Lotuseaters Dot Com
Published 29 Nov 2025Luca is joined by Dan to discuss Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser. They explore Fraser’s skill in writing historical fiction, the genius of the Harry Flashman character, and the sheer hilarity of the novel’s dark humour.
March 27, 2026
The Greatest Scoundrel Story Ever Written
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March 25, 2026
Montaigne, a Substacker avant la lettre
On Substack (of course), Ted Gioia makes the case that Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (or “Montaigne” to unwashed moderns) was the historical progenitor of all essayists to follow:
Michel de Montaigne may be the most influential essayist in history — even Shakespeare borrowed from his work (taking some passages almost verbatim). But if Montaigne were alive today, this famous essayist might be mistaken for just another slacker living in his parents’ basement.
Okay, let’s be fair. He actually lived in the family castle. But it still was slacking. At age 38, he didn’t have a job — and preferred reading books. Leave me alone, was his message to the world.
The Montaigne family castle (Photo by Henry Salomé)
But even a castle was too noisy for him — or maybe it was just his wife from an arranged marriage that made him feel that way. In any event, Montaigne eventually decided that he needed total isolation, almost like a monk in a hermitage. So he moved into the tower on the family estate. He called it his citadel.
Here he surrounded himself with books, and announced his intention to devote the rest of his life to reading and philosophizing “in calm and freedom from all cares”.
Montaigne’s tower (Photo by Henry Salomé)
But at age 47, Montaigne had a change of heart. He returned to the world, ready to embark on travels and public service. But before leaving for Italy, he had one last goal he needed to fulfill closer to home — and it would have a decisive impact on Western culture.
During his years in the tower, Montaigne wrote 94 essays, and compiled them in two book-length manuscripts. These he now delivered to a printer in Bordeaux, and paid to have them published. A short while later, he traveled to Paris and proudly gave a copy to King Henry III
In his mind, he was serving as his own patron, drawing on the family wealth to cover the expenses of his debut as an author. But today, of course, we would call this self-publishing — a term that is often (unfairly) used to demean the value and legitimacy of these rule-breaking efforts by do-it-yourself writers.
Call it what you will, Montaigne’s achievement cannot be denied. He not only invented the modern essay — setting the stage for Bacon, Emerson, and so many others. But he also helped shape the human sciences and legitimize the personal memoir. That’s because his essays covered many topics but really had only one subject—namely Montaigne himself, with all his quirks and opinions and hot takes.
His essays marked a milestone in the history of individualism. So, of course it makes sense that they were self-published. That’s what individualists do. They are happy to work outside the system.
I could even imagine our slacker Montaigne publishing these essays on Substack today. You might say that he anticipated the Substack style of writing. His balancing of memoir and analysis, subjective and objective, observation and generalization is very much aligned with what I see on this platform every day.
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March 24, 2026
“Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book”
In The Critic, Ben Sexsmith reviews a new book by Matt Goodwin, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity:
Here is an exceptionally easy argument to make:
- Mass migration is ensuring that the historical majority in Britain is becoming a minority.
- This is the result of policies that have been pursued regardless of popular opinion.
- This has had many kinds of destructive consequences.
The first claim is so obviously true that one might as well deny the greenness of the grass. The second is proven by decades of broken promises (see Anthony Bowles’s article “Immigration and Consent” for more). The third requires argumentation, but I think that it is clear if one considers hideous incidences of terrorism, grooming gangs and violent censoriousness, as well as broader trends of economic dependency and electoral sectarianism.
Again, this is not a difficult argument to make. So why is it made so badly?
Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book. It reads like the book of a political operator extending his CV. The left-wing commentator Andy Twelves caused a stir on social media by pointing out various factual mistakes and what appear to be non-existent quotes. Twelves speculates that these “quotes” are the result of AI hallucinations, which is plausible, if not proven, in the light of the fact that two of Mr Goodwin’s sparse footnotes contain source information from ChatGPT.
Inasmuch as Suicide of a Nation makes a form of the argument sketched out the beginning of this article, there is truth to it. But it contains a fundamental problem — it assumes that this argument is so true that there is no requirement to make it well.
“Slop” is an overused term but it feels painfully appropriate for a book that is spoon fed to its audience. Goodwin, who had a long academic career before becoming a successful commentator, is not a man who lacks intelligence. But he writes as if he thinks his audience lacks it. “I did not write this book for the ruling class”, writes Goodwin, “I wrote it for the forgotten majority”. Alas, he seems to think that the average member of the “forgotten majority” has the reading level of a dimwitted 12-year-old. As well as being stylistically simple, the book is full of annoying paternal asides. “In the pages ahead I shall walk you through what is happening to the country …” “In the next chapter we will begin our journey …” Thank you, Mr Goodwin. Can we stop for ice cream?
The book is terribly derivative, with a title that reflects Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower and a subtitle — “Immigration, Islam, Identity” — that all but repeats that of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe — “Immigration, Identity, Islam”. It is written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI. I’m not saying it was AI-generated. (Indeed, a brief assessment using AI checkers suggests that it was not.) I’m just saying that it might as well have been.
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March 22, 2026
Four million books published in North America during 2024
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte considers the size of the North American book market at most recent count:
Random photo of books stacked in my office about 15 years ago.
I’m often asked by writers about the prospects of a particular book. I try to be encouraging. If it’s a good book, there’s undoubtedly an audience for it. At the same time, I try to be realistic. It’s a crowded market and it’s often difficult even for a good book to find its audience.
If asked to explain just how crowded the market for books is today, I usually say something like, there are about two million books published in North America every year. I’m not sure where I got that figure from. Probably from some research I read five years ago.
Turns out it’s wrong. “The total number of books published in the US in 2025 with ISBN numbers jumped 32.5% over 2024 to more than four million books,” announced Publishers Weekly on March 17.
I can’t get over that number. Four million books.
An average reader might get through about 2,000 books in a lifetime. A long-lived super-reader churning through 70 or 80 a year may exceed 5,000. Gladstone’s reading logs suggest that he engaged with more than 20,000 books, but it’s not clear he read them all.
A large independent bookstore might carry between 10,000 and 30,000 books. A suburban chain store, 60,000 to 120,000. The Barnes & flagship at Union Square in Manhattan has hundreds of thousands of books on four massive floors. Powell’s City of Books in Portland, occupying an entire city block—you need a map to get from room to room—has at least a half million books, and by some counts a million. New York’s The Strand, which boasts 18 miles of books, new and used, is probably the world’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer: it has 2.5 million books on incredibly dense shelving. You’d need a Powell’s, a Strand, and a couple of B&N Union Squares to hold four million titles.
Four million books is equivalent in volume to the holdings of a good-sized university library system, or a large public library system—collections built over a century. And these are published in a single year.
In 1939, the year Margaret Atwood was born, The Library of Congress, widely recognized as the largest library in the world, home to a civilization’s worth of books, boasted about six million titles, including pamphlets. It’s now holding about 25 million, and the US alone is on pace to produce that many titles between now and the end of the decade.
Four million books. That’s 11,000 books a day. Four hundred and fifty books an hour.
A year ago, there were “only” 3.15 million books, traditional and self-published, released. So 2025 represents an increase of 32.5 percent. Self-publishing was up just under 39 percent. Traditional publishing about 6.6 percent. Publishers Weekly doesn’t offer much of an explanation for the explosion of new titles. AI has to be a major factor (see this week’s publishing sensation in The New York Times.)
Of course, most of the four million books are not worth your time. Only 642,242 of the titles were released by traditional publishers. A traditional publisher doesn’t guarantee quality, but it suggests a minimum of vetting. The search for merit among self-published books is easily frustrated.
Bowker, the service that counts the ISBNs (the unique thirteen-digit identifiers attached to each book), does not distinguish among formats. Many of the four million were published only as ebooks. And some books published as print, ebook, and audiobook are triple-counted. There may only be about 2.5 million distinct works in that total.
If one were to take the colouring books, planners, puzzle books, and AI-generated garbage out of the equation, we might be down to 1.5 million meaningfully distinct books. And of all those, maybe 1 to 3 percent, or 20,000 to 50,000, will sell over 1,000 copies. That puts some perspective on the four million.
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March 20, 2026
The Revenge Plot: Orestes’s Foreshadowing in The Odyssey
MoAn Inc.
Published 4 Dec 2025This video was filmed in July of 2025. I wasn’t going to upload it due to the weird not-really-focused-but-also-kinda-focused-thing my phone camera was clearly going through, but decided I didn’t care that much because the content itself was fine x
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QotD: The lameness and sameness of modern science fiction novels
I’ll confess, though: I almost didn’t read this book. Actually, for several years I didn’t. I was vaguely aware of its existence, but I’d pretty much stopped reading new speculative fiction because I finally admitted to myself that it was pure masochism that kept me beating my head against the wall of newly-published extruded genre product when I had sixty-plus years of Hugo and Nebula nominees to choose from. Sure, every novel will reflect something of its age’s concerns (there’s a lot of nuclear war in those old Hugo winners!), but it’s gotten much worse in the last ten or fifteen years: every book that gets any buzz is so deeply inflected with questions of personal liberation from oppressive structures, so little nuanced and so obsessed with identity and representation, that I find it borderline unreadable. A few books like that, done well — fine, that’s part of life, that’s certainly a kind of story you can tell. But when it’s everything, when it becomes a precondition for publication, you’re left with a tragically denuded sample of the human experience. It’s not that I don’t want to read a book where I disagree with the underlying politics, it’s that an unsubtle obsession with the “correct” politics makes a book boring and cringe. One-dimensionally “right-wing” fiction written in reaction to the contemporary mainstream is just as bad — worse, perhaps, because if done well it’s the sort of thing I would really enjoy.1
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J.I. Corcoran”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-04-29.
- There’s nothing worse than poor execution of an incredible idea, because it means no one else will come along and do the incredible idea right. Austin Grossman’s Crooked, for instance, is Richard Nixon vs. Cosmic Horrors, which is a brilliant premise (yes, the Interstate Highway System is definitely an eldritch sigil designed to protect America, I will not accept any argument) but falls apart on the totally ahistorical version of our 37th President designed to justify making him the “good guy”. The real Nixon is such a fascinating and compelling figure — why not keep him as weird and twitchy and striving as he actually was and have him be the good guy anyway?
Or, say, the Napoleon movie.
March 16, 2026
QotD: Political entrepreneurs and federal subsidies
Most of Josephson’s ire is directed toward political entrepreneurs. The subsidized Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific Railroad, with his “bad grades and high interest charges” show that he “apparently knew little enough about railroad-building”. The leaders of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, Josephson notes, “carried on [their actions] with a heedless abandon … [which] caused a waste of between 70 and 75 percent of the expenditure as against the normal rate of construction”. But it never occurs to Josephson that the subsidies government gave these railroads created the incentives that led their owners to overpay for materials and to build in unsafe areas. He quotes “one authority” on the railroads as saying, “The Federal government seems … to have assumed the major portion of the risk and the Associates seem to have derived the profits” — but Josephson never pursues the implication of that passage.
Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.
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March 13, 2026
QotD: “I was one-shotted in my teens by Guns, Germs, and Steel“
Jane Psmith, “BRIEFLY NOTED: Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-11-03.
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March 11, 2026
QotD: Traitors are worse than open enemies so we hate them more
Officer Frenly (High IQ) @FrenlyOfficer
The most hated character from Harry Potter is not Voldemort. It’s not Bellatrix. Not even Draco.It’s Umbridge.
Ask yourself why.
Simple.
Umbridge does one thing the main villain doesn’t do, that none of the other villains do.
She pretends to be on the heroes’ side. And prevents them from defending themselves.
This is how the human mind evolved. Foemen, tribal enemies who oppose us on the field of battle, provoke our fear, anger, even hatred. But traitors provoke our contempt and disgust.
We instinctively know that a disloyal friend is worse than an enemy.
Against an enemy, we can defend ourselves, and our tribe will support us. Oppose the traitor, and she will cry that she is an innocent victim, and we are the evil ones.
The traitor not only betrays her own tribe, she turns her tribe against each other.
But it’s worse than that. The enmity between this tribe and that, between lion and zebra, between farmer and rat, is dictated by opposing interests, by incompatible needs.
Our cruelty to the foe is forced upon us. It is the indifference of the universe, manifesting its conclusion through us. It’s adaptation, not sadism.
The traitor isn’t like that. She didn’t have to do it. She could have supported the tribe, and everyone, including her, would have been fine.
The traitor didn’t have her path forced on her. She chose it out of spite, or for gain.
Traitors are worse. So we hate them more.
Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-28.
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March 10, 2026
Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry
Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:
… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.
But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.
Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.
In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.
Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.
Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”
The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.
Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.
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March 8, 2026
Performative … reading?
Nicole James talks about a secretive cult of readers who — I’m afraid to even say it — read books in public, specifically to be seen reading books in public:
Reading has become competitive, which is impressive when you consider that it is an activity performed while sitting down and moving only the eyes. In theory, intellectually competitive reading would involve fierce debates in candlelit rooms, people slamming piles of Dostoevsky onto tables, and shouting things like, “You’ve misunderstood the moral ambiguity of suffering!” before storming out into the night to reflect meaningfully. In practice, it involves sitting in a café in Ridgewood holding a copy of the Iliad while pretending not to notice that three separate people have already noticed. And then pretending not to notice yourself noticing that they have noticed, which is where the true athleticism begins.
Because reading has slowly repositioned itself from private hobby to public personality trait. This is called performative reading, and it is less about engaging with ideas and more about being seen in the act of possibly engaging with ideas. It requires a certain book, a certain environment, and a certain facial expression. Specifically, a face suggesting that thoughts are currently underway.
The extraction of the book from the bag is an art form in itself.
It must not look like you packed it specifically for display. That would reek of planning, and planning is death to mystique. No, the book must appear to have happened to you. As though, midway through reaching for lip balm or car keys, you encountered it unexpectedly. “Oh,” your expression must suggest, “are you here too? How curious.”
The bag should be opened with a kind of languid inevitability. Do not rummage through your bag. Rummaging implies receipts. Crumpled tissues. A muesli bar from 2019. The book must be located swiftly, as if it occupies a reserved, velvet-lined chamber within your otherwise chaotic life.
You lift it out slowly. This is a text. Ideally one with a cover that signals moral seriousness or tasteful despair.
The removal must be conducted at a volume slightly above whisper. There may be a soft thud as it meets the table. A decisive, cultured thud. The kind of thud that says, “I have opinions about late-stage capitalism”.
Then, and this is critical, you do not open it immediately. That would look eager. Instead, you place it beside your coffee. The coffee must appear faintly architectural.
Only once the book is resting in full view do you adjust it by half a centimeter. A sleeve may be pushed back. A wrist revealed. The lighting should imply that you have recently contemplated something ancient and mildly troubling. Several photos are taken. One will be selected after rejecting seventeen for “looking too literate.”
The caption must be controlled. Something like:
Revisiting this.
“Revisiting” suggests that you and the book have history. You have both grown. You have both suffered.
And when it is finally time to return the book to the bag, this too must be handled with restraint. It slides back in as though it has completed a small but meaningful public service. The performance ends. The book remains unread. But visible. Which, as we all know, is the point.
QotD: Reading books versus remembering books
“What about people who can’t read?” I asked, thinking of all the illiterates in my year group at school. “Don’t they have human rights, too?”
My mother snorted with laughter, as if I’d told a dirty joke. “Oh, that’s precious!” she said, wiping her eyes, and I raced upstairs to bury my nose in the first book I could find.
To be fair, I’d no idea back then what the passage of time does to the brain; that knowledge is never accrued, only forgotten. As an adult, I’ve trudged my way through the entire oeuvres of a good number of literary giants, and not only do I remember bugger all about what I read in any of those books, I’ve entirely forgotten that I read the vast majority of those books at all. Worse, when people ask my opinion about one of their renowned authors, I frown bewilderedly and say, “Who?”, their very existence having somehow been completely blotted from my mind. In my lowest moments, I even add, “Oh, I’ve never heard of him/her. I’ll have to give him/her a try. Which book of his/hers would you recommend I start with?” Only when I’m several chapters into one of these titles does a muffled bell ring somewhere at the back of my broken brain. Hang on, I think, didn’t I read something a bit like this once before? Then I accuse Dostoyevsky of plagiarism.
Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.
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March 5, 2026
QotD: Chinese cooking
What is it like? Well, Dunlop barely manages to cover this in a 400-page book, so I hesitate even to try, but let me hit a few of the high points. First, diversity. China is a continent masquerading as a country, both in population and in geographic extent, so its cuisine is comparably diverse. Most cooking traditions have one or two basic starches, China has four or five.1 China extends through every imaginable biome, from rainforest to tundra, desert to marshlands, and much of the genius of Chinese food lies in combining the delicious bounties offered up by this kaleidoscope in interesting or unexpected ways.
One way to think of Chinese eating is that much of it is a sort of “internal” fusion cuisine. Because China was ruled from very early on by a centralized bureaucracy with a fanaticism for river transport, the process of culinary remixing has been going on for much longer than it has in most places. The Roman Empire could have been like this, but the shores of the Mediterranean all have pretty similar climates, so there were fewer ingredients to start the process with. Already very early in Chinese history, before the 7th century, we hear of the imperial city being supplied with:
oranges and pomelos from the warm South, […] the summer garlic of southern Shanxi, the deer tongues of northern Gansu, the Venus clams of the Shandong coast, the “sugar crabs” of the Yangtze River, the sea horses of Chaozhou in Guangdong, the white carp marinated in wine lees from northern Anhui, the dried flesh of a “white flower snake” [a kind of pit viper] from southern Hubei, melon pickled in rice mash from southern Shanxi and eastern Hubei, dried ginger from Zhejiang, loquats and cherries from southern Shanxi, persimmons from central Henan, and “thorny limes” from the Yangtze Valley.
If we think of chefs as artists, the Chinese ones have since ancient times had the advantage of an outrageously diverse set of paints. But these ingredients aren’t combined willy-nilly, without respect for their time or place of origin. The Chinese practically invented the concept of terroir, and their organicist conception of the universe in which everything is connected to everything else implied strict rules about which foods were to be eaten when, both for maximum deliciousness and to ensure cosmic harmony.
In the first month of spring, [the emperor] was to eat wheat and mutton; in summer, pulses and fowl; in autumn, hemp seeds and dog meat; in winter, millet and suckling pig. An emperor’s failure to observe the laws of the seasons would not only cause disease, but provoke crop failure and other disasters.
The obsessions with freshness and seasonality come to their culmination in the one area where Chinese cuisine stands head and shoulders above all others: green vegetables. In the West, “eating your greens” is a punishment, or at best a chore, and it’s easy to see why. In much of the world vegetables are bred for yield and transportability, kept in refrigerators for weeks, and then boiled until no trace of flavor remains. Dunlop and I have one thing in common: when we’re not in China, of all the delights of Chinese cooking it’s the green vegetables that we miss the most.
When I bring American friends to a real Chinese restaurant, sometimes they’re shocked that the vegetable dishes cost the same amount as the main courses. Why does a side dish cost so much? But no Chinese person would ever think of a vegetable course as a “side” dish, they’re part of the main attraction, and more often than not they’re the stars of the show. In the West, you can now get decent baak choy, but this is just one of the dozens and dozens of leafy greens that the Chinese regularly consume, many of them practically impossible to find outside Asia.
My own favorite is the sublime choy sum. I remember once getting off a transoceanic flight, starving and exhausted, and being offered a bowl of it over plain white rice. The greens had been scalded for a few seconds with boiling water, then tossed around a pan for no more than a minute — just long enough that the leaves were so tender they seemed to dissolve in your mouth, but the stems still held snap and crunch. The seasoning was subtle — maybe a few cloves of garlic, some salt, a splash of wine or vinegar. Just the right amount to bring out the deep, earthy flavors of the vegetable, to somehow make them brighter and more forward, but not to overpower them.2 It was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. I think I’ll still remember it when I am old.
Did you notice that in the previous paragraph I spent almost as much time describing the texture of the food as its flavor? That’s no coincidence. Of course the Chinese care about flavor, everybody does (except the British, ha ha), but relative to many other culinary traditions the Chinese put a disproportionate emphasis on the texture of their food as well. I’ll once again draw on a bastardized version of the Whorf hypothesis: English is a big language with a lot of borrowings, so we have a correspondingly large number of words for food textures. Imagine explaining to a foreigner the difference between “crunchy” and “crisp”, or between “soft” and “mushy”. That is already more semiotic resolution than most languages have when it comes to the mouthfeel of their food, but Chinese takes it to a whole ‘nother level.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-05.
- One of them, potatoes, has a particularly fraught history. Potatoes started seriously spreading in China right around the time of the mass famines that accompanied the collapse of the Ming dynasty. Accordingly, they got a reputation of being food for poor people. They’ve never really managed to overcome this association, and are generally shunned by the Chinese, especially in high-end cuisine, despite several government campaigns to encourage people to eat them since they’re nutritious and easy to grow in arid conditions.
- There’s a pattern in Chinese gastronomy where extremely intense, over-the-top flavors are a bit low-status, and flavors so pure and subtle they verge on bland are what the snooty people go for. This is true across regions (the in-your-face food of Sichuan is less valued than the cuisine of the Cantonese South, or the cooking traditions of Zhejiang in the East), but it’s also true within regions (in Sichuan, the food of Chongqing is much spicier than the food of Chengdu, and correspondingly lower status).
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March 4, 2026
Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints
Like many, I’ve heard of Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints but I’ve never seen a copy of it for sale and I certainly haven’t actually read it myself. At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses a rare thing: a newly translated printing of the book that iscurrently available for sale:
To call The Camp of the Saints prescient undersells it. At times, Raspail seems to be downright prophetic. Pope Benedict XVI plays a prominent role (albeit this is a character who could not be more different from Cardinal Ratzinger). Raspail also correctly predicted that Rhodesia would become Zimbabwe, which may have been easily foreseeable when Raspail was composing the work but still did not formally happen until 1980, seven years after the novel’s publication; while Raspail was writing, the Rhodesian Bush War was still in full swing. The Rhodies fought until the bitter end to prevent the breadbasket of Africa from being turned into Africa’s basketcase.
The Camp of the Saints is sometimes described as a dystopian novel, which should be read alongside 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, and C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. There’s something to be said for this interpretation. You get a pretty good description of the modern world with the Venn diagram overlap of the total state’s panoptic tyranny, the flattening of the human spirit into a mass-produced Last Man via the endless consumption of mass-produced trivial amusements, the death of literary curiosity, the imposition of forced egalitarianism, demon-worshipping transhumanist technocracy, and Raspail’s civilizational collapse via obsequious moral inversion.
Like every good dystopia, however, The Camp of the Saints is first and foremost a satire of the modern world, a warning about where things will head if certain sociopolitical trends are taken to their natural conclusion. Raspail’s work does not take place in some science-fictional near future, as the majority of other dystopias do: its world is technologically and politically indistinguishable from the world Raspail lived in, and still all too recognizable to us. It has been derided as a far-right racist tract, and Raspail’s depiction of the third world horde that subsumes the West is far from flattering, but his venom is directed primarily at the West’s own spineless cultural thought-leaders and political elites, who he identifies as the true and only possible architects of the world-historic catastrophe that he predicts.
The Camp of the Saints also has all the key tropes of a zombie apocalypse story.
The third world horde is depicted as a vast, ravenous, mindless beast comprised of individual members who are not at all fearsome or intimidating, but which triumphs through sheer numbers and slow but relentless advance, and which is defended by its revolting appearance and overpowering, nauseating stench. The migrants are the most wretched products of the slums of Calcutta, malnourished and sickly, afflicted by every kind of congenital defect, infectious disease, infirmity, and skin infection. Their leader is a monstrous, drooling idiot dwarf with lidless eyes, a toothless sphincter for a mouth, and stumps for limbs, who rides about on the shoulders of a giant coprophage. They make their way from India packed like human sardines in a fleet of rusting, dilapidated plague ships, wallowing their way towards Europe through the nauseating miasma that arises from the swamp of corpse-littered shit that they leave in their wake, spending their days listlessly staring out to sea and mindlessly copulating amidst their own putrifying filth. Merely to look upon the migrant horde is to be transfixed with a kind of a religious terror, overcome by its ugliness, paralyzed by pity. Soldiers forced to take even the smallest of aggressive actions against the horde, with only a few exceptions, throw down their weapons and run, not because they are terrified of the horde itself, but because they are terrified of their own conscience should they strike down a defenseless, pitiable wretch. In a few cases, soldiers take their own lives after being made to shoot. The horde’s primary weapon is the crushing psychological pressure that slams down on the souls all who behold it; better to give up and accept the inevitable than suffer the torment of fighting against it.
When the horde encounters a westerner, one of two things happens. Either the westerner is immediately killed by being trampled underfoot or torn limb from limb, or he is smoothly assimilated into the horde, becoming by and by indistinguishable from the innumerable wretches that comprise it. The zombies either eat you, or turn you into a zombie. Women of course are assimilated by rape.
Not everyone succumbs right away, of course. At the end of the novel a small group of psychologically resilient Frenchmen led by an army colonel and a right-wing government minister fall back to an abandoned mountain village. Inside the village’s borders they establish a micocosm of the old, pre-invasion French civilization. They defend their redoubt simply by shooting any migrants or white “assimilates” (as they immediately take to calling them) who get too close. The migrants and assimilates are easily seen, a constant presence shambling in the distance; they are just as easily picked off, being slow and unarmed, and the village’s inhabitants soon take to treating the hunt as a sport. Of course this refuge does not last long: the French air force, in what is implied to be its last act (for the new world will not be able to maintain airplanes) wipes the last surviving Frenchmen out in an airstrike. Racism can’t be tolerated, you see.
Finally, there are the delusional lunatics who imagine that they can befriend or master the horde, turning it to their own purposes or making common cause with it, and who are therefore instrumental in opening the gates to their and everyone else’s doom. Upon actually encountering the horde the madmen find only death or assimilation; the horde is utterly indifferent to any expression of friendship.
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February 28, 2026
QotD: The “Balance of Terror” in the missile age
This also meant that a devastating nuclear “first strike” could now be delivered before an opponent would know it was coming, or at least on extremely short notice. A nuclear power could no longer count on having enough warning to get its nuclear weapons off before the enemy’s nuclear strike had arrived. Bernard Brodie grappled with these problems in Strategy in the Missile Age (1959) but let’s focus on a different theorist, Albert Wohlstetter, also with the RAND Corporation, who wrote The Delicate Balance of Terror (1958) the year prior.
Wohlstetter argued that deterrence was not assured, but was in fact fragile: any development which allowed one party to break the other’s nuclear strike capability (e.g. the ability to deliver your strike so powerfully that the enemy’s retaliation was impossible) would encourage that power to strike in the window of vulnerability. Wohstetter, writing in the post-Sputnik shock, saw the likelihood that the USSR’s momentary advantage in missile technology would create such a moment of vulnerability for the United States.
Like Brodie, Wohlstetter concluded that the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike. This is an important distinction that is often misunderstood; there is a tendency to read these theorists (Dr. Strangelove does this to a degree and influences public perception on this point) as planning for a “winnable” nuclear war (and some did, just not these fellows here), but indeed the point is quite the opposite: they assume nuclear war is fundamentally unwinnable and to be avoided, but that the only way to avoid it successfully is through deterrence and deterrence can only be maintained if the second strike (that is, your retaliation after your opponent’s nuclear weapons have already gone off) can be assured. Consequently, planning for nuclear war is the only way to avoid nuclear war – a point we’ll come back to.
Wohlstetter identifies six hurdles that must be overcome in order to provide a durable, credible second strike system – and remember, it is the perception of the system, not its reality that matters (though reality may be the best way to create perception). Such systems need to be stable in peacetime (and Wohlstetter notes that stability is both in the sense of being able to work in the event after a period of peace, but also such that they do not cause unintended escalation; he thus warns against, for instance, just keeping lots of nuclear-armed bombers in the air all of the time), they must be able to survive the enemy’s initial nuclear strikes, it must be possible to decide to retaliate and communicate that to the units with the nuclear weapons, then they must be able to reach enemy territory, then they have to penetrate enemy defenses, and finally they have to be powerful enough to guarantee that whatever fraction do penetrate those defenses are powerful enough to inflict irrecoverable damage.
You can think of these hurdles as a series of filters. You start a conflict with a certain number of systems and then each hurdle filters some of them out. Some may not work in the event, some may be destroyed by the enemy attack, some may be out of communication, some may be intercepted by enemy defenses. You need enough at the end to do so much damage that it would never be worth it to sustain such damage.
This is the logic behind the otherwise preposterously large nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Russian Federation (inherited from the USSR). In order to sustain your nuclear deterrent, you need more weapons than you would need in the event because you are planning for scenarios in which some large number of weapons are lost in the enemy’s first strike. At the same time, as you overbuild nuclear weapons to counter this, you both look more like you are planning a first strike and your opponent has to estimate that a larger portion of their nuclear arsenal may be destroyed in that (theoretical) first strike, which means they too need more missiles.
What I want to note about this logic is that it neatly explains why nuclear disarmament is so hard: nuclear weapons are, in a deterrence scenario, both necessary and useless. Necessary, because your nuclear arsenal is the only thing which can deter an enemy with nuclear weapons, but that very deterrence renders the weapons useless in the sense that you are trying to avoid any scenario in which you use them. If one side unilaterally disarmed, nuclear weapons would suddenly become useful – if only one side has them, well, they are the “absolute” weapon, able to make up for essentially any deficiency in conventional strength – and once useful, they would be used. Humanity has never once developed a useful weapon they would not use in extremis; and war is the land of in extremis.
Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them.
(I should note here that these concerns were not the only things driving the US and USSR’s buildup of nuclear weapons. Often politics and a lack of clear information contributed as well. In the 1960s, US fears of a “missile gap” – which were unfounded and which many of the politicians pushing them knew were unfounded – were used to push for more investment in the US’s nuclear arsenal despite the United States already having at that time a stronger position in terms of nuclear weapons. In the 1970s and 1980s, the push for the development of precision guidance systems – partly driven by inter-agency rivalry in the USA and not designed to make a first strike possible – played a role in the massive Soviet nuclear buildup in that period; the USSR feared that precision systems might be designed for a “counter-force” first strike (that is a first strike targeting Soviet nuclear weapons themselves) and so built up to try to have enough missiles to ensure survivable second strike capability. This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (“Single Integrated Operational Plan”) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life”. Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets.)
All of this theory eventually filtered into American policy making in the form of “mutually assured destruction” (initially phrased as “assured destruction” by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1964). The idea here was, as we have laid out, that US nuclear forces would be designed to withstand a first nuclear strike still able to launch a retaliatory second strike of such scale that the attacker would be utterly destroyed; by doing so it was hoped that one would avoid nuclear war in general. Because different kinds of systems would have different survivability capabilities, it also led to procurement focused on a nuclear “triad” with nuclear systems split between land-based ICBMs in hardened silos, forward-deployed long-range bombers operating from bases in Europe and nuclear-armed missiles launched from submarines which could lurk off an enemy coast undetected. The idea here is that with a triad it would be impossible for an enemy to assure themselves that they could neutralize all of these systems, which assures the second strike, which assures the destruction, which deters the nuclear war you don’t want to have in the first place.
It is worth noting that while the United States and the USSR both developed such a nuclear triad, other nuclear powers have often seen this sort of secure, absolute second-strike capability as not being essential to create deterrence. The People’s Republic of China, for instance, has generally focused their resources on a fewer number of systems, confident that even with a smaller number of bombs, the risk of any of them striking an enemy city (typically an American city) would be enough to deter an enemy. As I’ve heard it phrased informally by one western observer, a strategy of, “one bomb and we’ll be sure to get it to L.A.” though of course that requires more than one bomb and one doubts the PRC phrases their doctrine so glibly (note that China is, in theory committed to developing a triad, they just haven’t bothered to actually really do so).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.
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