Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 20 Jan 2026Thickened vegetable and meat stew with suet dumplings with parsley
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1901The food served in Victorian workhouses could vary widely depending on the time, place, and management of a particular establishment. Operating under the notion that if the food served to the inmates (yes, that’s what they were called) of a workhouse was worse than the average, it would encourage them to choose to not be poor (yes, those in power believed that being poor was a choice), workhouse food tended to be … not great.
The recipes for this stew and dumplings come from actual workhouse cookbooks, and they’re actually quite tasty, though the Victorian reality was often far from what you might make today with fresh ingredients. Meat could be too tough to eat, bugs and rat droppings were not uncommon, vegetables could be rotten, and the stew watered down.
As written, it makes a simple, hearty, thick meat and vegetable stew with dumplings that are rather dense, though they have a bit of fluffiness. It’s quite good, though I’m under no impression that it’s close to what the poor were actually being served.
Meat Stew (or Scouse)
Ingredients.
5 ozs. Raw Beef free from bone (Stickings or similar quality).
1 oz. Flour.
½ oz. Dripping or Fat.
4 ozs. Potatoes.
4 ozs. Carrots and Turnips.
½ oz. Onions
Pepper and Salt to taste.
Water to make 1 pint.
Method. — Cut up the meat and vegetables. Fry the flour in the fat till brown, stir in the water, add pepper and salt; then put in the meat and vegetables. Simmer gently for two hours. To make 1 pint of stew.
— Manual of Workhouse Cookery (1901)Suet Dumplings. 6 oz. flour, 2 oz. chopped suet, 1/16 oz. baking powder, ¾ oz. chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Mix all the dry things, rubbing the suet through the flour; make into a firm paste with the cold water; divide into ten or twelve small pieces, which roll up into balls, having the outsides well floured. Drop the balls into the stew, and cook for half an hour longer; then serve.
— Miss F. A. Merchant in Management and Construction of Poorhouses and Almshouses by George A. Mackay
July 17, 2026
Eating Like a Victorian Workhouse Inmate – Scouse & Suet Dumplings
QotD: Catapults in pre-gunpowder armies
Cannon weren’t the first form of artillery used to batter fortifications, so before we get to gunpowder it is worth backing up and discussing catapults and the sort of “artillery threat” that catapults create. And here once again we need to clarify some terms: catapults are generally defined by the mechanism they use to store and then release energy, because that is fundamentally what a catapult is: a device for storing up some energy and then releasing it very suddenly to propel a large object.
The very oldest catapults, first invented by the Greeks were tension catapults (the gastrophetes and oxybeles), which functioned like large bows, with a bow-staff being bent backwards to store and then release the launching energy. This sort of design, common in pop-cultural depictions of catapults, is actually quite limited as with the materials available, there is a real limit to how much energy can be stored via tension. Fortunately for the Greeks, by the early fourth century, they had developed a better method.
Instead, the Greeks, Macedonians and Romans began using torsion catapults (where the energy is stored in wound-up sinews like a spring). While the devices used in field battles (and for city defense) were often smaller, arrow-launching devices, siege catapults could be very large; the standard engine for the purpose could fling a 1 talent stone (26.2kg) about 400m (though effectiveness was far higher if you could get closer to the wall, which as we’ll see will be a trend for most of this post); much larger engines did exist as well. That said, Roman catapults were mostly not for collapsing walls but for destroying towers and suppressing defenders in order to aid in escalade (usually by mole, rather than ladders or towers, though the Romans used those too).
And here once again the distinction between the “big army siege package” and the “small army siege package” matters quite a bit. Roman torsion artillery was complex, expensive and required lots of technical skill, and so sees far diminished use in the early Middle Ages where that technical skill is hard to come by. Vespasian, we are told, brought 160 torsion catapults to besiege Jotapata in 67 (Josephus BJ 3.166) while Titus brings a stunning 340 to besiege Jerusalem in 70 (Josephus BJ 5.356). By contrast, the construction of a single catapult is often a major event in a medieval siege (see Rogers, op. cit. 121-3 for some examples) and while later medieval catapults were often more powerful than the earlier Roman torsion devices, they were not that much more powerful.
Consequently, Hellenistic and Roman fortifications (especially city walls, like the Theodosian Walls we discussed last time) were designed with massed catapults in mind. As noted, the multiple walls ensured that the main curtain wall, the inner wall, was extremely difficult to target with catapults or indeed any kind of artillery: even if you knocked down the low wall and the outer wall, their rubble would mostly block shots at the base of the inner wall. Meanwhile, the inner wall was built to be practically immune to catapult fire anyway: up to 6m thick without any internal passages (the outer wall was much thinner, only 2m). That was more than enough to render the walls effectively immune to anything catapults can do; the walls in many places still stood up to Ottoman cannon in 1453. Finally, ancient city defenses were built assuming they’d often have their own stone and arrow throwing torsion artillery set up on the towers to return “counter-battery” fire. Not every city had the “complete package” that Constantinople, as the imperial capital head, of course, but some mix of thick walls, low out-walls and catapults designed for counter-battery fire were fairly standard defensive arrangements for Roman cities that could afford them and felt sufficiently threatened to invest the resources.
As we move into the Middle Ages, two paradoxical things happen. On the one hand, the ability for societies in Europe to deploy large numbers of finicky, high-tech torsion artillery decreases dramatically (and the machines that we do see tend to be the simpler, less accurate single-armed variety, what the Romans called the onager or “wild ass” because it kicked like one when it fired). On the other hand, by the sixth century, we start to see a clever new design of catapult, the traction trebuchet.
Originating in China in the 4th century BC, the traction catapult used muscle power directly to swing a long pole around a central frame. In terms of engineering complexity, it was a simpler device, and could be scaled up quite large so long as one could add more pullers (around 100 seems to have been normal for a large engine), but the range and power it offered as a result of the mechanical advantage offered by the long throwing arm were considerable. Given the number of pullers required, it is little surprise these were generally only used in small numbers in medieval Europe (again, often in reports it is merely a single device, described as a mangonel or a fenevol), but on the other hand, as I understand the physics, the range and striking power had the potential to be superior to a torsion catapult. Nevertheless, if we look at the kinds of fortifications emerging during this period, it certainly seems like in Europe, the concern that artillery might produce a breach in the wall (as opposed to merely degrading towers and the wall-walk) was fairly low.
Just to throw down a note here because we’ll come back to it, it is striking that while the small numbers of traction trebuchets in Europe seem to have represented a decline in the “catapult threat” to walls (recall last week’s contrast between castle walls and the much older Theodosian Walls), that was not the case in China, where walls continued to be made very thick – a design quirk that will matter quite a lot in a moment. I am not an expert on ancient and medieval Chinese siege tactics, alas, but my brief encounters with accounts of them often seem to describe traction catapults used en masse, in dozens or even hundreds, much more the way that the Romans used massed siege artillery. Likewise, Michael Fulton (Artillery in the Era of the Crusades (2018)) notes nearly a hundred Mamluk trebuchets (a mix of counter-weight and traction) at the Siege of Acre (1291); my sense is that such large siege trains were very rare within Europe. Presumably the ability to deploy so many engines was a consequence of greater state capacity in China and the Near East during this period as compared to fragmented, decentralized medieval Europe.
The late 12th century sees a major variation on the trebuchet design: the use of a counter-weight, instead of traction to provide the force; this innovation seems to have emerged in the West broadly defined, though it isn’t clear if that means in Europe or the Middle East (in any event both Christian and Muslim armies start using them at almost exactly the same time). This allows for much more energy to put into the shot, as the counter-weight can be very heavy and only slowly winched into place, allowing the work crew to spend more time “storing” energy in the counter-weight than they could with the quick pull of a traction trebuchet. Larger counter-weight trebuchets could also make use of animals to provide the power, or large wheels to make it easier to raise the counter-weight. The upper-limits on the size of projectiles were very high: Warwolf is thought to be the largest such trebuchet known, and threw a nearly 300lbs shot. That said, while counter-weight trebuchets hit harder (but fired slower), in function they do not seem to have been meaningfully different from traction trebuchets; they were used the same way in sieges.
What’s really striking is not the vast impact of catapults, but the muted impact of catapults. The counter-weight trebuchet was clearly good: the innovation makes its way all the way back to China, carried by the Mongols who presumably picked it up in the Middle East (ironically moving the opposite direction but at the same time as gunpowder, suggesting that at this point in the 13th century the two technologies were not considered mutually exclusive). Castle design does respond to catapults, but only in relatively modest ways: walls get somewhat thicker, but as Fulton (op cit.) notes, only by about half a meter or so (leaving even the newly thickened medieval castle walls somewhat thinner than the best old Roman defenses). In at least some areas, towers and keeps become more frequently rounded in shape, to resist catapult fire.
Certainly it was possible for catapults to open breaches in weaker walls to enable assault. The aforementioned Warwolf opened large breaches in the stone walls of Stirling Castle in 1304. But I note both Rogers (op. cit.) and Fulton (op. cit.) seem to confirm that while true breaches from trebuchets could happen, it was far more common that walls resisted trebuchet strikes and that the real work of the machines was degrading the wall defenses by striking off battlements and smashing towers, in order to enable escalade. Which is little surprise: that’s precisely what the Romans used catapults for too. While there is still some argument about the degree to which the counter-weight trebuchet was a revolutionary military technology, on the balance, the siege playbook changed only modestly to accommodate it, and castle design likewise shifted only in degrees.
And then Charles VIII of France (r. 1483-1498) decided to take a holiday on the Bay of Naples.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part IV: French Guns and Italian Lines”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-17.
July 16, 2026
“Only fans – Europe’s approach to air conditioning”
From the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s most recent article on his Substack:
The EU may not actually believe this, but they thought you would …
Different climates have enjoyed advantages at different points in time. For most of history, industry and scholarship in southern Europe benefitted from significantly longer hours of sun and daylight much of the year compared to the north, allowing for more hours of work and study. James Belich noted in The World the Plague Made that this all changed with the expansion of the Basque whaling trade in the late medieval period, providing cheap wax for candles.
England and the Netherlands subsequently overtook the south in their levels of literacy, a transformation usually attributed to Protestantism, although this technical solution to a physical disadvantage certainly helped. As the northern countries grew richer, and were able to use more energy, so the climate came to be an advantage. Cooler areas of Europe in particular benefitted from a relative absence of vector-borne disease, dangerous insects and food poisoning, which made hotter regions of the world more lethal.
Yet the biggest curse of the lower latitudes is that heat makes us sluggish — since people struggle to work above 23° centigrade. As Maarten Boudry writes on his substack, “For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C, office performance drops by almost 9 percent.”
I see that. I’ve been trying to write this in temperatures of up to 34°, which equates to a production level similar to a moderate hangover. If only there was some sort of technology that could make my home cooler.
Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call “the 60s”, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.
The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global “sunshine belt”.
Among the most notable beneficiaries of this technology are the financial powerhouses of Dubai and Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew famously said of air conditioning that it was “perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics … The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.” Indeed, it has often been noted as characteristic of the city-state that the aircon is usually set to icy levels, reflecting their determination to be on work mode throughout the day.
While Singapore is the most famous beneficiary of Carrier’s invention, Japan has almost universal air conditioning, with 91 per cent of homes equipped, compared to 88 per cent in the US. China is home to more than 500 million aircon units, is the world’s largest manufacturer, and has also seen an economic shift towards the south. Vietnam, also likely to be a major economic power by mid-century, is as dependent on this technology as it is on its people’s ingenuity. The development of aircon, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of tropical diseases, has shifted the centre of gravity away from the cold regions of the earth — just as the globe is warming up.
This year’s European heat wave, still ongoing, saw temperatures reach 37 last month in England, a June record. Many schools shut early, although one in Kent instead used air raid tunnels to teach children. London’s Central Line hit 39.4c, presenting a real risk of heat stroke.
Across Europe the hot weather has closed down not just schools but factories, offices and rail lines, and led to an estimated 10,000 deaths, with France top of the heat mortality charts. Indeed as Boudry writes, Europe has the worst heat-related excess deaths of any region — while fatalities in the US have declined by 75 per cent since the adoption of air conditioning.
Update, 17 July: 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.
“Banned” book library in a Portuguese bookshop
Most people are at least a bit uncomfortable with censorship, at least when the censors get into the swing of things and start banning ordinary books and authors. I had to check Wikipedia to find out who Dua Lipa might be as I hadn’t heard of her before, so the name popping up in headlines about her bold anti-censorship actions didn’t tell me much. I think I’m safe in assuming that Ms. Lipa is fully read-in on all the fashionable concerns of the celebrity set, so it’ll be easy to predict the works her library will feature:
The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of “banned” books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.
For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).
Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. “The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection” would make a funny meme — as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey — but it would likely not be much of a career boost.
And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.
Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc.), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).
Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: “The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices.”
What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.
This is most notable in the “Voice” section, which, we’re told, “amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented”.
Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the woke era of radical Leftism, aggressive conformity and cancel culture.
Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism — a hostile force attacking it from the outside.
And as the “banned” book library is in Portugal, I’m including Larry Correia’s comments on the issue (he still counts as “Portuguese”, right?)
Since I’m still getting barked at by pearl clutching weirdos about my comment yesterday about “banned books” everybody with a functioning brain knows that just because parents don’t want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing liberal authors to stock public school libraries with torture porn, and the book is still legally available literally everywhere else books are sold, means that book is not “banned”.
And most “banned” book displays are just left wing virtue signaling for marketing purposes. Like most liberal causes its a fake ass moralizing narrative disconnected from reality where they get to play the victim and the rest of us are bullies.
Manhattan publishing LOVES when the school board in Somnambulant Iowa says they don’t want to spend their limited budget buying copies of The Illustrated Guide To Fisting for Trans Middle Schoolers, because that’s great marketing and all the blue haired weirdos are now religiously mandated to go buy a copy to stick it to the chuds.
Libs tried their best to get writers like me booted out of everything, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before you see any of us showing up on any of these banned books displays, and we all know it.
Stephen King was lying his ass off about how that particular novella collection was all about “friendship” or WTF ever he claimed. The friendship story has prison rape as a subplot, but the real issue was the story about an escaped Nazi war criminal teaching an American teenager about the joys of rape, torture, and murder.
As you can imagine some parents get hesitant about giving stuff like that to their kids … just like Stephen King himself did when he banned his own school shooting book, Rage. But it was okay when he did it.
If a school board said they didn’t want to buy one of my books because they thought it was too violent for kids, I’d say, okay, cool. Not being a dishonest histrionic dork, I recognize that’s their choice, and not being in that one collection does not in any way make my book “banned”.
The book in question is still available in every store, can be ordered online, and is in most public library systems. No law is broken if you possess it or share it. But to a liberal NOT buying their shit with tax dollars to give to children (even if their parents think it is inappropriate) is the gravest sin imaginable and you are all basically nazis.
Well, except for Graham Platner obviously. Stephen King says he’s alright.
This is why so many of the kids are not “alright”
An interesting discussion at the social media site formerly known as Twitter, as Devon Eriksen responds to a comment from Stephen Fleming:
But don’t you understand?
There was a way. There was always a way.
We had it within our grasp, because we had already grasped it. The childhoods that you and your daughter had were available because you and your daughter had them.
All that the Boomers, and their parents, the eldest of the post WW2 generations, had to do was …
Nothing.
Just live in the paradise that their ancestors won for them, and make the minimum, the bare minimum, of effort that would have been required to actually sustain it.
That’s all.
Just keep things the way they were.
But they couldn’t handle that. Their fathers and grandfathers, the heroes that won WW2, made them jealous.
They wanted to be heroes, too.
So, for the sake of their own egos, they had to become Social Justice Warriors. They had to be Champions of Progress and Change.
They had to see the world they inherited as a pile of problems to be solved, rather than a pile of solutions to be cherished and preserved.
So they could feel like they were doing something important.
Almost all of the elder generations, even the ones who call themselves conservative and vote republican, are, in truth, socialist liberal progressives. Because they looked at paradise, and wanted to fix it instead of protect it.
That’s why the “republican” option was Reagan, the gun-ban guy, the social-welfare guy, the kiss-up-to-the-commies guy, the amnesty-for-foreign-invaders guy.
Reagan, the Hollywood liberal, the Obama of the 80s, instead of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.
Teens can’t have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don’t care about civilization, but will work cheap.
Teens can’t have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.
Teens can’t have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.
Teens can’t have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.
Teens can’t have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.
Teens can’t have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.
Teens can’t even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.
Teens can’t have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.
And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles …
Except.
Except the elders don’t understand that any of this of this is happening.
They haven’t had a child in the household since 1997. They haven’t looked for an entry-level job since 1973. They haven’t gone on a date since 1981. They haven’t been laid off … ever.
They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.
It’s affecting the youngest generations first and worst. While the elders sit on their cruise ship, surveying the short with binoculars, wondering who all these ragged distressed looking people standing on the shore are.
And why they are holding signs that say “HELP”, “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT”, and “YOU STOLE THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE”.
Then they shrug, conclude that these must be the whiny losers, and everyone further inland is probably just fine, and everything is fine, because they fixed everything and they are all heroes, and the Summer of Love was the end of the Problematic Era of History and the beginning of the Great Enlightenment.
And when I am 74 years old, and the elders are all safely tucked into their cemetery plots, I will be torn apart by an angry mob for having white hair, and therefore being “one of them”.
And the mob will not care that I didn’t get to cast a vote until 1992, for the Man Who Predicted All Of This.
He called it the “giant sucking sound”.
Which is apt because it’s why everything sucks now.
How Few Remain: The Second War Between the States
Feral Historian
Published 13 Mar 2026Let’s take a look at Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain and its many themes and historical extrapolations. And probably argue about the Civil War a little along the way.
If there’s enough interest, this may be the start of a dive into the entire sprawling series that follows.
00:00 Intro
01:37 A War Unfinished
07:09 Adapting and Evolving
10:12 Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass
13:15 The Horace Greeley Letter
15:40 Freddie’s Louisville Adventure
18:07 Turtledove, Lost Cause, and Spoilers
(more…)
QotD: The nostalgic British elements of Canadian nationalism
Britishness survives as civic nationalism. Old British Canada may be gone, but aspects of that Britishness live on. We should celebrate our history and our historic symbols, but this alternative shouldn’t set about restoring it all. A future oriented embrace of our history needs to be built around the active parts of this Britishness that have now become truly Canadian. For example, the Crown in Canada is not now just a British institution, it’s a Canadian institution. Same with our democratic institutions and parliamentary traditions, which we must work to strengthen and renew.
Embracing this enables us to thread the needle on our relationship with America. Part of what makes us different historically, culturally, ideationally, and in disposition from America, is this history. Just as Canadian Britishness has survived to the present day in unique ways, our desire not to become Americans is alive and well. A homegrown Canadian Britishness enables us to continue this without falling into crass anti-Americanism, and without requiring us to embrace the new Liberal nationalism to reject America. We should see America as an amicable cousin, but one that we are distinct and different from.
But most importantly, what this new kind of national identity needs to build around needs to be an evolution of the liberal nationalism that emphasizes and consciously builds around our regional pluralism. […] but the kind of rationalistic liberalism that our modern national identity is built around, while sold as a way of dealing with diversity, suffers from some serious internal tensions. Liberalism, especially the Canadian variant of it, implicitly depends upon and encourages a degree of homogenization that flattens hard cultural differences. We need to become more pluralistic, and less liberal.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
July 15, 2026
The Prince – “The only people who haven’t read it are the ones who keep losing”
I didn’t intend to turn this into Machiavelli week, but after the discussion of correctly translating “virtù“ for modern audiences, here’s Krzysztof Szczawinski with more about that famous/infamous book:
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 as a practical manual for power. For five centuries, polite society has pretended to be shocked by it. Meanwhile, every successful political operator — on every side — has been quietly following it. The only people who haven’t read it are the ones who keep losing.
1. Machiavelli’s central insight is not that the ends justify the means. That is the misquote that lets comfortable people dismiss him. His actual insight is simpler and more disturbing: power has its own logic, independent of morality, and those who refuse to understand that logic will be defeated by those who do. The Prince is not a villain’s manual. It is a description of reality that makes virtuous people uncomfortable – because reality doesn’t care about their virtue.
2. The current progressive system applies Machiavelli more fluently than any of its opponents. His first rule: the appearance of virtue matters more than virtue itself. The DEI statement while systematically excluding dissent. The democracy rhetoric while suppressing opposition. The compassion branding while destroying careers. This is Machiavelli’s prince – not good, but performing goodness to maintain legitimacy. The performance is the power.
3. His second rule, which the current system also applies perfectly: cruelty, when necessary, should be delivered swiftly, completely, and early. Cancellation is Machiavellian – total, swift, exemplary. The point isn’t the individual being cancelled. The point is the ten thousand people watching who quietly adjust their behavior. One public destruction purchases a million private silences. Machiavelli would have recognized the mechanism immediately. He invented the theory.
4. Communism applied the fear side of Machiavelli with full conviction – Stalin made the explicit choice Machiavelli described: better to be feared than loved. The show trial is pure Machiavellian theater – a public demonstration of power functioning as a warning to everyone who isn’t on trial. But communism made his fatal mistake: it destroyed the people’s goodwill so completely that it generated not just fear but hatred. And Machiavelli is unambiguous – you can rule through fear, you cannot survive through hatred.
5. His most important democratic insight — the one nobody quotes — is that the prince who builds his power on the people is more secure than one who builds it on elites. Elites are few, demanding, and treacherous. The people are many, ask only not to be oppressed, and are a more stable foundation. The political movement that actually connects with ordinary people against the credentialed elite is applying Machiavelli more correctly than the elite relying on institutional capture alone.
6. What should we do? Stop bringing virtue to a knife fight. The chronic error of the opposition is the naive prince Machiavelli explicitly warns against – the leader who assumes truth wins automatically, who believes that being right is a strategy. It is not a strategy. It is a precondition. Being right gives you something worth fighting for. Machiavelli tells you how to fight: build your own power base, never rely entirely on others, control your narrative before your enemies do, and treat fortune as something to be seized, not waited for. Fortune favors the bold. Not the righteous. The bold.
7. Machiavelli is taught in universities as cynical amoralism – the thing decent people reject. This framing is itself Machiavellian – it keeps the manual out of the hands of the people who most need it. The current establishment didn’t reject Machiavelli. It institutionalized him, rebranded him in the language of social justice, and uses him daily. The opposition reads Augustine and loses. The system reads Machiavelli and wins. Until the side that is actually right decides that understanding power is not a betrayal of principle but a precondition for defending it – the result will be the same. Virtue without strategy is just a dignified way of losing.
Update, 16 July: 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.
The Korean War Week 108 – The Republican Candidate – July 14th, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 14 Jul 2026In Chicago, the US Republican Party Convention comes to its end and they have chosen Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower as their Presidential Candidate. Part of the official platform is ending the Korean War. The war continues, of course, with a new UN operation designed to take prisoners, massive aerial bombing of Pyongyang, and the build up of the South Korean Army — the ROKA — to one day hopefully take over from the UN forces.
“Communism no longer comes for your property”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski explains why western countries are perhaps more in danger of communist subversion, because we have an out-of-date mental model of what communism looks like:
On communism – in summary:
1. Communism no longer comes for your property. It comes for your reality. The West still pictures bread lines and gulags, a failed economic theory safely buried in 1989 – that was only ever the surface symptom. Leftism-communism is the most insidious destructive force in our world today, and it survives every empirical refutation for one reason: it was never really an economic theory. It doesn’t care about the truth. It only seeks power.
2. At its core it is a civilizational cancer – a machine for distorting reality through constant lies, rewritten history, and the systematic corruption of truth. It practices negative selection: it promotes the ambitious sociopaths, the ideologues, and the conformists, while the honest and the competent are sidelined or destroyed. Talent, integrity, and productivity become liabilities. The body count runs to roughly a hundred million. But the deeper kill is spiritual – trust eroded, excellence punished, reality itself subordinated to raw power.
3. What has changed is the method, not the logic. Tanks and gulags were crude, visible, self-defeating. Today it does not confiscate – it destabilizes. Chaos is the new collectivization. Every manufactured crisis follows the same structural logic: disorder is produced, fear is maximized, and in the panic that follows, transfers of power occur that would have been politically impossible in calm times. You do not notice the expropriation, because you are too busy surviving the emergency they built for you.
4. The fuel running this engine is the Systemic Lie – not ordinary propaganda, but a managed reality in which the categories of thought themselves are corrupted. Productivity is renamed exploitation. Order is renamed fascism. Resistance is renamed hate. A population that cannot name extraction cannot resist it – that is the design, not a side effect. Polish has a word for what results: zakłamanie, a society so saturated with lies that truth becomes almost inaccessible. Obłuda is the mask of falsehood worn so long it begins to feel like a face.
5. This is why the ideology did not die in 1989. It mutated, migrated, and entrenched itself inside the institutions of the civilization it had set out to destroy. Under a system of institutionalized lying, the loyal are promoted and the honest are pushed out, until the institution fills, top to bottom, with people selected specifically for their unreliability. That is not inefficiency. That is institutional rot at the genetic level. People learn to say the words, attend the meetings, sign the statements – and inwardly check out entirely.
6. The damage was never only in the ideology. It was in the people – the habits of mind that decades inside a system of lies produce, habits that do not evaporate with a change of government. The decisive terrain now is institutional: the schools, the media, the corporations, and above all the artificial intelligence systems being trained at civilizational scale on values that half the civilization never chose and was never consulted on. Whoever writes the values into the machines will have more influence over the next century than any election result.
7. This is where civilizations are actually won and lost – not in grand gestures, but in millions of daily, invisible decisions about whether to say what you actually see. Every person who refuses to perform the lie one more time is doing something larger than they know. Name the chaos. Name the lie. The naming is the resistance.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.
The Ancient Greeks 03 – Enter the Persians 3 – Darius, Ionia, and the Fragile Peace
seangabb
Published 16 Feb 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
With Darius I, the Persian Empire reaches its greatest extent. This lecture explores how Darius reorganised the empire into satrapies, imposed taxation systems, and stabilised rule across vast territories. We examine Persian cultural policy, military discipline, and the integration of Greek communities within the imperial system.
But beneath the surface of order, tension grows. The Ionian Greek cities resent indirect rule through tyrants. Persian administrative logic collides with Greek political volatility. The peace is real — but unstable.
QotD: First up against the wall, come the revolution
A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.
He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.
Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.
Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.
Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.
When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.
He had set forces in motion that he could not control.
He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.
His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.
The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.
In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites … were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”
Rob Henderson, “Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2026-03-22.
July 14, 2026
Orson Welles – the great failures
On his Substack, Ted Gioia looks at the up-and-down-and-up-and-down career of Orson Welles and selects, from a long list, his ten greatest failures:
Orson Welles in 1937.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons.
It takes a lifetime of misses to create those hits (if they come at all). And those misses tell the real story of our passion, our resilience, our willingness to push our talent to the limit.
These speculations have led me to return to the work of filmmaker Orson Welles (1915-1985) — who I see as an inspiring role model for indie creators of the digital age. Welles is like many of us today. He lost institutional support from Hollywood studios while still in his twenties. And despite his reputation as the most innovative filmmaker of his generation — for many years his debut movie Citizen Kane won polls as the best film of all time — was forced into a precarious life as a perennial freelancer.
He spent most of his career working on projects that failed. And not because they weren’t good (see the list below) — but for other reasons. Some blame Welles’s prickly personality. Others will fault close-minded Hollywood execs. Or maybe Welles was just cursed with bad luck — problems did seem to follow him wherever he went.
You might say that even his hits were misses. His biggest early success came via a 1938 radio rendition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which convinced many listeners that extraterrestrials were actually invading America. Welles got plenty of publicity but was threatened with $12 million in lawsuits in the aftermath. He was lucky to escape without criminal charges.
His greatest triumph, Citizen Kane, was also anything but a conventional hit. The major theater chains refused to book it — fearing punishment from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the thinly-disguised model for Kane. So even at the peak of his career, Welles had a target on his back.
It got worse from there. He couldn’t finish the editing of his second film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — because FDR prodded him into going to Brazil as a cultural ambassador during World War II. So Welles was out-of-touch as the studio butchered his remarkable film, and even added a saccharine new ending. It’s testimony to Welles’s greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling.
After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him. He got occasional gigs (although more often as an actor). But this brilliant filmmaker never enjoyed job security or long-term institutional support. He was the permanent indie gadfly — always pitching projects and sometimes actually starting them. But rarely finishing them.
At his death in 1985, Welles left behind at least 19 unfinished projects. Add to that the many others he abandoned in earlier years. And then there are so many Welles concepts that hardly got started at all — but were promising ideas that deserved better. Finally, Welles suffers the added indignity of achieving some commercial successes (on radio or the stage) that are now lost to us — so even these must be counted among his misses, at least from the perspective of posterity.
Below I’ve listed Welles’s ten greatest failures. But I could have easily expanded it to twenty or thirty.
I do this as testimony to Welles’s greatness. From a mercenary perspective, these might be failures, but from an aesthetic standpoint they testify to a creative force that operated at the highest level of intensity for a full lifetime.
Translating “virtù” in Machiavelli’s The Prince
At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman ponders the use of the Italian word “virtù” and how best to translate it into English without losing the essence of what Machiavelli was trying to communicate:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
I’d read Machiavelli’s The Prince many times. Pondered its fiendish teachings as I watched political events. Wondered how true, or at least universal, the suggestions really were. I’d even started translating the text myself a few months earlier, just for fun. Machiavelli’s Italian wasn’t all that different from Spanish, so I could get quite a bit of it. With a bit of study, I got the rest. Now, here I was, standing in the very room he’d written the book in, touching the very desk he might have used.
It was in that moment I remembered a letter Machiavelli had written once, to a friend, about writing in that very room:
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine, and that I was born for. There, I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them … I have composed a little work (The Prince), where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject.
The book itself opens with a quick description of the different types of states, and then concludes the first paragraph with an important sentence. New dominions, says Machiavelli, are acquired o con le armi di altri o con le proprie, o per fortuna o per virtù — that is, they’re acquired “either with the arms of others or with one’s own, either by fortune or by” — drum roll — “virtù“. That’s the word in Italian. The question is how to best translate virtù into English.
You might say, “virtue”. And you wouldn’t entirely be wrong: of course the Italian virtù and the English virtue are cognates. The problem is that in the Tuscan Italian of 1513, virtù carried important connotations which no longer exist in contemporary Italian, and don’t exist in English. “Virtue” these days, in either language, refers to an ethical attribute; it describes something good or moral. But in Renaissance Italian, it still retained an older meaning — one unaligned with anything specifically ethical. That older meaning merely described a certain kind of manly excellence, skill, power, prowess, or virtuosity: the Latin root of virtù is vir, meaning man; virility, like virtuosity, traces back to the same root. (The only remaining echo of this meaning in English or Italian, that I know of, lies in the idiom “by virtue of” — which attributes some authoritative force to something: “The agreement remained binding by virtue of state law”, or “Dan became captain by virtue of his experience”.)
To make matters even more challenging for the conscientious translator, Machiavelli pushes this older meaning to its extreme end throughout The Prince. In fact, his use — or as some might have it, his abuse — of the word virtù drives the main theme of the book.
In brief, what Machiavelli argues is that the political realm has its own rules — its own sort of morality, if it can even be called that. This morality is entirely unlike Christian morality, Aristotelian morality, or commonsense folk morality. Thus, the meaning of “virtue” and “vice” in the political realm differs from the meaning in other contexts. Failure to understand this and act accordingly will bring ruin to any aspiring ruler.
So, according to Machiavelli, a “virtuous” ruler isn’t necessarily a good man. In fact, he can’t be a good man by any normal definition; if he were, he’d inevitably fail as a ruler. After listing off some admirable moral qualities, Machiavelli says this:
It is not necessary, then, for a prince to have in fact all of the qualities written above, but it is indeed necessary to seem to have them … when these qualities are possessed and always observed, they are harmful; but when they seem to be possessed, they are useful. So it is useful to seem compassionate, faithful, kind, honest, religious … a prince cannot observe all of those things for which men are believed good, since to maintain his state he is often required to act against faith, against charity, against kindness, and against religion.
A virtuous ruler, in other words, is simply a political virtuoso: a ruler who knows what it takes to acquire and use power effectively, and has the guts to do it.
[…]
As you read through The Prince, you can almost hear Machiavelli saying, hey — I didn’t create this world. I’m just explaining how it actually works. If that’s anyone’s fault, it’s God’s — except there’s no reason to believe God even exists. And so, the aspiring ruler can and must do whatever it takes to succeed, without fear of divine disapproval.
This is Machiavelli’s conception of, or redefinition of, virtù. It is the main theme of the book. Yet as Harvey Mansfield notes in his book Machiavelli’s Virtue, often “Machiavelli’s translators have difficulty in rendering virtù“. Indeed they do, and where they don’t get it right, the reader has no chance to grasp just how radical or disturbing Machiavelli’s morality-inverting argument is. Where they do get it right, we get the chance to engage with one of history’s subtlest and most challenging political thinkers. This raises the question of whether there’s some specific set of principles which ought to guide the translation of great books, and if so, what they might be.
The problem is the state
Brivael Le Pogram explains that acceptance of mediocrity is key to the decline of most western societies … meek acceptance that we are lesser people living in the ruins of a just-passed but rapidly receding Golden Age:
An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m on a “air-conditioned” train where it’s 26 degrees. The WiFi doesn’t work. No one says a word.
And that’s what fascinates me the most: not the breakdown, but the collective acceptance.
The socialist state has pulled off a psychological feat. It’s made us internalize that a mediocre service, paid for at exorbitant cost, is normal. That it’s even what “public service” means.
The same service in a free market would cost a fraction of the price. And if the AC broke down, you’d be refunded within the hour, because a competitor is waiting right next door for you to switch shops.
Make a list of everything the state touches:
Education: plummeting standards, teachers burning out, PISA rankings in freefall.
Healthcare: months-long waits, hallways full of gurneys, caregivers fleeing.
Transport: delays, breakdowns, strikes, prices exploding.
Justice: years for a judgment.
Police: overwhelmed, demoralized.
Colossal budgets.
Record-high tax takes in Europe.
Result: everything’s rotten.Why?
Because two things are missing that only the market provides: skin in the game and prices.
Skin in the game first. An entrepreneur who delivers a lousy service goes bankrupt. He loses HIS money, HIS reputation, HIS years of work. A bureaucrat who mismanages a public service loses nothing. He’ll get promoted, transferred, or at worst he’ll coast to retirement. Failure has no personal consequences. So failure repeats, indefinitely.
Prices next. Hayek showed it: market prices are an information system. Every price aggregates millions of individual decisions and signals where to allocate resources. When the state sets prices or subsidizes at a loss, it destroys that signal. No one knows anymore what anything is worth. We sprinkle money at random, we waste, and we call it “public investment”.
That’s why the bureaucrat is the worst possible steward of your taxes: he spends other people’s money, on other people. No incentive to save, no incentive to serve well. Milton Friedman summed it up in one sentence: it’s the worst of the four ways to spend money.
The problem isn’t this minister, that government, this reform. The problem is structural. A monopoly without competition, without prices, without skin in the game, will ALWAYS produce mediocrity. No matter who’s running it. No matter the budget.
If you’ve grasped that, you’ve grasped 90% of political economy.
So do one simple thing: explain it to your loved ones. Next delayed train, next emergency room wait, ask the question: “Who loses money when this service sucks?” Answer: no one. That’s the problem.
The information will eventually spread. And one day, collectively, we’ll stop swallowing it.
The problem is the state. Always.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
Update, 15 July: 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.
