I’ve thought about this uncrossable gap from the reader’s side as well. A few years back, I read a book written by an eleventh-century Byzantine bureaucrat and historian, Michael Psellus, chronicling his turbulent times. (That the title was Fourteen Byzantine Rulers but only covered a century is a clue to just how turbulent.) It was, of course, originally handwritten, “publication” consisting of the manuscript being hand-copied by scribes, and distributed to a tiny audience of like-minded men. I read it in English translation, in an e-edition instantly available worldwide in unlimited quantities, on my tablet computer. Psellus could not possibly have pictured me as his reader, living a thousand years later on a continent he didn’t know was even there, speaking a language that hadn’t come into existence yet, in a technological future he could not have imagined. (That I’m female, to boot, might be less of an issue — there were plenty of literate Byzantine women, at least in the upper classes of his assumed readership.) And yet his words and thoughts were handed to me as freshly as if they’d been penned (though not typed) yesterday. I could see him; he couldn’t see me.
The Psellus book was a memoir, and so its author was presenting himself fairly directly to his audience, if in a self-edited fashion. Fiction adds a layer of veiling between creator and reader, ranging from a thin gauze to a thick stage curtain. People are naturally curious about anything hidden by a curtain, and always want to peek. (When thinking about this as a shy writer, I always channel that famous line from the Wizard at the climax of the movie The Wizard of Oz — “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”) But if readers can’t get an actual look, they will make up the writer in their heads, constructed from their own knowledge and expectations much as they mentally construct the fictional characters they’re reading about.
I got an accidental peek at this process many years ago at a science fiction convention, where I fell into a conversation in the booksellers’ room with a (male) reader who was very surprised to discover I was a woman — by whatever assumptions, he had not processed my name on the cover as female. (This, I later discovered, is not uncommon in my foreign-language translations, where the genders of English names are less recognizable.) Quickly, before his mental image was overwritten by our encounter, I got him to describe the author whom he had imagined had written the books he’d enjoyed (Vorkosigan Saga science fiction stories, at the time.) It included some odd details — male, mid-thirties, dark-haired, East Coast upper class — rather like my fictional character Ivan Vorpatril, really. Nothing at all like the beleaguered (if also mid-thirties) Midwestern housewife and mother I actually was. Yay curtain.
Lois McMaster Bujold, introduction to the Taiwanese edition of The Curse of Chalion by Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing, 2020-03-25.
October 2, 2025
QotD: The gap between the author and the reader
September 28, 2025
The beginning woodworker … an easy mark
On his Substack, Christopher Schwarz posts a weekly “earlywood” article pulled from his extensive back-catalogue of woodworking books and magazine articles. This week, he addresses the plight of the beginner in the woodworking hobby just before the internet became ubiquitous:
When people begin woodworking, most go through a phase (I did) in which they are willing to soak up every single piece of information they can find. Many will subscribe to multiple woodworking magazines, buy astonishing numbers of woodworking books, seek out catalogs and advertisements for woodworking tools, and buy anything they can afford that looks remotely useful.
This is when people are vulnerable. They need guidance. Unfortunately, woodworking is a mostly solitary pursuit. And so we spend incredible, astonishing and shocking amounts of money on equipment, books and instruction. And most of it is of questionable worth.
Because of this phenomenon:
- The woodworking magazine business had a glut of magazines. When we ran the numbers in the 1990s, we surmised that there should be three magazines serving woodworkers. Instead, there were more: Fine Woodworking, WOOD, American Woodworker, Woodsmith, Shopnotes, Workbench, Popular Woodworking, Woodworker’s Journal, Woodshop News, Woodcraft, Weekend Woodcrafts, Woodwork and a host of specialized magazines. What propped up these magazines? Beginners. Eventually, most woodworkers winnow their subscriptions down to one or two magazines. But the spendthrift beginner made it possible for many magazines to survive.1
- The woodworking book industry produced a glut of books. In the 1990s, my mailbox was stuffed with new woodworking books every week. It wasn’t unusual to see seven or eight new woodworking titles in a month. That’s coo-coo. Why did this work? New woodworkers wanted the latest information. New books are better than old books (duh!). And so publishers churned out books that had an 18-month life cycle before disappearing forever.2
- The woodworking tool industry thrives on new SKUs. After covering woodworking tool manufacturers for nearly three decades, it’s obvious that they introduce new products every year to goose sales. That’s why you have a new crop of cordless drill/drivers every year. And it’s also why you have a rash of odd products that seem (on the surface) to be innovative – silicone glue brushes, painter’s pyramids, many router table jigs, marrying a chisel with a rasp, aluminum squares, putting a laser on everything, oddball and worthless sanders (the Black & Decker Mouse; Porter-Cable Profile Sanders), and battery-powered clamps and tape measures. The list is endless, and it’s not a modern phenomenon. When my grandfather was woodworking in the 1970s, he was charmed by a jig that let you cut dovetails with a corded drill. The only people who are dumb enough to fall for these products are beginners and woodworking journalists. Beginners don’t know better, and journalists need copy to fill the empty space between the covers.3
Some of you might be thinking I’m exaggerating my experiences. I’m not. The good news is that the Internet did a Half-Nelson on most of these stupid business practices. When people now go through their “indiscriminate sponge” phase, they do it on YouTube and soak up as much ridiculousness as they wish.
For free. Mostly.
Eventually, they will be able to ignore the tool-chugging nincompoops and focus on what’s important: Building basic skills using simple and robust tools (and maybe a few well-built machines).
Honestly, it’s a good thing to be a bit jaded about the woodworking tool and publishing industries. It makes you a better consumer and encourages us to do better. So please, for the sake of the future of the craft, don’t buy the Bench Cookies.
- Some modern context follows. Many of these magazines have disappeared or have been consolidated. But you know what? I still think we have too many woodworking magazines these days. Or not enough. I forget which is right.
- More modern context follows. Most of these publishers have gone tits up. And good riddance. We don’t need a new book every year on advanced router techniques.
- Modern context follows. Nothing has changed here.
I matched this profile of the “indiscriminate sponge” beginner and I had huge numbers of woodworking books and magazines … until I finally noticed that the magazine articles in the latest issue were basically the same as the ones I’d first seen three years earlier, just with more gee-gaws and doo-dads added (microadjusters-for-everything were flavour of the month when I finally exited my sponge phase).
September 27, 2025
QotD: Utopian revolution
This illustrates a point that Professor Chirot makes clear in his discussion as to why the Vietnamese communist regime, though often brutal, never descended to anything like the level of horror of neighbouring Cambodia. Among the factors must surely have been the character and personality of the leaders as well as of the countries themselves. In other words, the fate of countries cannot be reduced, either in prospect or in retrospect, to an invariable formula. Human affairs will, to an extent, always be incalculable.
Still, some degree of regularity is possible. I was rather surprised that Professor Chirot overlooked one such. He writes the following of the corruption endemic under communist regimes: “a function of a deliberately exploitative, thieving elite that staved the general economy by its dishonesty than it was the essence of the system itself. Avoiding corruption was impossible because without it the society could not function.”
What is surprising here is that he does not mention why it could not function, but the answer seems to me perfectly obvious: it was because the communist system abolished the price system and substituted political decision-making in its place. This explanation is sufficient, for where there are no prices, and the economy is thereby largely demonetarised, goods and services can be distributed only by corruption. This is not to say that where there is a price system there will automatically be no corruption, obviously this is not the case; but such corruption will be limited by the very need for money to retain its value where such a price system exists. To that extent, it imposes at least a degree of honesty. The mystery of the Soviet Union or any other communist country is not why it produced so little, but why it produced anything at all: and here Professor Chirot is quite right. The answer is because of corruption: an “honest” communist state would produce nothing. It could not survive.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Longing for Revolution”, New English Review, 2020-05-13.
September 23, 2025
QotD: “Bye, Phoenicia”
The long-distance trade of the Bronze Age had been dominated by large state actors. The ships were probably built and crewed by men from the Levantine coast, but the cargo was purchased and shipped by local representatives of the Great (and lesser) Powers of the age: luxury goods were an integral part of high-level diplomacy, so most trade was a virtual monopoly centrally directed from the palaces. When these polities were weakened (or in some dramatic cases like Ugarit completely destroyed) in the Collapse, they left behind a vacuum that independent Phoenician traders, operating without centralized control and serving only profit rather than the demands of empire, rapidly filled.
By the tenth century BC, the Phoenicians were importing silver from Spain, copper from Cyprus and Sardinia, and cinnamon from southeast Asia. They exported timber (the much-vaunted “Cedars of Lebanon”)1 and the valuable purple dye extracted from the murex sea snail, as well as a wide variety of finished luxury and quotidian goods they produced at home from raw materials obtained abroad. They founded colonies throughout the Mediterranean. And perhaps most importantly for the future of “the West”, they introduced the alphabet,2 which enabled the return of literacy to Greece and its far wider adoption than had ever been possible with Linear B.3
By the time the ascendant Neo-Assyrians began to encroach on their territory, the Phoenician city-states were so rich and economically well-connected that they were more valuable as semi-autonomous tributaries and middlemen than as conquered subjects. In fact, it was the Assyrian demands for metal (especially silver) that drove Phoenician colonization in the western Mediterranean: they founded Cadiz (Phoenician Gadir) to access the rich silver mines in the Spanish interior, as well as dozens of other smaller entrepôts along the sailing routes to and from the Levantine coast. Eventually they removed so much silver from Spanish mountains that its value in Assyria collapsed, inflated away by oversupply, just like Peruvian silver would destabilize the Spanish economy two thousand years later — but with the roles flipped. I enjoy these echoes.
It’s worth pointing out here that Phoenicians never called themselves Phoenicians: it’s a Greek word, deriving from a Mycenaean era (e.g., pre-Collapse) term for purple dye. In fact, they didn’t even have a term that clearly limned what the Greeks meant by “Phoenician” (essentially, “Levantine traders with really good ships who speak a related set of Semitic languages”). Instead, they sometimes referred to themselves more narrowly by reference to their native cities (Sidonian, Tyrian, Byblian, etc.) and other times more broadly as “Canaanite”, because of the cultural heritage they shared with the other survivors of Bronze Age Canaan. But even if they never employed it themselves, “Phoenician” is a terribly useful word, because these particular city-states had a lot in common with one another but diverged sharply from their Canaanite kin to both north and south.
Bronze Age Canaan had been relatively culturally homogenous, though the cities in the north came into the Hittites’ sphere of influence and those in the south the Egyptians’. After the Collapse, though, the city-states of northern Canaan (modern Syria), like their Neo-Hittite neighbors, seem to have continued more or less as they had been. Those in southern Canaan were not so lucky: weakened by the invading Sea Peoples and the withdrawal of Egyptian hegemony, the southern Canaanites were displaced by (or assimilated to) the new Semitic kingdoms in the region, including Israel, Judah, Edom, and Ammon. And the central Canaanites became the Phoenicians: master sailors and traders, they had seized their opportunity and so thoroughly transformed themselves that we join the Greeks in identifying them by a new name.
Most of the larger cities of the central Levant are buried beneath their modern equivalents, and Lebanon has not been a particularly salubrious place to excavate for the last few decades, so it’s hard to say a great deal about Phoenician continuity with their Bronze Age ancestors. There was obviously some, certainly genealogically but also linguistically and in terms of material culture. However, we also know that their lifestyles changed dramatically as their economic reach expanded and their cities became centers not only of exchange but of manufacturing. We know their commercial firms were organized around extended families, and that they began to settle foreign lands both as colonists in their own new cities and elsewhere as resident merchants with their own dedicated enclaves. And we know that as their city-states grew more powerful, they increasingly directed worship away from the traditional Canaanite pantheon, led by El, and towards the tutelary deity of each individual city. (The story that King Hiram of Tyre actually tore down the temples of El and Baal to make room for a magnificent new temple of his patron, Melqart,4 is probably an exaggeration, but points to the scale of the break with the past.)5
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.
- For a very funny story about an Iron Age Egyptian attempt to buy some, which I simply could not fit into this review, see the “Story of Wenamun“. Bonus points for imagining how it would have played out under the New Kingdom.
- Okay, the Phoenician “alphabet” is actually an abjad — it contains no symbols for vowels — but the Greeks quickly added those.
- It is much, much easier to learn to write with an alphabet than with a logosyllabic system like Linear B or cuneiform.
- Melqart is also the patron of the Tyrian colony of Carthage, and his name contributes one element to that of Hamilcar Barca. The –bal in Hannibal, Hasdrubal, etc., is of course from Baal.
- Cline doesn’t give a ton of detail on Phoenician culture; in this section I am also drawing heavily on the opening chapter of Richard Miles’s Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, which sentiment I fully endorse even though I haven’t finished the book yet.
September 21, 2025
From Eat Pray Love to plotting a murder
On Substack, Elizabeth Nickson charts the career of Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love and more recently a memoir of her life up to the point where she planned to murder her “once in a million year” partner:
Gilbert, you certainly know, wrote Eat Pray Love which was a massive international bestseller made into a film with Julia Roberts, which was also very successful. During the Pray portion, Gilbert retreated to an ashram in India to worship a living sub-deity called The Mother. At the time I was still tangentially aware of life in the world of moderately successful upscale arty women from the mega-cities and I’d heard of the Mother and her clinging clanging worship sessions — Siddha Yoga — going round the Pilates and yoga studios and the upscale self-help programs. The Mother’s satsangs were guaranteed to put you into an ecstatic state where you fused with the divine. And then you’d heal. From the abuse of the Patriarchy.
During the Pray section, Gilbert had a series of intense moments, which &mddash; coupled with an earlier session on the bathroom floor where God told her to wash her face and go to bed — meant, to her, a great deal. Her “God” gave her direction and purpose, where before she was caught in an unhappy marriage, being apparently the breadwinner in that marriage with a husband who a) didn’t work, b) wanted her to buy more and more stuff and c) have a child.
This seems a poor choice for a husband, but never mind. Gilbert was successful in the New York world of publishing and magazines and much occupied with that pursuit, a business which I now suspect is financed by the drug trade and used to launder money. In that world where success is one in ten thousand, one hundred thousand, and where Gilbert experienced perhaps the biggest literary success of her generation. She became universally, ridiculously, excessively loved.
And embrace it she did. For the past 15 years, Gilbert has traveled the world, usually with a woman companion to keep her on the rails, dishing out nostrums and platitudes with relish meant to show you how to “find yourself” and “live your truth” to women searching for purpose. “Creativity” or “art” is now substituted for what women in the before times used to call service to their communities and families, which is now called slavery to the patriarchy.
The following is the progression of “evolving” for modern left-of-center women, for whom finding a meaningful work is the number one priority, children being the last, as the below illustrates.
When the recognition of slim to no talent or at least un-sellable talent, is made and a future of grinding for multinationals is revealed, and spiritual enlightenment or Kundalini awakening seems out of reach, the desperation moves onto Democrat politics, and ends in middle-aged and elderly woman on the streets, face contorted in rage. Those women, a full 40% of whom are childless and family-less, spend their lives slogging away in some corporate or health or educational structure, becoming semi-insane. As an aside note, in my years-long investigation of voter fraud, many of the operators are women just like these below: middle-aged, put together, well dressed, polite, fully criminal.
In searching for your creativity — the highest good — you have to become fully aligned with your child self, your spiritual self, and that self becomes the most cherished part of you. Your intelligence, your executive function is demoted. Your creativity, your spirituality, then becomes fused to others whom you perceive being as weak as that child self you have elevated as spiritually superior. Women, it seems hardwired, must have people to care about. In the absence of family, it is the helpless to whom you assign your life.
Gilbert’s once-in-a-million-years love was a gay Syrian immigrant hairdresser with a history of heroin addiction and incarceration. No more victimish victim can be found.
For Gilbert’s millions of acolytes, spiritual worth, meaning,creative power is found in allyship with the weak, with whom they fully identify. And meaning is also found in hysterical advocacy and fury on behalf of the weak. There is no thinking attached to any of this, no analysis, no study. Just intense emotionality.
September 19, 2025
Edmund Burke, lawfare, and the East India Company
In The Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes discusses “the most outrageous campaign of lawfare in the history of the Anglosphere”, as Edmund Burke assailed Warren Hastings, the first governor general of India:
Why do even principled statesmen — and there are some in this administration, too — not dig in their heels and try to arrest the chain of revenge? Why do even cautious, logical men and women succumb to the passion of lawfare?
The most outrageous campaign of lawfare in the history of the Anglosphere, the impeachment and trial of the first governor general of India, Warren Hastings, was mounted by Mr. Incrementalism himself, Edmund Burke. The father of modern conservatism spent nearly a decade of his time in Parliament—from 1787 to 1795—crusading against Hastings, antagonizing allies all around.
Impeaching the “Wicked Wretch”
There were reasons to investigate what was going on in India: Hastings exploited the fact that the East India Company was, at that time, an adjunct of the Crown. That connection between a powerful company and a government — a far more powerful company than, say, Intel — was the trouble, for as Burke would put it, it created “a state in disguise of a merchant“.
Burke chose to prosecute Hastings — and failed. The “wicked wretch”, one of Burke’s slime phrases for Hastings, emerged from the ordeal with a pension, not a conviction. Burke biographer Russell Kirk has argued that the public flaying of Hastings served posterity — in England at least. After Burke’s death, at “every grammar and public school”, the story of Burke and Hastings “impressed upon the boys who would become colonial officers or members of Parliament some part of Burke’s sense of duty and consecration in the civil social order”. That slowed another chain, the chain of abuse by Britons of Indians. After Burke, England recognized that, as Kirk puts it, she had a “duty to her subject peoples in the East”.
Still, even Kirk’s excellent biography leaves readers wondering: Was Hastings truly the archest of the arch villains, as Burke maintained? And is this the right way to go about it all? A book that Burke penned in the same years that he waged his Hastings war, Reflections on the Revolution in France, influenced a far greater number, and in a greater number of lands, than the Hastings story. Burke might have had the same reach with a Reflections on the Abuses of the East India Company.
All the more welcome then is James Grant’s Friends Until the End, which gives the best-yet account of the chain reaction in Burke’s soul that drove him to weaponize government, what his crusade cost him, and what such crusades may cost all of us.
[…]
Next, however, came a challenge that deeply frustrated Burke. Scanning the empire’s horizon for a place to commence a model reform, Fox and Burke settled on the East India Company, which abused the some thirty million Indians it oversaw with the same admixture of plunder, condescension, and cruelty familiar to Catholics of Ireland. The pair put their hearts into the Indian reform: Fox promised a “great and glorious” reform to save “many, many millions of souls”. They also put their minds into the project. To track the East India Company, Burke personally purchased sufficient shares to win him rights to attend and vote at quarterly meetings. He steeped himself in knowledge of a land he’d never seen, learning names of “numerous Indian nawabs, rajas, nizams, subahs, sultans, viziers, and begums“.
Such prep work, as Grant points out, enabled the Whigs to identify the correct solution: de-mercantilization. “Separate the company’s two incompatible missions: sovereign rule and moneymaking”, Grant writes. The compromised statute that emerged from the House of Commons was not as neat: A seven-man commission would rule India, while a board would govern East India’s commercial operations. But the commercial board would be a subsidiary to the commission. And in marshaling their votes for the measure, the pair still confronted the formidable obstacle of East India shareholders in Britain, furious at the threat to their fortunes that such reform represented. Fox might emancipate Hindus, their opponent William Pitt warned, but he must also “take care that he did not destroy the liberties of Englishmen”.
The king and his allies in any case defeated Fox’s India Bill, as it was known, in the House of Lords. The king, who had that prerogative, booted Fox and Burke from paid posts. In the 1784 general election, Burke held on to his seat in Parliament, as did Fox (by a hair), but so many Whigs, now labeled “Fox’s martyrs”, were ousted by voters from Parliament that the Whigs’ opponent, Pitt, became prime minister. Burke’s disillusionment ran deep: “I consider the House of Commons as something worse than extinguishd”, he wrote.
It was thus, at the age of fifty-nine and merely an opposition parliamentarian, that Burke risked his high-stakes lawfare. He commenced impeachment proceedings with a four-day anti-Hastings polemic. Of course, Burke universalized his point: The Hastings trial was “not solely whether the prisoner at the bar be found innocent or guilty, but whether millions of mankind shall be made miserable or happy”. And of course he raised the stakes for fellow lawmakers by appealing to their honor: “Faults this nation may have; but God forbid we should pass judgment upon people who framed their laws and institutions prior to our insect origin of yesterday!” The House must join him in impeachment, the Lords convict Hastings.
The House did join him, handing to the Lords charges that Hastings had “desolated the most flourishing provinces”, “pressed, ruined, and destroyed the natives of those provinces”, and violated “the most solemn treaties”. In thousands of hours of speeches before a jury from the House of Lords, the eager prosecutor, Burke, dwelt on Hastings’s cruelty to the Rohillas, an Afghan tribe from land bordering Nepal. He also charged that Hastings had taken revenge on a crooked tax collector, Nandakumar, for alleging that he — Hastings — had taken a bribe, seeing to it that Nandakumar was convicted and hanged for forgery. Not all of this was proven. And, as the jury of Lords slowly considered the charges, as the months and years passed, Burke found himself more and more isolated. Fox, Burke’s initial ally in the undertaking, faded. By the time the Lords’ jury voted not to convict, eight years on, a full third of their original number had already passed away.
September 17, 2025
Dark Forest Deterrence: Bureaucrats are Destroying the Universe
Feral Historian
Published 2 Sept 2022A quick look at a minor and neglected detail of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem series. I trust that everyone has done the reading.
September 14, 2025
“When must we kill them?”
On the social media platform previously known as Twitter, Tom Kratman provides an excerpt from The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad:
Reposting this seems apropos:
The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad, Chapter 32 Copyright © 2025, Tom Kratman, Harry Kitchener
“When must we kill them?”
That question was asked recently by a leftist student, one Nicholas Decker, from George Mason University. It’s a very interesting question, and one that most, and perhaps all, hard leftists in the United States are contemplating. Indeed, we see now, from an NCRI / Rutgers survey, that something over half of leftists believe that assassinating Trump would be justified, and nearly half think the same thing about Musk.
Note, here, that this was of all people identifying as left of center. I would suggest that this means that almost nobody who is slightly left of center would agree with that and nearly everybody who is far left of center agrees with that. And if we needed any more proof, just contemplate the number of would be groupies moistening their panties over murderer Luigi Mangione, as pointed out by former New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz.
Why do they think so or why are they wondering about it? It’s actually more understandable than most on the right and perhaps even many on the left would understand. They’re wondering about it because, with the destruction of the Deep State, with so many billionaires turning against the left and – horrrors! – no longer letting the left wing narrative control online and legacy media political discourse, with no prospect of the kind of money being shunted from the taxpayer, through the Federal Government, to left wing NGOs to help swing elections, they do not really think there is any serious prospect of the left ever winning a national election again or, at least, not in their lifetimes. And they may be right about that.
With James Carville telling the Democrats to give the boot to the gender and woke ideologues, the identity politics losers, the little boy penis choppers and little girl breast destroyers and vagina removers; they see themselves being marginalized, losing their influence, and losing their dream, forever. And this seems fairly likely. With no possibility, once Trump gets finished deporting all the illegals, of turning just enough of those illegals into client voters to swing elections just enough for control, they think that leftism will be hopeless in the United States. And they’re probably right about that. With the Communist factories of higher education being broken to the will of the right, with Gramsci’s / Rudi Dutschke’s “Long March Through the Institutions” being walked back, and quickly, they’re thinking about it and wondering about it because leftism is dead in the United States, a corpse just awaiting burial.
So, though the point of this entire exercise in the Right Wing Death Squad has been to convince the left to chill out, FFS, it seems that certain key point bear repeating.
1. Urban Guerilla movements invariably succeed in creating the kind of oppressive government that they believe will infuriate the people and lead to a general uprising. Those governments then proceed to exterminate the Urban Guerillas and all their supporters, and do so to general popular applause.
2. The armed forces, barring some political generals and morally cowardly colonels, hate you and everything about you. Posse Comitatus is only a law, not something in the constitution that would require going through the difficult process of amendment. Change the law – and do but note who has control of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court (so that constitutional grounds could not be manufactured to create an objection to getting rid of the law) – and the military would be very happy to round you all up. And you’re completely, incompetently, incapable of resisting this.
3. Moreover, though you have a few people with some military experience and training, the key word there is “few”. Yes, yes, I know that, since Vietnam, the left has been obsessed with the inner city black cannon fodder meme, but it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. Conversely, the white working class and conservative populations at large – to the limited extent these categories may differ – are replete with people with a lot of military training and experience and they hate you, too. They also have most of the guns. Your side has fairly few, in comparison, and little skill in using what you do have, alone or in groups.
4. You also fundamentally misunderstand the difference between your approach to violence – as a rheostat to be turned up or down, to suit – with the right’s – which is an on-off switch marked “peace and good feelings” on the one hand, and “kill every one of them” on the other.
You know all those terrible things you and your pals like to say about right wing, especially but not always white, Americans? Well, we know you don’t really believe those things because if you did you would be afraid ever to leave your mom’s basement. But you really ought to try to grasp this; sometimes those things are true.
Although our purpose with this project has been to try to get you to save yourselves, still, one cannot help but look forward to the prospect of young Mr. Decker finding this out.
So, if you were to succeed in killing the president, you will get Vance. Vance will have a mandate, in that case, to obliterate you. If he fails to carry out that mandate then genuine Right Wing Death Squads will take up the slack. No trial, no due process at all; they will proceed to obliterate you and every safe harbor and supporter you have, and often in creatively disgusting ways.
Amusingly enough, your only safety, in such a case, would be in being sent to some variant on El Salvador’s CECOT. I could see the population of El Salvador roughly doubling in the course of a few years as millions of American leftists find out just how grim a Latin American prison can be.
But, seriously, why would they or anybody waste the money when you could as easily just become an unfortunate statistic? Were I betting on it, I’d bet that few of you see a flight – or even half a flight – to El Salvador, but that many of you would have a long last moment staring down into a ditch you had just been forced to dig while a man with a pistol walks up behind you.
So the answer to young Mr. Decker’s question, “When must we kill them?” is “When you want to die.”
September 8, 2025
QotD: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies
One of the most famous hoaxes of that era was the so-called Cottingley Fairies. Two girls in Yorkshire, cousins Elise Wright and Frances Griffith, took a series of five photos in 1917 showing themselves near a stream in the presence of tiny fairy-like creatures. Elsie’s father Arthur Wright, an amateur photographer, never doubted that the photos were fabricated. But the girl’s mother Polly was more credulous. The pictures became public when Polly Wright attended a lecture on “fairy life” at a Theosophical Society meeting in Bradford. They were quickly circulated among the group’s adherents, who found the photographed fairies consistent with their theosophical beliefs. The extraordinary images soon came to the attention of the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist who was writing an article on fairies for the Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was convinced the fairies were real. His article was published under the headline Fairies Photographed, describing the Cottingley Fairies as an “epoch-making event”.
“The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life,” wrote Conan Doyle. “Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been put before it.” In 1922, Conan Doyle followed up with a book, The Coming of the Fairies, in which he announced that proof of fairy existence was a blow to cold Victorian science, which “would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon”. He added: “There is nothing scientifically impossible, so far as I can see, in some people seeing things that are invisible to others.”
Conan Doyle was wrong of course. Like many other spiritualists at the time, he’d been taken in. The photos were fake. The two girls Elsie and Frances both lived into their 80s. Toward the end of their lives in the 1980s, they admitted that they’d fabricated the fairy photos using paper cutouts.
Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.
September 7, 2025
Long before the “Bad Orange Man”, there was “T.R.”
In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes points out some strong similarities between Donald Trump’s career and that of the Bull Moose himself, Theodore Roosevelt:
Though a century apart—TR served from 1901 to 1909 — these two chief executives have favored the same modus operandi: using unpredictability to amass power. And the record of Theodore Rex, as Edmund Morris titled his TR biography, bodes ill for both the economy and the Republican Party.
The Trump-TR Parallels
But to the similarities. They start, for both men, pre–White House. As Trump did, TR staged his pre-presidential efforts as much with an eye to public recognition as to sustained reform or strengthening institutions.
Whenever TR stumbled, he pivoted to a new venture and publicized it like mad, though the medium in those days was the printed word, not season after season on The Apprentice. Before the cognoscenti had even absorbed the meaning of the young Roosevelt’s humiliating fourth-place score in a key 1886 New York City mayoral contest, for example, TR was off to the Badlands, memorializing his ranching experiences in dispatches and books such as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.
As Trump does, TR routinely alienated GOP grandees, circumventing them to get ahead. As Trump has, TR skillfully cultivated the media — so skillfully that members of Congress were left trying catch up with whatever shifts in public opinion resulted from the politician’s press alliances. TR’s Rupert Murdoch was the widely syndicated William Allen White of Kansas’s influential Emporia Gazette. TR’s equivalent of Fox News was the New York Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, drummed a steady beat of support when Roosevelt called for war against Spain.
Today, Murdoch must be scratching his head over what his showcasing Trump has wrought, especially now that Trump decided to sue both Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal. White, too, found that he had second thoughts about his decision to back TR: “Roosevelt bit me and I went mad,” White reportedly told a colleague.
[…]
BULLY
The occupant of what he labeled the Bully Pulpit — “bully” as in “excellent” — proved a literal bully as well.
As president, TR perpetually unnerved fellow Republicans, pivoting back to domestic politics. As Trump has, TR cast his campaigns in moral terms rather than economic ones. Where Trump launched his tariff war, TR made war against trusts, large combinations of companies. Relying more on whim than statute, Roosevelt segregated trusts into “good trusts” and “bad trusts”.
TR targeted an invincible-looking industry that, in those days, mattered as much as the interstate highways, or the internet, do today: railroads. James Hill’s Great Northern Railway took over a struggling competitor, Northern Pacific. Roosevelt asked Hanna what he made of the combined entity, Great Northern Securities. Hanna replied that it was “the very best thing possible for the future of the whole Northwest territory”. Roosevelt nonetheless sicced the Justice Department on the Great Northern.
J. Pierpont Morgan, a participant in the beleaguered deal, called on the president to inquire, as desperate steel importers these days do from time to time, whether their attorneys might work out the matter behind the scenes.
No.
Next, the disconcerted Morgan asked whether other investments of the House of Morgan might be assailed. Roosevelt’s reply captures the chill of arbitrary leadership. The administration would not go after the other Morgan companies, he said — unless “they have done something we regard as wrong”.
As Edmund Morris reports in Theodore Rex, to observers such as French ambassador Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt seemed “more powerful than a king”. That power suited many voters fine, which is why Roosevelt won so headily when he ran for office on his own in 1904.
Of course TR, like Trump, occasionally supported laws that aligned with his impulses. One example is the Elkins Act of 1903, which made it illegal for railroads to charge different freight rates for different customers. This shallow effort to achieve market “fairness” deprived the railroads of a standard business tool: the ability to provides discounts to those who buy the product in larger quantities. Shares in railroads promptly dropped more than 20 percent, a shift that undermined TR’s premise of railroad invincibility.
QotD: Generation X
The concept of “selling out” — and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything — is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties. The complexity, nuance, and application of the term sellout was both ubiquitous and impossible to grasp. Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche.
Or, as I like to put it, we were so obsessed with “authenticity” that we took as our guru an exquisitely sensitive longhaired goof who fronted a band named after spooge. […] But Klosterman does have genuine insights sometimes:
The detail always noted in remembrances of the Bronco chase is the throngs of bystanders cheering for Simpson as the car rolled down the freeway, congregating on overpasses and holding makeshift cardboard signs proclaiming, “The Juice Is Loose”. It seemed perverse then and still seems perverse now. Yet this can also be understood as the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.
Sailer thinks that’s clever and perceptive, and I agree. Too bad you have to read some masturbatory bullshit about Zima to get to it.
Sadly, he doesn’t take that out a step (or, at least, he doesn’t get quoted doing so in Sailer’s review). Here’s Klosterman’s verdict on why Gen X, for all its faults, wasn’t so bad:
The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy.
True enough, but look: Of all the things that made the Boomers so fucking insufferable, right near the top was their utter inability to let go of their youth. Instead of seeing Forrest Gump as a metaphor so unsubtle, an anvil to the head seems sneakier, they thought it was a lighthearted celebration of a simpler, more innocent time. We knew better. Since they couldn’t let go of their youth, we made “being old and jaded long before our time” into our signature thing.
But where, my fellow alterna-dudes, is that attitude now, when it matters? We’re in the same position in 2022 as our parents were in 1992: Staring down the barrel of middle age, teeing off on life’s back nine, pick your metaphor. It’s time to put away childish things. Grow the fuck up already, the way we wish our parents would’ve done for us back in 1992. Instead, we’re letting our lunatic children smear their pathologies all over what’s left of America, because … ?
I know why Klosterman does it: That’s what they pay him for. What’s our excuse?
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
September 1, 2025
“… these two [books] are ‘perfect bound’, which is a misleading name for a crappy technique”
Chris Schwarz on the frustrations of a (physical) book reader with far too many modern printed books:
Dammit, Norton!
I don’t read much for pleasure these days. I spend about three hours a day reading manuscripts, draft blog entries, old woodworking texts, academic papers and contracts. When the workday is done, the last thing I want is someone else’s voice chattering in my head.
But I love books and have always been a voracious reader. So I keep a stack of books that I probe and pick at, like a 5-year-old forking through chop suey, looking for something to consume.
This month has been great. I’m in the middle of “The Overstory” by Richard Powers and “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders. Both books were written with an exquisite pen, and I lose track of time when I’m reading them.
But both books also make me want to burn down the headquarters of Norton and Random House publishing. Because both books are made like dogshit.
Like most books these days, these two are “perfect bound”, which is a misleading name for a crappy technique. Like if we called a “butt joint” the “excellent end-grain joint,” or if we called miters the “super slanty joint”.
What’s perfect binding? Take a stack of individual sheets of paper, like the stack of pages you put in your printer. Slather some glue on one edge and press the goo into the pages. While the glue is still wet, slap the book’s cover to the glue on the spine. Trim the pages, sell the book and make an obscene amount of money.
I don’t know a binding technique that is crappier than perfect binding. Even loose-leaf pages in a Trapper Keeper are better because they can be repaired.
Perfect-bound books are – like a Ryobi drill – a product that has an expiration date. After two or three readings, the pages will start to fall out of the glue. You don’t even have to mistreat the binding for this to happen. The glue gets brittle, then you turn a page like a normal person and the leaves fall like it’s autumn.
Do not fool yourself and think that book publishers are suffering and need to cut corners in the manufacturing department. They aren’t. Book publishing is still one of the most profitable businesses, as far as margin is concerned. It’s not unusual for a publisher to have margins of 30 to 35 percent. (Note: Lost Art Press keeps a margin of about 15 percent – much lower because we pay more in royalties and pay a lot more for manufacturing.)
My paperback copy of “The Overstory” is the 23rd printing of the title since it was released in 2018. Norton is literally printing money at this point with the book. The book’s retail is $18.95. Manufacturing cost (at a plant in the United States): I’d guess is about $3.80.
Norton can do better. But it doesn’t have to. Customers are happy to pay $18.95 for an impermanent book.
August 31, 2025
Andrew Doyle’s The End of Woke
In The Critic, Titania McGrath reviews The End of Woke, and nobody should be surprised that it isn’t a rave review, although there is some raving:
Renowned grifter Andrew Doyle has written another “book” called The End of Woke. It’s the most repugnant piece of tripe ever to reach the printing press. It’s ignorant, ill-formed and offensive in the extreme. I have absolutely no intention of reading it.
Not content with his previous fascist manual Free Speech and Why It Matters, Doyle in his new book challenges ideological dogma on both the left and the right. It is laughable that he believes that anyone would be interested in such an approach. Imagine being so insecure in your belief-system that you would be open to persuasion and debate.
Doyle is a reactionary monster with a sub-zero IQ, one who is so unenlightened that he does not seem to realise that “liberal values” and “free speech” are Nazi dog-whistles. Having skim-read the blurb of The End of Woke, I’ve gleaned that Doyle supports outmoded and frankly immature notions such as “tolerance” and “liberty”. And he has a head like a cube (see above).
It was to be expected that bigots would approve of this book. The “comedian” Jimmy Carr called it “thought-provoking and entertaining”. The white male author Michael Shermer said it was “a magisterial read”. And that evil cisgender demon Julie Bindel wrote in The Critic that it was “the best work yet by the creator of genius parody Titania McGrath”.
August 28, 2025
QotD: The rise and fall of the chariot in combat
The classic chariot was driver and archer or spearmen. A friend describes them as being like a pilot and a navigator (or bomb-aimer) on a bombing run. The pilot/charioteer concentrates on getting the pair of you where you need to be (or not to be). The archer/spearmen/navigator/bomb-aimer concentrates on killing the enemy.
The most famous driver/warrior pairing in myth and literature is Krishna and Prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata and, specifically, the Bhagavad Gita. (Normally, the driver serves the warrior, but if your driver is an incarnation of Vishnu, things work differently.) The warriors of the Iliad are also chariot-driving warriors — hence scenes such as Achilles dragging Hector‘s dead body behind his chariot. Chariots were a major element in Chinese warfare up to the Warring States period. New Kingdom Egypt was very much a chariot empire, as were their great rivals, the Hittites.
Once recurve bows able to match chariot archery from horseback arrived, chariots largely disappeared from combat in the major Eurasian civilisations. This began to occur around the time of the Assyrians — who were a transitional case using both chariots and cavalry — about a thousand years before the invention of the stirrup and even longer before the stirrup’s arrival in the Mediterranean world. Lancers — the heavily armoured version of which was the cataphract — then developed as a way of dealing with horse archers.
Lorenzo Warby, “Stirrups, a rant”, Lorenzo from Oz, 2025-02-28.
August 27, 2025
In praise of the book
Ted Gioia contemplates the glorious future of the book:
A decades-old bookmark from a Toronto Book City location (probably the store on the Danforth near Chester).
Can you imagine data storage that never needs an upgrade. Even better, there’s no subscription fee. And the system never crashes — there hasn’t been a single minute of down time in recorded history.
And there’s still more:
- There are no terms of service.
- No hidden fees.
- No customer service bots to deal with.
- No annoying follow-up spam emails and texts.
- No privacy intrusions or surveillance of any sort.
- No data incompatibility issues now or in the future.
- No advertising or solicitations of any sort.
The list continues — no cookies, no credit cards, no come-ons, no conditions. None of that.
What a miracle!
I’m talking about my favorite handheld device, and I don’t need a cloud to hold its contents. Just a shelf.
You guessed it — I’m referring to books. They’re the greatest hard storage concept in human history, and nothing else comes close.
The book is the ultimate killer app.
People have been predicting the death of the book for decades. The Internet was going to make them obsolete. But somehow they survived.
The launch of the Kindle in 2007 posed a bigger threat. Even I was convinced — at least for a while. I bought a Kindle and tried it out, plunging with enthusiasm into the world of eBooks and digital storage.
But a month later, I’d returned to physical books. It was a better experience in every way.
It didn’t help when Amazon started deleting books from Kindles. Much to the customers’ surprise, they learned that they didn’t own the book they had bought — they were merely “purchasing a license to the content“.
Access can be terminated. And Amazon is the ultimate terminator.
That’s never happened to any physical book on my shelf. I own thousands of them, and nobody has ever revoked my access. I can also sell or give them to others, and they will retain rights in perpetuity.
You can’t do that with a Kindle. You’re not allowed to sell an eBook. You can’t even donate it to a library. Your license is restricted and non-transferable.
But transferability is how books and literary culture survive. Books are supposed to move without friction across generations and borders and boundaries. Some books have had dozens of owners over hundreds of years — creating a legacy unknown in the world of digital technologies.
Even more insidious, Amazon will update books on your Kindle — changing the text without the reader or author’s permission. That’s happened, for example, to books by Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie. If somebody in a position of power decides that an author’s work is problematic, your e-book gets cleansed.
