Despite this view being out of fashion today, most organizations retain a residual awareness that leaders should have a superset of the skills of the people they’re leading.1 So the only thing that really could serve as “management turpentine”, a transferable set of management techniques applicable to any domain, is narrowly-tailored advice for how to deal with people, how to motivate, direct, and control them. And so, by and large, that’s what management books like this one offer — techniques for the one part of the job generic enough to benefit from this kind of advice. But is it really so generic?
A nanosecond’s reflection will tell you that the techniques needed to manage computer programmers, movie actors, and the boom-town roughnecks that inspired Conan the Barbarian are going to be very different. What if we restrict our analysis to just one category, say the computer programmers?2 Well, consider another similarly restrictive category: children. The great limitation of parenting books is, as every parent of more than one child knows, that children are extremely different from one another. One child may need strict discipline, while another actually needs to be encouraged to take rules less seriously; one needs to be reassured constantly and showered with love, while another needs to have firm boundaries. The techniques that work brilliantly with one child will not work unmodified with another. If the goal is the Aristotelian mean, then some need to be nudged to one side, and others in the opposite direction.
If that’s the way it is with kids, imagine how much more so this all applies to adults, who in addition to having different innate personalities and temperaments and aptitudes also carry with them extensive life histories, experiences, and scar tissue. Any generic advice, any “management turpentine”, needs to be heavily customized to the personalities and the dynamics of a particular team. But the catch is that mastering the ability to apply this sort of generic management advice in a particular situation is pretty much just the same thing as mastering management itself.
To a very great degree, management just is the art of taking a set of discordant personalities and welding them into a harmonious whole. A great manager sizes up his or her team, sees the ambitious go-getter, the resentful and self-defeating genius, the timid and awkward newbie with leadership potential, the lazy slob who secretly glues them all together — sees not just these categories but sees the individuals and the unique ways they subvert these archetypes, and instantly and intuitively knows how to fuse them into a machine for achieving a common purpose. Or as Hilaire Belloc once put it:
There is one element in the [management of men] which is all-important, and the possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or “eye” in a sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined — the faculty of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole — you have the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is among men.
But why does he say that this particular talent is not to be acquired? Go back to Johnson’s line about the management turpentine and read it again, but this time note how deftly the magic trick is performed. Do you see it? Hey presto, there are only two options as to what a book on painting could be about — “Form and Structure and Meaning,” or where to buy turpentine. This is important, because left to your own devices you might prefer a third possibility: namely a book about how to make great art. But as soon as you say it, it becomes clear why that option needs to be hidden from view — no such book has ever existed, no such book can exist, you can’t learn to make great art from a book.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-28.
- Fewer and fewer every day though. A United States military friend recently pointed out to me that the high ratio of senior Russian officers killed in Ukraine and Syria speaks well of their military culture, because it means that even their general officers make a custom of occasionally leading from the front (there’s a long history of this in the Russian armed forces). He then reflected bitterly that an American general being killed was simply unthinkable, since to a man they sit in air-conditioned offices and command their troops over satellite link.
- Johnson’s book is marketed towards those managing computer programmers, which is interesting since she worked on the operations side of the house and as far was I know has never been in charge of a crew of engineers.
July 27, 2026
QotD: The art of management
July 26, 2026
The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
Handre discusses the book George Soros wrote (or had written) after he gained a huge sum of money by speculating against the Bank of England in the 1990s:
George Soros made a billion dollars betting against the Bank of England in September 1992, and then he wrote a book explaining that markets are fundamentally irrational. Notice the tension there.
The Alchemy of Finance, published in 1987, gives you Soros’s theory of reflexivity. The idea runs like this: participants in a market do not observe prices from the outside. They shape the reality they are trying to measure. Their biased expectations feed into prices, prices feed back into expectations, and the whole thing spirals away from any “equilibrium”. Soros presents this as a devastating blow to the neoclassical economists who model markets as tidy machines grinding toward a single clearing price.
He is right, but misses one fundamental point. The equilibrium fetish deserves a beating. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek spent decades explaining that the market is a process, not a photograph, and that no equation captures the discovery going on inside it. Prices carry dispersed knowledge. Entrepreneurs guess, act, and get corrected by profit and loss. Soros rediscovered a slice of this in his trading room, and called it “alchemy”.
But, Soros treats his “far from equilibrium” boom-bust sequences as proof that free markets are inherently unstable and require an adult (usually a central bank, sometimes Soros himself) to supervise them. He points at the credit bubbles of the 1980s and sees capitalism failing. He never asks who prints the credit.
The Federal Reserve does. Cheap money floods in, entrepreneurs misread the artificially low interest rates as real savings, and they pile into projects that cannot pay off. That is the boom. The bust arrives when reality collects its debt. Soros describes the symptom with real skill and misses the pathogen entirely.
So the man who broke sterling by exploiting a currency that politicians pegged at a lie somehow concludes that governments need more discretion, not less. The 1992 pound was a government price-fix collapsing, exactly as Mises predicted such fixes always do.
The reflexivity part is spot on, but send the bill for the bubbles to the people with the printing press.
July 21, 2026
Frederick the Great’s 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel
At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his look at all things Machiavelli, including Prussian king Frederick the Great’s polemic against the author of The Prince:
Frederick the Great, 1781
Oil portrait by Anton Graff (1736-1813) in the Sanssouci Palace collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Maybe Machiavelli’s teachings have no relevance in any remotely civilized political system. Maybe they’re far worse than irrelevant: maybe they’re all entirely evil (as they appear), and in addition, would prove the ruin of both the people and their ruler.
This was, as it happens, the view espoused by one important ruler: the Prussian king Frederick the Great. In his 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel, he claims Machiavelli’s book is “one of the most dangerous that ever appeared in the world”, in that the political crimes it encourages would impose “a lasting misery upon whole nations”. Truly great rulers, says Frederick, aren’t the avaricious, amoral, self-serving, shape-shifting demons that Machiavelli describes. Rather, they are those “whose business it is to administer justice, and to set examples of justice to their subjects; and who, by their magnanimity, mercy, and goodness, ought to be the living images of Deity”. Thus, Frederick sees his rebuttal as “a defense of humanity against a monster who would destroy it”; it is “an antidote to poison”.
Frederick ruled Prussia for nearly 50 years. Most historians rate him a success. On the face of things, he seems like the kind of critic who knows what he’s talking about.
But Machiavelli would say, not so fast. What did Frederick do almost immediately after assuming power? Without any provocation, he launched a war to seize the large, prosperous, populous province of Silesia (now in southwestern Poland) from the Habsburg Monarchy. And he did so on a convoluted, centuries-old dynastic claim which sounded as unconvincing to his contemporaries as it does to us now. In the three Silesian wars which followed (the third turning into the Seven Years War), well over a million soldiers died fighting. Millions more wound up maimed, psychologically scarred, or otherwise ruined. Of course, millions of non-combatants also suffered: wives lost husbands, mothers and fathers lost sons, children lost fathers and uncles and brothers. Those non-combatants also suffered displacement, terror, deprivation, and injury. Over two decades, Frederick’s wars — particularly the Seven Years War — convulsed Europe. Frederick gained 30% more territory and 50% more citizens, but the cost was losing 10% of the Prussian population to combat or disease (the modern equivalent of 35 million Americans, 6 million English, or 3 million Australians). The point is: if his actions are anything to go by, Frederick didn’t oppose Machiavellian power moves as much as he professed, if at all. Machiavelli might even argue that in taking pains to proclaim his opposition to Machiavelli even as his wars of acquisition injured and killed millions, he was doing exactly what Machiavelli had advised: seeming to be good even as he was doing whatever the hell he wanted, for his own purposes. Most people will buy the act anyway, says Machiavelli, so why not?
This brings me back to Machiavelli’s claims about how rulers do in fact act, and how they must act to avoid ruin. And that in turn brings me back to the original wording of The Prince, and what real-world credibility Machiavelli might have as a political commentator.
As it happens, Machiavelli was no armchair quarterback. Even if he hadn’t spent nearly fifteen years at the highest levels of Florentine government (which he did), he might well have qualified as a political expert just by virtue of growing up in the tumultuous time and place he did. Between the jockeying Italian states, the myriad (and ever-changing) foreign alliances and enemies and designs, the political influence of the papacy, and Florence’s own internal politics, Machiavelli’s home city furnished more than enough lessons in how the political world could, and often did, operate.
July 20, 2026
Markets reject Carney’s official carbon price, so Canadians have to pay more
Canada is one of the last remaining bastions of Net Zero zealotry … in fact, Prime Minister Mark Carney may be the only national leader trying to turn back the tide of economic reality over this:
AI image posted by L. Wayne Mathison on X.
Mark Carney wrote a book called Value(s) lecturing the world about fairness, responsibility, sustainability and humility. His real governing value appears to be this: when markets reject his climate scheme, force Canadians to rescue it.
Carney now admits the official carbon price is supposedly above $100 while actual credits have traded near $20. Any honest banker would recognize the message. The market does not believe these credits are worth the imaginary price politicians assigned to them.
Carney’s response is classic central-planner arrogance. He will not reconsider the product. He will rig the price, tighten the rules, compel companies to buy it and call the resulting coercion “investment certainty”.
He praised carbon pricing in Value(s) as one of the most important and effective ways to reduce emissions. Then the consumer carbon tax became politically poisonous, so he scrapped it. The industrial version survives because its costs are easier to bury inside electricity, transportation, groceries, construction materials, wages and lost investment.
Carney also boasts that Canada continues sending climate-finance money abroad while other G7 governments pull back. Canadian families are struggling with food, housing and energy, yet our philosopher-banker remains determined to finance his international reputation with their money.
His book preached humility. His government practises price fixing.
His book preached responsibility. His government transfers the risk to taxpayers.
His book preached fairness. His policies protect the climate-finance class while ordinary Canadians absorb the costs.
Carney spent years wrapping political ideology in the language of banking. Now the numbers are exposing the sales pitch. When a theoretical $100 asset trades for $20, the market has delivered its verdict. Ottawa can falsify the price, but it cannot manufacture genuine value.
Value(s) may be hundreds of pages long. Carney’s philosophy fits into one sentence:
When reality refuses to validate the climate fantasy, force Canadians to pay until it does.
July 17, 2026
British logistics in the Falklands, 1982
A new post at the Operational Art of War considers the amazing achievements in logistical support that allowed the British to re-take the Falkland Islands so soon after the Argentine invasion in 1982:
This post is largely highlights from a book I think everyone should buy, called Logistics in the Falklands War: A Case Study in Expeditionary Warfare by US retired MGen Privratsky.
[…]
I read the book as part of a long term project on the history of command and communications in the Falkland War. I couldn’t figure out how the British managed to pull off victory given the logistical challenges, so I purchased this book hoping to find answers.
Having now read the book I know WHAT the British did to win the war, but I have ZERO clue how they managed to make it work. The conditions and limitations they faced were so much worse than I thought.
I can honestly say this is the most interesting book I have read in years, which is a shock to me as I’m typically as bored by logistics as the next non-logistician. It was genuinely more engaging and entertaining than the battlefield accounts of that war.
The Logistics Challenges of the Falklands War
The task eventually given to the British task force was to retake the Falkland islands from the Argentines. This was a daunting task, both logistically and in terms of the actual ground combat.
Strategic Logistics
Strategic logistics is providing the lifeline of supplies, personnel, maintenance and health care between the home country and a staging area about 300km outside the combat zone. British strategic logistics involved a link from England to a small British held island half way between Brazil and Africa called Ascension. This link was 4,300 miles (6,900 km) by sea from Portsmouth. It had an airport and one jetty capable of handling one or two small commercial ships.
The next link was a further 3,600 miles (5,800 km) from Ascension to a logistics loitering area about 200 miles (320 km) short of the Falkland Islands. This was just a box drawn on a map in the middle of the ocean where the larger supply ships would loiter, outside the range of the Argentine air force.
[…]
Tactical Logistics
Tactical Logistics holds a few days’ supply (eventually the BSA/DSA held about 30 days supply ashore at San Carlos) but it’s main job is to move supplies, broken equipment, replacements and injured personnel between the BSA/DSA and the manoeuvre units.
Normally the backbone of Tactical Logistics is trucks. Here there was a problem, as the image below is a comprehensive of all the paved and unpaved vehicle capable roads in the Falklands, excluding those in the vicinity of Port Stanley.
“Roads? Where we’re going Marty we don’t need roads.”
The details of tactical logistics take up several chapters of the book. The brief version is:
- The troops marched from the DSA to the Objective;
- For the attack on Port Stanley two days supply of Ammunition, Shells, fuel and shells were brought to the two Forward Support Areas (FSAs) along with skeletal field hospitals;
- Helicopters spent about 2 weeks bringing the artillery from the DSA to outside Port Stanley; and
- Limited emergency resupply of ammunition and casualty evacuation was available from the FSA to the troops in combat. However, most of the ammunition going brought and casualties evacuated rearward was done on foot over what can charitably be described as walking tracks.
Tactical Logistics in the Falklands was so difficult because there were no roads and the distances involved were enormous. While the orange arrows above give a sense of the distances involved, the image blow shows the size of the Falkland Islands superimposed over England.
[…]
Conclusion
Prior to reading Logistics in the Falklands I couldn’t quite figure out how the British managed to pull a victory out the hat, given the challenges of projecting power literally on the opposite end of the globe. Having read the book I am now convinced the British military in 1982 was either the best improvisational armed force in history or under some kind of Divine mandate.1
- Maybe both.
July 16, 2026
“Banned” book library in a Portuguese bookshop
Most people are at least a bit uncomfortable with censorship, at least when the censors get into the swing of things and start banning ordinary books and authors. I had to check Wikipedia to find out who Dua Lipa might be as I hadn’t heard of her before, so the name popping up in headlines about her bold anti-censorship actions didn’t tell me much. I think I’m safe in assuming that Ms. Lipa is fully read-in on all the fashionable concerns of the celebrity set, so it’ll be easy to predict the works her library will feature:
The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of “banned” books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.
For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).
Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. “The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection” would make a funny meme — as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey — but it would likely not be much of a career boost.
And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.
Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc.), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).
Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: “The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices.”
What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.
This is most notable in the “Voice” section, which, we’re told, “amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented”.
Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the woke era of radical Leftism, aggressive conformity and cancel culture.
Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism — a hostile force attacking it from the outside.
And as the “banned” book library is in Portugal, I’m including Larry Correia’s comments on the issue (he still counts as “Portuguese”, right?)
Since I’m still getting barked at by pearl clutching weirdos about my comment yesterday about “banned books” everybody with a functioning brain knows that just because parents don’t want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing liberal authors to stock public school libraries with torture porn, and the book is still legally available literally everywhere else books are sold, means that book is not “banned”.
And most “banned” book displays are just left wing virtue signaling for marketing purposes. Like most liberal causes its a fake ass moralizing narrative disconnected from reality where they get to play the victim and the rest of us are bullies.
Manhattan publishing LOVES when the school board in Somnambulant Iowa says they don’t want to spend their limited budget buying copies of The Illustrated Guide To Fisting for Trans Middle Schoolers, because that’s great marketing and all the blue haired weirdos are now religiously mandated to go buy a copy to stick it to the chuds.
Libs tried their best to get writers like me booted out of everything, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before you see any of us showing up on any of these banned books displays, and we all know it.
Stephen King was lying his ass off about how that particular novella collection was all about “friendship” or WTF ever he claimed. The friendship story has prison rape as a subplot, but the real issue was the story about an escaped Nazi war criminal teaching an American teenager about the joys of rape, torture, and murder.
As you can imagine some parents get hesitant about giving stuff like that to their kids … just like Stephen King himself did when he banned his own school shooting book, Rage. But it was okay when he did it.
If a school board said they didn’t want to buy one of my books because they thought it was too violent for kids, I’d say, okay, cool. Not being a dishonest histrionic dork, I recognize that’s their choice, and not being in that one collection does not in any way make my book “banned”.
The book in question is still available in every store, can be ordered online, and is in most public library systems. No law is broken if you possess it or share it. But to a liberal NOT buying their shit with tax dollars to give to children (even if their parents think it is inappropriate) is the gravest sin imaginable and you are all basically nazis.
Well, except for Graham Platner obviously. Stephen King says he’s alright.
How Few Remain: The Second War Between the States
Feral Historian
Published 13 Mar 2026Let’s take a look at Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain and its many themes and historical extrapolations. And probably argue about the Civil War a little along the way.
If there’s enough interest, this may be the start of a dive into the entire sprawling series that follows.
00:00 Intro
01:37 A War Unfinished
07:09 Adapting and Evolving
10:12 Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass
13:15 The Horace Greeley Letter
15:40 Freddie’s Louisville Adventure
18:07 Turtledove, Lost Cause, and Spoilers
(more…)
QotD: The nostalgic British elements of Canadian nationalism
Britishness survives as civic nationalism. Old British Canada may be gone, but aspects of that Britishness live on. We should celebrate our history and our historic symbols, but this alternative shouldn’t set about restoring it all. A future oriented embrace of our history needs to be built around the active parts of this Britishness that have now become truly Canadian. For example, the Crown in Canada is not now just a British institution, it’s a Canadian institution. Same with our democratic institutions and parliamentary traditions, which we must work to strengthen and renew.
Embracing this enables us to thread the needle on our relationship with America. Part of what makes us different historically, culturally, ideationally, and in disposition from America, is this history. Just as Canadian Britishness has survived to the present day in unique ways, our desire not to become Americans is alive and well. A homegrown Canadian Britishness enables us to continue this without falling into crass anti-Americanism, and without requiring us to embrace the new Liberal nationalism to reject America. We should see America as an amicable cousin, but one that we are distinct and different from.
But most importantly, what this new kind of national identity needs to build around needs to be an evolution of the liberal nationalism that emphasizes and consciously builds around our regional pluralism. […] but the kind of rationalistic liberalism that our modern national identity is built around, while sold as a way of dealing with diversity, suffers from some serious internal tensions. Liberalism, especially the Canadian variant of it, implicitly depends upon and encourages a degree of homogenization that flattens hard cultural differences. We need to become more pluralistic, and less liberal.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
July 15, 2026
The Prince – “The only people who haven’t read it are the ones who keep losing”
I didn’t intend to turn this into Machiavelli week, but after the discussion of correctly translating “virtù“ for modern audiences, here’s Krzysztof Szczawinski with more about that famous/infamous book:
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 as a practical manual for power. For five centuries, polite society has pretended to be shocked by it. Meanwhile, every successful political operator — on every side — has been quietly following it. The only people who haven’t read it are the ones who keep losing.
1. Machiavelli’s central insight is not that the ends justify the means. That is the misquote that lets comfortable people dismiss him. His actual insight is simpler and more disturbing: power has its own logic, independent of morality, and those who refuse to understand that logic will be defeated by those who do. The Prince is not a villain’s manual. It is a description of reality that makes virtuous people uncomfortable – because reality doesn’t care about their virtue.
2. The current progressive system applies Machiavelli more fluently than any of its opponents. His first rule: the appearance of virtue matters more than virtue itself. The DEI statement while systematically excluding dissent. The democracy rhetoric while suppressing opposition. The compassion branding while destroying careers. This is Machiavelli’s prince – not good, but performing goodness to maintain legitimacy. The performance is the power.
3. His second rule, which the current system also applies perfectly: cruelty, when necessary, should be delivered swiftly, completely, and early. Cancellation is Machiavellian – total, swift, exemplary. The point isn’t the individual being cancelled. The point is the ten thousand people watching who quietly adjust their behavior. One public destruction purchases a million private silences. Machiavelli would have recognized the mechanism immediately. He invented the theory.
4. Communism applied the fear side of Machiavelli with full conviction – Stalin made the explicit choice Machiavelli described: better to be feared than loved. The show trial is pure Machiavellian theater – a public demonstration of power functioning as a warning to everyone who isn’t on trial. But communism made his fatal mistake: it destroyed the people’s goodwill so completely that it generated not just fear but hatred. And Machiavelli is unambiguous – you can rule through fear, you cannot survive through hatred.
5. His most important democratic insight — the one nobody quotes — is that the prince who builds his power on the people is more secure than one who builds it on elites. Elites are few, demanding, and treacherous. The people are many, ask only not to be oppressed, and are a more stable foundation. The political movement that actually connects with ordinary people against the credentialed elite is applying Machiavelli more correctly than the elite relying on institutional capture alone.
6. What should we do? Stop bringing virtue to a knife fight. The chronic error of the opposition is the naive prince Machiavelli explicitly warns against – the leader who assumes truth wins automatically, who believes that being right is a strategy. It is not a strategy. It is a precondition. Being right gives you something worth fighting for. Machiavelli tells you how to fight: build your own power base, never rely entirely on others, control your narrative before your enemies do, and treat fortune as something to be seized, not waited for. Fortune favors the bold. Not the righteous. The bold.
7. Machiavelli is taught in universities as cynical amoralism – the thing decent people reject. This framing is itself Machiavellian – it keeps the manual out of the hands of the people who most need it. The current establishment didn’t reject Machiavelli. It institutionalized him, rebranded him in the language of social justice, and uses him daily. The opposition reads Augustine and loses. The system reads Machiavelli and wins. Until the side that is actually right decides that understanding power is not a betrayal of principle but a precondition for defending it – the result will be the same. Virtue without strategy is just a dignified way of losing.
Update, 16 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
July 14, 2026
Translating “virtù” in Machiavelli’s The Prince
At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman ponders the use of the Italian word “virtù” and how best to translate it into English without losing the essence of what Machiavelli was trying to communicate:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
I’d read Machiavelli’s The Prince many times. Pondered its fiendish teachings as I watched political events. Wondered how true, or at least universal, the suggestions really were. I’d even started translating the text myself a few months earlier, just for fun. Machiavelli’s Italian wasn’t all that different from Spanish, so I could get quite a bit of it. With a bit of study, I got the rest. Now, here I was, standing in the very room he’d written the book in, touching the very desk he might have used.
It was in that moment I remembered a letter Machiavelli had written once, to a friend, about writing in that very room:
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine, and that I was born for. There, I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them … I have composed a little work (The Prince), where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject.
The book itself opens with a quick description of the different types of states, and then concludes the first paragraph with an important sentence. New dominions, says Machiavelli, are acquired o con le armi di altri o con le proprie, o per fortuna o per virtù — that is, they’re acquired “either with the arms of others or with one’s own, either by fortune or by” — drum roll — “virtù“. That’s the word in Italian. The question is how to best translate virtù into English.
You might say, “virtue”. And you wouldn’t entirely be wrong: of course the Italian virtù and the English virtue are cognates. The problem is that in the Tuscan Italian of 1513, virtù carried important connotations which no longer exist in contemporary Italian, and don’t exist in English. “Virtue” these days, in either language, refers to an ethical attribute; it describes something good or moral. But in Renaissance Italian, it still retained an older meaning — one unaligned with anything specifically ethical. That older meaning merely described a certain kind of manly excellence, skill, power, prowess, or virtuosity: the Latin root of virtù is vir, meaning man; virility, like virtuosity, traces back to the same root. (The only remaining echo of this meaning in English or Italian, that I know of, lies in the idiom “by virtue of” — which attributes some authoritative force to something: “The agreement remained binding by virtue of state law”, or “Dan became captain by virtue of his experience”.)
To make matters even more challenging for the conscientious translator, Machiavelli pushes this older meaning to its extreme end throughout The Prince. In fact, his use — or as some might have it, his abuse — of the word virtù drives the main theme of the book.
In brief, what Machiavelli argues is that the political realm has its own rules — its own sort of morality, if it can even be called that. This morality is entirely unlike Christian morality, Aristotelian morality, or commonsense folk morality. Thus, the meaning of “virtue” and “vice” in the political realm differs from the meaning in other contexts. Failure to understand this and act accordingly will bring ruin to any aspiring ruler.
So, according to Machiavelli, a “virtuous” ruler isn’t necessarily a good man. In fact, he can’t be a good man by any normal definition; if he were, he’d inevitably fail as a ruler. After listing off some admirable moral qualities, Machiavelli says this:
It is not necessary, then, for a prince to have in fact all of the qualities written above, but it is indeed necessary to seem to have them … when these qualities are possessed and always observed, they are harmful; but when they seem to be possessed, they are useful. So it is useful to seem compassionate, faithful, kind, honest, religious … a prince cannot observe all of those things for which men are believed good, since to maintain his state he is often required to act against faith, against charity, against kindness, and against religion.
A virtuous ruler, in other words, is simply a political virtuoso: a ruler who knows what it takes to acquire and use power effectively, and has the guts to do it.
[…]
As you read through The Prince, you can almost hear Machiavelli saying, hey — I didn’t create this world. I’m just explaining how it actually works. If that’s anyone’s fault, it’s God’s — except there’s no reason to believe God even exists. And so, the aspiring ruler can and must do whatever it takes to succeed, without fear of divine disapproval.
This is Machiavelli’s conception of, or redefinition of, virtù. It is the main theme of the book. Yet as Harvey Mansfield notes in his book Machiavelli’s Virtue, often “Machiavelli’s translators have difficulty in rendering virtù“. Indeed they do, and where they don’t get it right, the reader has no chance to grasp just how radical or disturbing Machiavelli’s morality-inverting argument is. Where they do get it right, we get the chance to engage with one of history’s subtlest and most challenging political thinkers. This raises the question of whether there’s some specific set of principles which ought to guide the translation of great books, and if so, what they might be.
July 13, 2026
A Fair Reading of The Camp of the Saints
Feral Historian
Published 10 Jul 2026Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints has gone from obscurity to infamy in recent years, drawing condemnation for its highly … unflattering depiction of third-worlders. Much of this condemnation comes from people who haven’t read it, or gave it only a shallow and cursory read. But if we let the book speak for itself it can be quite insightful at times, and the true target of its scorn becomes brutally evident.
Rather than use politically-charged b-roll, it’s all hiking shots this time. Mostly to cover some edits. This is a great one for those who listen to these on the commute. Or the commode as the case may be.
00:00 Intro
01:03 The Story
14:22 Escalation Curve
17:38 Hamadura and “Whiteness”
22:05 Culture and Ethnicity
26:33 Why so Serious?
30:09 The End of a World
34:14 Your Virtual Right-Wing Uncle
35:48 A “Martian” Perspective🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
🔹 and Merch! | feral-shop.fourthwall.com
🔹 Oh, and book 2 of Stellar Drift is out. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GTVXK4CN
Larry Correia’s trailer park elves
On X, Larry Correia explains the genesis of a group of characters he created in his Monster Hunter International series:
I’ve been talking to this pathetic, race obsessed loser, bitter failure of a wannabe writer for a while, but it did remind me of the fun story of where MHI‘s trailer park elves came from.
This dork thinks it is because I’m racist against white people or some shit, but it is actually a lot simpler. I was in the bedroom, typing on my laptop. I was working on the beginning of MHI and still figuring out this whole writing thing.
My wife was in bed reading a fantasy novel. She sighs and puts the book down. I ask what’s wrong, and she says “Elves are always the same. It’s so boring. Authors just keep rehashing Tolkien elves over and over. They’re all wise and beautiful and eternal and blah blah blah. Just once I’d love for them to do something different! Why can’t there be, I don’t know … redneck elves or something?”
And the light bulb went on because she said this to a guy who’d lived in some poor areas in Alabama and Mississippi and had a blast. And that night I wrote the Enchanted Forest Trailer Park scene.
The part where the dog pees on the outside couch, and they just flip the cushion over and tell you to have a seat, true story. 😀
Contrary to what this woke loser thinks, I love rednecks. I think they’re hilarious and awesome and I appreciate the culture of being rowdy and not giving a shit while being ready to fight at the drop of a hat. Anybody who has read the series knows MHI is filled with bad ass southerners. Just like the woke left appointed themselves “speakers for the marginalized” this asshole is the same. I never bent the knee to the woke left, and my answer is the same to the woke right. Fuck off.
Meanwhile I go to the south and people love this stuff. Only humorless dolts get butt hurt over the Enchanted Forest, because the rest of us have been there! We know those guys. That’s what makes it fun.
The elves gave me the idea, what if every mythological race from the old world adopted an American subculture once they got to the US? Which gave us orcs, gnomes, minotaurs, dragons, cyclops, all adopting some culture. I’ve had a lot of fun with that over the series.
And the culture has got to be a twist on what’s expected. That is what makes it interesting. It goes back to what my wife said back in 2007. This prick is crying how come the elves are WHITE?! Tolkien, that’s why. And why is one FAT?! Why are they POOR?!? Did you make the other races fat and poor and use them for comedy relief or just the WHITE ONES?
Well A. stupid obviously never got to the gnomes, and B. it is because, elves are supposed to be beautiful and immortal and awesome. If I wrote a dwarf as fat and drunk that’s not interesting because that’s NORMAL, and doesn’t fit the established nature of the setting where traditional stuff goes sideways when it gets here. Duh.
This explanation is for my fans. Not this dork. I don’t think he’s smart enough to explain anything to.
July 11, 2026
Don’t boast about your online pirating skillz
Larry Correia interacts with a proud book pirate on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
You’d better run, pussy. 😀
Listen, authors are gonna get pirated. We know this. I don’t freak out about it.
But if you are gonna steal, just admit you are a thief and own it. Don’t make a bunch of bullshit posturing excuses why it’s the victim’s fault you’re robbing him. Spare us your commie manifesto about the poor and oppressed, and how you are so brave to stand up for the masses against those cruel wealthy authors taking advantage of the poor (and for most writers, lol wut? They are broke, dummy!)
BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH POORS?!?
Go to the library!
But then we have to listen to these thieving shit weasel cry but what about the RURAL POOR. Which extra fucking pisses me off because now they’re appropriating my culture, because I grew up poor in the sticks. And I choose to live in the country now. Fuck your commie gibberish. Rural people are used to driving long distances to do everything.
Reading is like the cheapest hobby! If you are pirating you are rich enough to have internet.
You aren’t Robin Hood. You’re just a cheap bitch. There’s tons of free books online. My “greedy corporate oligarch” publisher Baen has a free online library with hundreds of titles.
Or KU is like $12 a month for UNLIMITED books. You can read 20 hours a day for a few cents an hour if you feel like it.
If you want to steal, great. Whatever. I don’t give a shit. That’s on you. But just do it with some fucking dignity and spare us from this retarded class warfare justification bullshit. That’s way more pathetic than being a thief.
July 6, 2026
“The Road to Hell is Always Paved with Good Intentions”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam expresses his frustration with young people’s recent affection for more socialism, despite all the evidence of history:
When I see the younger generation demanding more and more Marxism, more socialism, more State, more “planning” to fix a world they’ve been taught to hate — I don’t feel like snickering. I feel like screaming.
Because I recognize the opening chapter of a story whose final page I know all too well.
That story, a man wrote in 1944, under the bombs. Friedrich Hayek. The book: The Road to Serfdom. And he dedicated it — read carefully — “to the socialists of all parties”. Not out of contempt. Out of affection. Out of urgency. Because he had seen, with his own eyes, an entire Europe tip over the edge.
Remember this, it’s the heart of it all: totalitarianism never starts with monsters. It starts with good people.
It starts with idealists who want the common good. Generous young people who can’t stand injustice anymore. Soft, consensus-driven parties that promise to fix everything if you just give them a little more power. The problem isn’t their intentions. The problem is the mechanism they set in motion.
Here’s that mechanism. Follow it, it’s relentless.
To plan an economy, you need a single decision where there were once millions of free choices. So you have to concentrate power. But no society ever agrees on a single plan — everyone has their own ends, their dreams, their priorities. The planner then hits a wall: disagreement. And disagreement becomes an obstacle to eliminate. You start by persuading. Then by coercing. Then by silencing. Not out of sadism — out of logical necessity. The plan demands that you crush what resists it.
And then comes Hayek’s most chilling chapter: “Why the Worst Get on Top”. In a system that demands total power, it’s not the best who win. It’s those who are ready for anything. The scrupulous man hesitates; the man without scruples acts. The collectivist machine, whatever its colors, mechanically selects the brutes.
Look at Germany. You’ve been told Hitler fell from the sky, an anomaly, an accident of evil. That’s false, and it’s dangerous to believe it. What Hayek understood was that Germany had spent half a century abandoning classical liberalism — the individual, rights, the market — in favor of the cult of organization, the collective, the State that knows better than you. The left and the right already shared the same premise: the individual must submit to the nation’s plan. Hitler didn’t have to build that machine. He found it already assembled, warmed up, ready. He just had to grab the wheel.
That’s the warning. Totalitarianism isn’t an ideology. It’s a structure. You can fill it with red, brown, any generous color you like. Once you’ve accepted that the individual must bend to the collective, that property is just a revocable privilege, that the freedom to trade, to speak, to innovate stops where “the common good” decreed from above begins — you’ve laid the tracks. The train, it’ll come on its own.
And it always comes with the world’s best intentions. Every step toward the abyss is justified, reasonable, compassionate. One more tax for the poor. One more control against the bad guys. One less freedom, but “just that one”. No one chooses servitude. You slide into it, one good intention after another.
So I’m tossing this bottle into the sea. To you who are twenty and on fire with passion. Your revolt against injustice is beautiful — keep it. But for the love of God, learn history. Read Hayek. Read what the 20th century really was, not the caricature they’re feeding you. The tens of millions of deaths it left behind weren’t killed by sadists from another world, but by systems built, at the outset, on dreams of justice.
Freedom isn’t the problem to fix. It’s the treasure they’re convincing you to sell off cheap.
Wake up.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
July 5, 2026
Canary in a Climate World
On his Substack, John Robson begins a series looking at a new book that covers the skeptic view of the great climate change debate, Canary in a Climate World:
Today we start a series looking at the new bestselling book Canary in a Climate World: Climate Realism vs. the Net Zero Myth. From the title you can guess the slant, but you may not expect the sheer number (38) of well-credentialed contributors. And we begin where they did, with the first chapter called “A Personal Awakening: from Covid to Climate” by Dr. Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at University of London. What’s an expert in cancer research doing writing about climate? Well, he doesn’t claim to be a climate scientist in the narrow sense (though he certainly understands statistics). Instead he writes about how his experience as a medical expert during Covid opened his eyes to the way science can be politicized and hijacked to serve an agenda. Once he saw the same pattern in climate, he realized it was essentially the same story, with many of the same characters, just being played out on a much slower time scale.
Dalgleish is a man who understands how science is done, or should be. He’s an expert in cancer immunotherapy and virology, who has made award-winning contributions to the fight against HIV, among other diseases. When Covid broke out he found himself at the forefront of research on the unfolding pandemic. But soon his suspicions were aroused.
I was surrounded by experts and doctors who believed every word they were being told. What first shook me was work done with my close collaborator Birger Sorensen, with whom I had been helping to improve an already effective HIV therapeutic vaccine, Vacc-4X. Sorensen spotted that the sequence of SARS CoV-2 published in Nature in February 2020 contained several highly positively charged inserts that one simply did not see in natural viruses.
So, a scientific discovery to be shared, right? Dalgleish explains why the six sequences in question could not be natural, and moreover two of them matched ones published earlier by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But when he pointed this non-coincidence out to colleagues he was told, basically, to shut up. In a revealing echo of the “not a climate scientist” trope, people with far less training than him told him he wasn’t an expert and wasn’t qualified to comment on the matter. And in another revealing echo, when he took his findings to the government he was accused of spreading misinformation for saying something true.
It gets worse. He then watched the official response to Covid break all the rules. China could have stopped the spread within days by preventing people from leaving Wuhan, but instead they and the WHO allowed daily flights to leave the city, sending the pandemic around the world. The data began to show that only the elderly or people with comorbidities were at risk of death, yet governments around the world imposed universal lockdowns, urged on them by incompetent and narrow-minded scientists whose computer models consistently overpredicted infection rates, painting an alarmist picture of catastrophe that went unchallenged.
Dalgleish was also dismayed to see that standard symptomatic treatments, such as vitamin D3 and inhaled steroids, that he was using successfully on his patients, were being cast aside by the General Medical Council in favour of dangerous alternatives including ventilators which, he says, “in many cases certainly killed rather than saved lives by pushing secretions back into the lungs and effectively drowning the patients.” He accused the GMC of:
prosecuting good doctors for looking after their patients and not slavishly following official guidelines, which often had more in common with what I can only describe as highly coercive and authoritarian behaviour.
Then the vaccines arrived. Dalgleish and his colleagues reviewed all the available literature and concluded that no coronavirus vaccine had ever succeeded. Instead the vaccines were likely to program the immune system against obsolete variants and impair its ability to recognise the current one. The demand that everybody everywhere take the shot, despite the knowledge that it was a futile treatment and posed serious risks to people who were not at risk of dying, convinced Dalgleish that what was happening was a scam or worse.
