutska, 23, was riding a train in Charlotte, when Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr rose up, slit her throat, and as he was exiting the train gleefully declared he “got” his white woman. Brown had been arrested some 14 times before he murdered Zarutska, for crimes including armed robbery. He was freed each time. For the murder, he was found by Experts to be “incompetent to stand trial”.

Brown and the gypsies were not alone. Recently, there were these cases:

Many states have humane destruction laws that apply when animals (usually dogs) have attacked or killed humans. Florida, for instance, confiscates vicious dogs and puts them down. When any animal kills and eats a man it is usually put down, and most think it wise and prudent to do so. But some curiously argue the animals cannot help themselves, that it is their nature to attack and kill and even eat people, and who are we to judge?

In any case, it is clear that dogs, nor any animal, are not as intelligent as man. Just as it is clear obvious truth that some men are not as intelligent as others. Yet this fact does meet resistance from Equalitarians and Universalists, both forgiving every sin except the sin of claiming sin exists.

[…]

The Eighth Amendment reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted“.

Since 2002, executing a dumb criminal is “cruel”, yet executing an intelligent criminal is not cruel nor unusual. This is odd because, as any dog owner can attest, even dogs can know right from wrong, and even stupid men know murder is wrong.

Scalia wrote in his dissent that an Expert (a psychologist) on one of the appeals testified Smith had “an IQ of 59”. Smith also, and in this case, really had “16 prior felony convictions for robbery, attempted robbery, abduction, use of a firearm, and maiming”. He noted previous courts ruled only the profoundly retarded, those “idiots” who “had an IQ of 25 or below”, had a “‘deficiency in will’ rendering them unable to tell right from wrong”.

On the general topic of IQ, but not directly related to violent crime, ESR discusses the relationship between IQ and the caste system of India:

The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib Khan

That feeling when your knowledge about how average IQ varies with caste rank in India stops being peculiar arcana and suddenly becomes deeply relevant to US domestic politics …

Anybody who has studied the matter knows that castes in India have been maintaining almost perfect endogamy for thousands of years. About the only significant category of exceptions is that if you have an exceptionally beautiful daughter you *might* succeed in getting her taken as a concubine by a higher-caste man, so their offspring might jump a rank.

With no significant gene flow between jatis, divergences in important traits like IQ and time preference not only don’t smooth out, but actually amplify due to genetic drift and differing selective pressures.

Highest-caste Indians have an IQ distribution a lot like Europeans. Low-caste Indians … don’t. They’re not quite as genetically handicapped as the dimmest populations in sub-Saharan Africa, thankfully, but the spread is wide.

This doesn’t mean all low-caste Indians are stupid; Gaussian distributions don’t work that way. It does mean that importing 10,000 low-caste Indians has very different implications for the host society then importing 10,000 Brahmins.

Segue to the recent news stories about American families getting killed by illiterate Indian truck drivers doing crazy stupid things on the roadways. Those truck drivers are not Brahmins.

This is a recent phenomenon because, until one of our political parties decided to import the entire Third World for vote-farming purposes, we were cream-skimming India. Now we’re not, and this makes a serious difference.

Update: Fixed broken link to ESR’s X post.

Applying for a job in 2026

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is exactly the kind of experience I was having before I retired: painfully extended online application process, complete with re-entering pretty much everything in my resumé in their preferred format (but without the impromptu video pitch, thank goodness) followed almost instantly by rejection. In the vast majority of cases, no human being was ever even aware of my application:

“Help Wanted” by dreamsjung is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I spent 4 hours yesterday updating my resume to apply for a mid-level PM role.

The listing said they wanted someone with 10 years of experience in a software that was invented 4 years ago.

I clicked apply and was immediately redirected to a third-party portal that asked me to upload my resume, which I did.

Then it asked me to manually type in every single detail of the resume I had just uploaded.

Why did I upload it if I have to type it again?

Is the uploaded PDF just a ceremonial offering to the HR gods?

I spent 40 minutes breaking down my career history into tiny mandatory text boxes.

The portal required me to list a start and end date for every job, but the calendar widget wouldn’t let me type the year.

I had to click the back arrow month by month to get to 2002.

My wrist started cramping somewhere around 2018.

Then it asked for my high school GPA.

I’m 44 years old.

I don’t even remember the name of my high school mascot, let alone my proficiency in AP European History.

After the history lesson, came the behavioral assessment.

It presented me with 75 statements and asked me to rate them from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

One statement was “I prefer to work alone but also thrive in team environments.”

That is a paradox.

I’m being asked to evaluate a philosophical contradiction by a recruiting algorithm.

I just clicked “neutral” for everything out of spite.

The final step was a mandatory video cover letter.

I had to record a one-minute pitch explaining why my core values align with a B2B SaaS company that sells inventory management software.

My core value is being able to afford groceries and paying my internet bill on time.

I put on a dress shirt over my sweatpants, stared into my webcam, and lied for 60 seconds.

I said I’ve always been profoundly passionate about supply chain optimization.

Nobody is passionate about supply chain optimization.

I clicked submit and immediately received an automated rejection email.

The timestamp said it was sent zero seconds after I applied.

I was evaluated and deemed unworthy by a line of code at the speed of light.

Next time I’m just going to wrap my resume around a brick and throw it through their office window.

Rare & Unique Sightings From 100 French FR-F2 Sniper Rifles

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published Jan 12, 2026

Today I had a chance to dig through no less than one hundred FR-F2 snipers brought in by Navy Arms. I found a number of interesting and unusual things in the process, including a number of three-digit serial numbered very early production examples and some renumbered guns. We’ll also be looking at the Scrome J8, the modern picatinny scope mounts for the FR-F2, and things like depot refurbishment markings.
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QotD: Christian heresies

Filed under: Books, Europe, France, History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I don’t even have time to read a magisterial five-volume history of the Hundred Years War, let alone write one. But a little while ago I was in Albi and got more interested in the bloody and tragic history of that place, and learned that [Jonathan] Sumption had written a book about it that might or might not be magisterial, but had the distinct advantage of not being five volumes long. I read it, and I’m glad I did, because this short history of one of the nastiest little wars in the entire Middle Ages has many weird and unexpected echoes with our own era, not to mention a lot to tell about the creation of the modern nation-state.

An Albigensian is an inhabitant of Albi, in the South of France. Before we get to that, though, we need to talk about the Cathars. An important rule of thumb in the history of Christianity is that heresies generally originate in the East and gradually spread to the West. I think this is mostly because, at least for the first thousand years or so, the vast majority of the population, GDP, and theological disputation was happening in the East. If you have theological ferment, you will have heresies, as assuredly as modifying software produces bugs and copying a cell’s DNA produces cancer. There were just a lot more people arguing about the nature of God in the East for a long time, and so given a constant error rate we should expect that most of the bad ideas come from there as well as most of the good ones. Now, why it is that this rule of thumb still holds true, despite the bulk of population and GDP moving to the West, is a very interesting question. Perhaps the legalistic Latin mind is just not as given to flights of fancy.

Whatever the case, the East was doing its usual thing and spitting out heresies, and two in particular are important to our story here. The first is dualism, which is a very old solution to the Problem of Evil, and which states that the forces of good and the forces of evil are evenly matched in some ontological sense. Many religions (for instance Zoroastrianism) are officially dualist. Christian dualism, on the other hand, has always been severely frowned upon if not outright condemned. Yet it’s also always been there, almost from the very start. I theorize that the dualist temptation arises again and again in Christianity because it “humanizes” an otherwise quite otherworldly faith, making it more like the stories and situations that human beings hear and encounter elsewhere.1

The second heresy is gnosticism, the belief that the physical world we all experience is an illusion, or a deception, or at least very much worse than the world of pure spirit. Once again, this is an important official element of religions like Buddhism, and once again it’s a tendency that Christianity has had to battle from the very start, probably because of some common, cross-cultural psychological quirk about human beings. Many modern Christians don’t actually realize that gnosticism is, technically speaking, totally heretical, because much modern Christianity is quite gnostic-inflected. But in the early days, and still today in some more traditionalist corners, Christianity is an earthy religion of bodies and physical substances and matter that is capable of being sanctified. For much more on all of this, read our review of Origen’s Revenge.

Anyway, relatively early in the history of Christianity, these two great ur-heresies flowed into one, like Godzilla and Mothra becoming a single monster that both flies and is radioactive. According to this grand synthesis, the false, illusory world of our physical reality is the domain of the forces of evil. The “god” of this world, often called the demiurge, is a diabolical figure, an anti-god that has trapped us all in prisons of flesh and blood. The real God is somewhere above and outside this reality, and our mission is to use secret knowledge, gnosis, to transcend to the spirit world. The guy who codified and turbo-charged this combined doctrine was a rich shipowner named Marcion (from the East, naturally), so you may sometimes see this heresy referred to as “Marcionism”.

If the physical world is the creation of an evil demiurge, then all physicality and physical matter must be irredeemably corrupt. In fact a much later Marcionist theologian actually used this as an argument for his views: “God is perfect; nothing in the world is perfect; therefore nothing in the world was made by God”. Consequently, the Marcionists practiced unbelievably extreme forms of asceticism to try to disconnect themselves from this corrupted world. They meditated and wore rags and occasionally starved themselves to death. Needless to say, having children was severely frowned upon, because it meant trapping new souls in the prison of reality. Critics of Marcionism accused them of endorsing sodomy as an alternative to normal sexual intercourse. The Marcionists also rejected the entire Old Testament on the grounds that the God of the Old Testament was actually the Devil, because only an evil being would do something as terrible as create the world.

The Marcionists were persecuted by the Roman authorities just as much as the Christians were, and this kept their numbers under control until by chance they spread to an empire with different laws. A wild-man from Persia named Mani, claimed by his followers to be a prophet and a magician, became deeply influenced by Marcion, traveled to India, returned to Persia, and created his own spin on Marcionism that incorporated elements of Buddhism and of his native Zoroastrianism. This combined religion became known as “Manicheanism,” and his followers refused to work normal jobs, serve in the military, or marry. Mani was promptly killed, but his teachings jumped back into the Eastern Roman Empire, and started spreading like a wildfire.

In the 8th century, Manicheanism (via a quick detour through a dualist Armenian group called the Paulicians) jumped the firebreak separating Asia from Europe and took off amongst the Bulgarian Slavs. Here, their champion was a priest named Bogomil, and his followers became the “Bogomils“. The English slang-term “buggery” is actually derived from the word “Bulgaria,” because of the old knock against the Marcionists. Did Bogomil in fact endorse buggery? It’s a little hard to say, but the “radical” Bogomils really got quite wild.2 The most extreme of them preached that performing disgusting or blasphemous acts was actually good, because it was a way of debasing and disrespecting our corrupted physical reality. It was also in Bulgaria that the word “Cathari” meaning “the purified ones” began to appear as an alternative name for this church.3

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Albigensian Crusade, by Jonathan Sumption”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-09-02.

  1. You can also see it as injecting some excitement and drama and narrative stakes into the religion. A critic of Christianity might call it boring because the forces of evil are always and everywhere ultimately powerless. I don’t agree with this characterization, because the drama is taking place on a different level, namely the struggle towards sanctification that every living being engages in. But that might be too abstract for some. A much more immediate kind of drama is angels and demons duking it out on roughly equal terms, which is why you see this in all kinds of popular media, movie, video games, etc. Again, this is not an anomaly, it’s been present in Christian folk culture forever.
  2. Thought not as wild as some even later Slavic adherents of Dualism/Gnosticism. The 18th century sect of the skoptsy interpreted the anti-physical, anti-reproduction message of Marcion as requiring castration for all true believers. Warning: the Wikipedia page has graphic pictures.
  3. Anything you read about the Dualists, Gnostics, Marcionists, Manicheans, Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars is made considerably more confusing by the fact that tons of authors use these terms completely interchangeably (including ancient authors, and including the Dualists/Gnostics/Marcionists/Manicheans/Paulicians/Bogomils/Cathars themselves). It’s not even entirely wrong to do so, because there really is a continuous tradition here that all these groups are manifestations of.

June 1, 2026

America before the Constitution

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

In The Critic, Clement Knox discusses how the newly independent United States of America were governed — or not governed — under the pre-Constitution arrangements:

Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull (1756-1843), showing the Committee of Five (Adams, Livingston, Sherman, Jefferson, and Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 28 June, 1776.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

The historian James Breck Perkins once observed that the Declaration of Independence was French and the Constitution was English. One was a coup de folie — all Gallic bombast and improvisation — the other a coolly logical exercise in state construction.

Often overlooked is that these documents came into effect thirteen years apart. And the story of how the Americans went from the Declaration to the Constitution, from France to England, over the course of those years is filled with lessons for the present.

This year is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. It is also the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Articles of Confederation, which were commissioned at the same time as the Declaration but enjoy none of its renown. This is odd, as the Articles were the founding governmental structure of the United States, the system intended to effectuate the high-flown principles of the Declaration, and did so for over a decade until they were replaced by the Constitution in 1789.

The reason nobody talks about the Articles is because they were disastrous. Under them the United States government had a single legislative branch, congress, whose presiding officer was also the head of the executive branch. There was no federal judiciary. Neither congress nor its president had any real powers. Congress could not actually raise money. It could only “request” funds from the states — requests which were typically ignored. Congress also had no power over the regulation of commerce which meant that states could and did broker trade deals with foreign powers and impose taxes on the trade of their neighbouring states. Moreover, this hapless system could not be reformed as the articles required unanimity among the states to make even minor changes to them.

The regime imposed by the articles brought the nation to its knees. “The existing Confederacy is tottering to its foundation,” James Madison said in 1787, and few would mourn its passing as it “neither has nor deserves advocates.” “No money is paid into the public treasury,” he continued, “No respect is paid to the federal authority … It is not possible that a government can last long under these circumstances.” His pessimism was shared by George Washington who feared that “without some alteration in our political creed, the superstructure we have been seven years raising … must fall. We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion.”

Not prepared to allow the legacy of 1776 to be national ruin, Madison did something extraordinary: he moved to replace a failing regime with a functioning one. In 1786 he organised a convention in Philadelphia with the loosely-defined purpose of “revising” certain elements of the Articles. Once the convention was in session Madison revealed his true purpose. He did not want to revise the Articles but replace it with a constitution of his own composition.

The story of Madison’s high-stakes political gambit and how it played out in the years between the Philadelphia convention and the adoption of the constitution in 1789 is told in The Framers’ Coup by Michael J. Klarman. A professor at Harvard Law School, Klarman has written not just the seminal account of America’s founding but a classic account of how peaceful regime change can occur.

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