… this morning I was thinking about monasteries. Specifically, monasteries as the one place in the Middle Ages where you might could test my theories about Information Velocity and Caloric Surplus.
I don’t know whether you need much in the way of background, but since some of you seem to enjoy the “inside baseball” stuff … History, as an academic discipline, has always suffered from a “source base” problem. We deal with artifacts; more specifically with documents. If it ain’t written down … see what I mean? This is why whoever-it-was wasn’t wrong when he said that History is just the biographies of Great Men. It’s the biographies of the best-documented men, anyway. I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, but you see what I mean.
So when, in the Seventies, we had the “cultural turn“, a whole new series of techniques had to be developed to expand the source base. Some of those were good and necessary. Others … well, Wiki quotes Frederic Jameson, one of the most prominent early-90s obfuscators (Indie band name?):
The very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but it is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the image of culture.
Translated from the PoMo, it’s your standard, tiresome stuff about “critique”. Culture just IS Capitalism, which IS Consumerism, blah blah blah, you know the drill. It’s tedious, but it’s not entirely wrong — what people “consume” (in the egghead sense, not the biomechanical sense) can give us important clues about their world. So long as you avoid the teleological temptation (didn’t they tour with EVC?) of attributing everything to “Capitalism”, you can do good work.
The “problem” with recent history is that the “centers of cultural production” do seem to be identifiable, and so are their motives. They are “Madison Avenue” and “to make money”, respectively, and so it’s easy — and profitable!! — to do the tiresome PoMo CultMarx thing. The further back into The Past you go, though … well, consider this:
As you can see from the caption, that style is called “macaroni” — like from the old song “Yankee Doodle,” which the Colonials appropriated in an early example of “owning the insult.” Wiki sez:
Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually epicene and androgynous manner. The term “macaroni” pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his British nature …
… The macaronis became seen in stereotyped terms in Britain, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality – which was then legally viewed as sodomy. At the time, homosexuality was frowned upon, and was even punishable by death. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th-century British society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification, and consumer capitalism.
You see the typical “critical” blah blah blah there at the end, and it’s not wrong, just tedious, predictable, and tediously predictable. It’s also much harder to find a “purpose” for this behavior. It’s easy to do for the modern analogue of the macaroni, the hipster […] which Wiki documents extensively, because of course they do, it’s right there underneath “macaroni”. But the whole “culture industry” thing wasn’t there yet in the 18th century, so it might actually be down to an individual person. It’d be theoretically possible to find “the first macaroni” — it was the Marquis de Whatever, and he decided to dress like that because reasons, and all the best people decided to copy him, also because reasons, and that’s pretty much all your “cultural turn” can do, because that’s the only documentation we have.
Since we here are not bound by the canons of scholarship, however, we can speculate. I want to focus on this bit about macaronis:
In the 18th century, wealthy young British men traditionally took a trip around Europe upon their coming of age, known as the Grand Tour. Italy was a key destination of these tours. During their trip, many developed a taste for maccaroni, a type of pasta little known in Britain then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 by those returning from the Grand Tour. They would refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as “very maccaroni”.
That’s Information Velocity, preindustrial-style. They had to go there personally — or, at the very least, have access to the in-house journals of those who did:
The song “Yankee Doodle” from the time of the American Revolutionary War mentions a man who “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. Dr. Richard Shuckburgh was a British surgeon and also the author of the song’s lyrics; the joke which he was making was that the Yankees were naive and unsophisticated enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a macaroni.
In America, only a select few persons would have access to that kind of thing, because only a few would move in those circles.
Go back a bit further, and cultural trends are far less traceable, but “centers of cultural production” are much easier to find, in one specific sense: They’re monasteries. And there you have a group which speaks a common language — extremely rare in the Middle Ages — is literate (ditto), and has something close to, if not caloric surplus, then at least “chronic caloric sufficiency”, I guess we’ll have to call it. Monks worked hard in the Middle Ages, by our standards, but not as hard as the peasantry. They were well-fed, or at least consistently fed, in a way the peasantry weren’t.
In other words, whatever Information Velocity existed in the Middle Ages, they had it. They made a virtue out of circulating books, and all those books were in a common tongue. Since they also produced books — indeed, were pretty much the only ones who did — they were also, by definition, au courant with whatever the high fashions were, because they illustrated the books that were such a crucial part of the aristocracy’s gift-giving culture.
Severian, “Monastic Vices”, Founding Questions, 2026-01-13.
August 25, 2026
QotD: “… and called it macaroni”
August 24, 2026
It’s no wonder that people have lost trust in formerly prestigious institutions
Lorenzo Warby on the two cases that are currently front-and-centre with the terminally online left, one a recently deceased academic grifter and another a confessed multiple murderer (of her own children):
We are currently observing attempts to turn the late Jason Arday — a fabulist who produced nothing of intellectual merit — and Lindsay Clancy, a woman who murdered her three children, into moral heroes. The former is allegedly a martyr for the cause of anti-racism and care for the neurodivergent/autistic, the latter for motherhood — or at least postpartum depression and psychosis. Both are construed as victims.
There is a real push to put the truly awful into Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. It’s almost as if there are some issues with feminisation. On the other hand, a woman being an open supporter of Lindsay Clancy is an excellent negative signal for men.
Just when you think progressivist purity spirals can’t get any worse, they do. Thus, we not only get the above hagiographical elevations of the grotesquely unworthy, we also see the physical mutilations of trans-surgery used to rehabilitate female genital mutilation.
But, of course, any such surprise is having far too contemporary a focus. Left-progressivism has a long history of elevating some of history’s most appalling monsters, most tyrannical mass murderers — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — as heroes of world-history and human liberation.
The use and abuse of moral mascots
The worse a group or individual behaves, the more progressives like them. If a group is noted for high levels of violence or various social dysfunctions, left-progressives adopt them as moral mascots.
The concept of such mascots comes from economist Thomas Sowell. Mascots are people or individuals that “the Anointed” — those who see themselves as at forefront of human liberation — adopt to be extolled and defended. This is connected to Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Constrained and Unconstrained political visions.
The Constrained Vision says there are no complete solutions, there are just trade-offs, all the way down. Human nature is one of those constraints. Biologist E.O. Wilson‘s famous observation about Communism — great idea, wrong species — is a pithy expression of the Constrained Vision.
In the Constrained Vision, history is an enormous memory well where we learn about ourselves. This is because the humans who made history are just like us. Their experience, their triumphs and failures, even their mundanities, are lessons for us.
History is contingent, it has no particular direction. The Constrained Vision finds it easy to take people’s choices as having authority because there is no direction of historical travel to which they must conform.
The Unconstrained Vision denies that human nature is a constraint in that way, so it’s possible to create a society of transformative human liberation. History is not a source of lessons, but a record of failures to achieve that liberation — a record of corruption and sin.
Moreover, history has a proper direction — towards transformative human liberation or another, related telos. Hence, choices that support that direction are legitimate, those that go against it are not. The politics of the Unconstrained Vision turns elections into legitimating rituals: citizens’ votes are blocked from overturning any of the policies the Anointed have decided represent history’s proper direction.
The Anointed evince what writer Wesley Yang labels the non-electoral politics of institutional capture. If you want to see that in its most complete form among the Western democracies, PM Tony Blair’s debauching of Britain’s constitutional order through quangoes, human rights legislation that empowered judges over elected ministers, and devolving decision-making to the EU — thereby massively increasing the degree to which elections became legitimating rituals that change remarkably little — is the current gold standard case. However, all Western democracies face similar pressures, albeit to considerably differing degrees.
The commitment of The Anointed to this vision of human liberation gives them such a sense of trumping moral authority that they see themselves as owning morality. They have the right-to-decide what is moral and then to impose their decisions on everyone else.
“Communism is an ideology designed to liquidate nations”
I nearly skipped this post by Celina, as it started off appearing to be pretty much of interest only to Australians, but that was just the opening sections:
The Bolsheviks were the first governing power of the modern era to write the suppression of “national enmity” into a systematic criminal code. The RSFSR Criminal Code of 1922 penalised agitation and propaganda arousing national enmity or dissension, its successor, the 1926 Code, carried the provision forward as Article 59-7, under the chapter dealing with especially dangerous crimes against the order of administration, punishing “propaganda or agitation directed towards arousing national or religious enmity or discord”, with sharply escalated penalties, up to and including death, where the offence occurred in wartime or amid mass disturbances. From the earliest years of the Soviet state, in other words, speech about nationality was not a civil-society problem to be argued out, but a category of state crime sometimes punishable by death.
To understand why, it is necessary to understand something about communism that conservatives and libertarians have largely obscured. If you ask the average conservative what communism is, he will most likely start discussing government ownership, five-year plans, bread queues etc.
Communism, from this point of view, is essentially capitalism with the economic settings reversed. The government “does and owns everything“. This is why so much conservative analysis eventually degenerates into horseshoe theory: fascists liked government intervention and communists liked government intervention, therefore fascism and communism were basically versions of the same thing.
But that completely misses the ideological conflict which defined twentieth-century Europe. Communism was not just some economic theory about who should own what. It was an internationalist theory about who you are.
Communism is an ideology designed to liquidate nations. Literally.
Marxism insisted that the fundamental political division of mankind was class. The worker was not ultimately supposed to understand himself principally as English, German, Italian, French or Russian. He belonged to the proletariat. His historical interests were shared with workers beyond the borders of his own country, while his supposed national solidarity with his own bourgeoisie concealed the class relationship upon which capitalism depended. Hence the language that runs through the entire communist tradition: Workers of the world, unite; The proletariat has no fatherland; No war but class war. You’re not Italian, you’re not German, you’re the proletariat, and all you have to lose is your chains.
The political logic here is blatantly obvious. Nationality competes with class consciousness, patriotism competes with proletarian internationalism. The nation tells a German worker that he shares something profound with another German who happens to own a factory. Marxism tells him that this solidarity is false and his real political brother is the French, Russian or Italian worker standing on the other side of the border.
That is why the nation became one of the great obstacles confronting revolutionary socialism. The theory said workers possessed common international class interests. Yet, history repeatedly demonstrated that workers continued to behave like members of nations.
In 1914, the workers of Europe did not unite against their governments and refuse the coming war. They rallied overwhelmingly to their respective countries. Socialist parties fractured along national lines. Men who Marxists expected to understand themselves as an international proletariat marched into battle as Germans, Frenchmen, Russians, Austrians and Britons. And the same problem returned after the Bolshevik Revolution.
That is why the great twentieth-century conflict between communism and nationalism was not accidental. It was ideological. Communism was internationalist not in the banal sense that communists in different countries cooperated with one another, but in its conception of history itself. The nation was something history would ultimately transcend. Lenin said this openly: socialism aimed not simply to bring nations closer together, but eventually to “merge them“. Elsewhere he described the centralised state as a historical step towards the future “socialist unity of the whole world“.
Stalin, grasping this principle, forged civic nationalism as the indispensable stepping-stone toward that communist universalism. Inside the borders of the revolutionary state the old nationalities were to be liquidated into a single Soviet identity: you are not Ukrainian, you are not Russian, you are not Jewish, you are not Georgian, you are a Soviet patriot, loyal only to the revolution. That state, once purged of national loyalties, would then project its universalist ideology outward, seeking global hegemony by liquidating, in turn, every nation that still dared to resist it.
Update, 25 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 4 – The Fall of Athens
seangabb
Published 26 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
What happens when resistance fails?
In this lecture, we examine the dramatic collapse of Greek resistance after Thermopylae and the advance of the Persian army into central Greece. With the Spartan force destroyed, the road to Athens lay open.
We explore:
– The consequences of Thermopylae
– The evacuation of Athens under Themistocles
– The Persian capture and destruction of the city
– The psychological and strategic impact on the Greek world
– Why, at this moment, Persian victory seemed inevitableThis is the darkest point of the war for the Greeks — a moment when everything appears lost, and yet the story is far from over.
August 23, 2026
Julius Caesar’s will
At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his study on “The Art of Translation”, this time touching on the unlikely and unlooked-for rise of Caesar’s grand-nephew and eventual successor Octavian — better known to history as Caesar Augustus, the founder of the Principate:
Augustus of Prima Porta
Currently in the Chiaramonti Museum of the Vatican Museums (image from Wikimedia Commons).
You’d think someone who’d just won as much power as the 32 year old Octavian would appreciate a best-selling epic poem in praise of himself. Only fourteen years earlier, in 44 BC, the then-obscure teenager still expected to live a quiet life in his hometown of Velitrae. True, he did have family connections to the political big leagues 25 miles up the road in Rome; but as things stood, a lower-key path looked a lot more likely for the frail, bookish student.
Alas, a quiet life was not to be. On Tuesday, March 15, his great-uncle, Julius Caesar — ruler of Rome — had just seated himself in the senate meeting hall when dozens of senators stabbed him to death. In the assassins’ minds, they’d done something noble: they’d protected the republic — the Roman people — from a future tyrant-king. Surely, they thought, ordinary Romans would now rise up and hail them as republican heroes.
Ordinary Romans, it turned out, thought much more highly of their favorite war-hero than the treacherous senators who’d killed him. Whatever his flaws, Caesar had at least imposed some long-overdue order on Roman life. Now that he was gone, the terrible troubles of former times would return, and probably in a form far worse than before. Shock, anger, despair, and fear filled the city.
It didn’t help that as the hours bled into the next day, it became clear the senator-assassins had no plan for what to do next. They’d eliminated the energetic, enterprising man who’d led Rome the previous five years, but the senate itself was deeply fractured, with a number of the assassins now second-guessing what they’d done. The senate wasn’t stepping up. No one was. As a result, in that moment, the city and empire had no functioning government.
Sensing the possibility of violent conflict, Caesar’s colleague Lepidus quickly ordered troops into the city to keep things stable. It worked. But a possible trigger appeared the next day in the form of Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Piso, who stepped forward as the custodian of Caesar’s will and informed the senate he was ready to settle Caesar’s affairs as duty demanded. The senate panicked. Not knowing what the will contained, the now-rattled group begged Piso to keep it confidential for fear its contents would provoke riots. Piso refused: Caesar was a public official, and the public deserved to know, come what may. He demanded a day be set for revealing the will.
Surveying the precarious situation, Caesar’s right-hand man, Mark Antony, called a senate meeting to figure out what to do next. In that Friday meeting, the senate and Antony agreed to let the assassins escape punishment, while still enforcing all of Caesar’s policies. This compromise, they hoped, would appease both the pro- and anti-Caesar factions, and keep Rome from convulsing in violence.
This, and much more, all happened within three days of the assassination. But what happened on the fourth day — Saturday, March 19 — would prove just about as shocking as anything else: it was on that day that Lucius Piso appeared before the senate to open up, and read aloud, the will left by his murdered son-in-law.
To put that moment in perspective, I note that by the time of his death at age 55, Julius Caesar was one of the richest men on earth. Moreover, he had no legal descendants: his daughter, Julia, had passed away at the age of 22 during childbirth, along with her child. The Egyptian queen Cleopatra claimed Caesar had fathered her son, but Caesar never felt certain the child was his, and never acknowledged him under Roman law.
In addition to all this, Caesar commanded the loyalty of tens of thousands of Roman soldiers, active and retired, along with the admiration of tens of millions of residents and citizens around the Mediterranean. Among these were many of Rome’s most influential movers and shakers.
In short, Caesar had a lot to bequeath. (This was especially true in a world in which the lifelong loyalty of others easily transferred from a deceased person to his named heir.) Surely, in the senate meeting hall that Saturday sat a number of figures who expected to receive extraordinary gifts from the man they’d served—Mark Antony in particular. Antony, after all, had fought with Caesar for years, worked side by side with him in government, and been his closest confidante and colleague.
So you can imagine the humiliation, shock, and indignation around the room as the bereaved father-in-law Lucius Piso stood reading a will which named not Antony, not Lepidus, not any of Caesar’s other comrades, but Caesar’s eighteen-year-old grand-nephew, Octavian, as his adopted legal son and heir to nearly everything he had. Octavian—whose biological father had died when he was five—would receive Caesar’s name, most of his incalculable fortune, his lands, the benefit of his status and loyalties, and the automatic approval of all those who trusted the judgment of the great-uncle who’d adopted him.
By all accounts, Octavian had no idea about any of this. Yes, he’d spent some time with his great-uncle, even visiting him during his Spanish military campaign the year before. But Caesar had kept his will entirely secret.
When Octavian — away studying in Apollonia, in present-day Albania — heard about the assassination and will a couple of weeks later, he found himself facing The Mother of All Crossroads. He could either travel to the now violent, dangerous, nearly-anarchic Rome, risking his own assassination in demanding all Caesar had left him (and accepting all the attendant obligations), or he could decline and pursue the safe, quiet life he’d always imagined for himself.
The End of the Battleship Era – Force Z
TimeGhost Cartographic and World War Two
Published 22 Aug 2026In December 1941, Britain is fighting a global war on multiple fronts when Japan enters the conflict in Southeast Asia. At the centre of Britain’s strategy is Singapore, and the arrival of two powerful warships is meant to demonstrate that the Royal Navy can still project its power across the region.
HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, accompanied by a small destroyer force, form Force Z and sail into increasingly dangerous waters. But without the aircraft carrier originally intended to accompany them, the squadron is operating under a serious disadvantage.
As Japanese forces begin their invasion of Malaya, Force Z sets out to disrupt the landings. What follows becomes one of the most dramatic naval actions of the early Pacific War, as British battleships find themselves facing a threat they were never designed to fight alone.
Why This “Foreign” Commonwealth Truck Was Built In 800,000 Units And Supplied Every Front
BritishWarLegends and BritishWarArmory
Published 31 Mar 2026The Canadian Military Pattern truck was built by two rival factories in Ontario for a nation of eleven million people. It ended up supplying the British Eighth Army across North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and Burma — and Canada built more of them than Germany, Italy, and Japan built trucks combined.
Almost nobody knows it existed.
When Rommel captured two thousand of them at Tobruk in 1942, he didn’t scrap them. The Afrika Korps pressed them straight into active German service. An enemy with his own purpose-built military trucks chose to keep using captured Canadian vehicles instead.
The full forgotten story.
Update: I generally try to avoid watching or re-posting clearly AI-generated slop, but this was the first video I’d encountered discussing the hundreds of thousands of CMP trucks that Canada built during WW2. At some point between me scheduling the video and today, the channel has been banned. You’ve undoubtedly seen CMP vehicles in WW2 stills or movie footage, as they’re pretty distinctive – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Military_Pattern_truck
From The British Army in North-west Europe 1944-45,
CMP lorries passing through Uedem, 2 March 1945.
Photo by Carpenter (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Photograph B 14966 from the Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons.
QotD: “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store”
I once asked a friend in the French music biz how the song went over there. I hummed him the tune and he sang me the French lyrics and, although I can’t recall any of them, I remember they were entirely different from the English words. It’s not just the five-and-ten that’s hard to translate or the million dollar baby. But the concept of finding the latter inside the former is also very American. There are a ton of Mitteleuropean operettas in which the prince or duke or count wanders into the streets in disguise and falls in love with a serving wench, but the serving wench usually turns out to be a Countess or Margravine or some such also wandering around in disguise. Even the British are prone to this syndrome (Spring In Park Lane, etc). But in an American song the shop girl is a genuine shop girl, and she’s still a million dollar baby. That’s what makes it American.
In the Sixties, by the way, you could have found a future billion dollar baby in a five and ten cent store: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, got his start in retail as a franchisee at a Ben Franklin’s, founded in 1920 by the Butler brothers, who’d been in the five-and-dime business since the 1870s. I’m not saying “I Found a Million Dollar Greeter in the Big Box Store at the Strip Mall on the Edge of Town” would be as big a hit, but there is an historical continuity from the Butlers to Wal-Mart.
Mark Steyn, “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)”, Steyn Online, 2020-10-25.
August 22, 2026
“No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-Super-Mare”
On his Substack, Christopher Gage discusses how to shorten your life (but not for the usual reasons):
St George’s Nursing Home in Weston-Super-Mare. I’m sure the staff are fine, but this reminds me strongly of the hospice my grandmother ended her days in.
My Dharma or reason for being is devilishly simple: to maximise pleasure and to shuffle off this mortal coil before the nursing home beckons.
Fatally, at least for those with a yen for acronyms and self-hatred, my ultimate goal corrupts their hallowed SMART strictures. It is not quite specific. It is measurable. It is attainable. It is relevant. It is not time-based. I’m not resolved to stubbing out the fags, abandoning the booze, or chasing around Soho the doomed affections of neurotic artists. I refuse to wake at 5 a.m., invest in crypto, or bore my tastebuds with rainbow carrots.
I’ll take my cue from the great novelist, ardent womaniser, and prodigious piss artist, Kingsley Amis: “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-Super-Mare”.
In an age which toggles between grind-culture puritanism and brain-rot hedonism, we must chart a more amenable path. So, the pursuit of pleasure, it is. I resolve to pursue pleasure deliberately, intelligently, doggedly, ethically and without apology — not to escape but to evolve.
Pleasure gets a bad name. What, with all our competing isms and illities. Those journeys of immiseration and self-loathing. One cannot move for ice baths and magnesium supplements and alcohol-free and protein-rich and wellness retreats and fucking motivational podcasts. Antisocial tech billionaires inject the blood of teenagers in a demented bid to live forever. It is a new secular puritanism. These longevity bros trade the profound depth of life for its mere length. They are terrified of death, yet terrified to actually live. It must stop.
For myself, I’m not at all eager to die, but I don’t view the mechanical prolongation of life as a worthwhile end in itself. Living a bit longer, but at the cost of giving up some or all of the things that make life worth living seems a particularly bad bargain. I’ve never smoked, so that quick’n’easy “stay healthy” recommendation doesn’t apply, but I enjoy drinking wine and beer. Not to excess, as I don’t enjoy being drunk, but as a social relaxant, a pleasure in its own right, something to look forward to at the end of a long day. Matching the right wine to the food on your plate is a worthwhile skill to develop, as it increases two pleasurable things at the same time.
QotD: Fortified towns in the Middle Ages
Nevertheless, the larger size of the area being defended makes it harder to deploy concentric defense-in-depth solutions. There are also transit considerations: towns are, after all, economic centers, typically sitting at the junction points of many different local and regional routes, which means they tend to need lots of entry-points to facilitate all of that travel and trade and in turn that means lots of potentially vulnerable gatehouses. Meanwhile, internally, the desire for residents to move around the town freely and general land-use considerations make subdividing towns into walled districts (very common in video-games for memory-management and loading reasons) very difficult and as a result very rare. You can see this, for instance, looking back at the period city-maps from the Lonely Cities series: a good number of cities have either a citadel or a section of the town which is walled but also outside of the main circuit (often separated by a river), but full concentric styles of defense or multiple cell-like walled districts don’t really occur. There are exceptions, but they are relatively rare: most cities have a single primary circuit of walls, which, if they are breached generally give access to the main area of the town.
In Europe, the most complete and formidable set of city walls were without question the Theodosian Walls built to defend Constantinople during the reign of Theodosius II (r. 402-450). The Theodosian Walls stood for the whole Middle Ages but they really reflect the culmination of the ancient system of city wall fortifications, the ultimate answer to the kind of “big army” playbook the Assyrians (and Romans) employed. So I want to both talk about the defense system but also note points where its method diverges from the walls of later medieval towns.
The Theodosian Walls had to cover some 5.7km and had nine gates; both numbers should immediately make clear that you needed quite a few people to man these defenses effectively. This was in particular a factor for town defense: most of the defenders are going to be citizens of the town called up to defend it in an emergency, rather than a standing guard. As far as I can tell, this seems to have made towns somewhat more vulnerable to surprise “hasty assaults”, if the attacker could force a gate along a long circuit before the defenders knew where the attack was coming. Of course that problem is intensified by the fact that this is a single-point-of-failure system: the loss of one gate against a superior foe generally meant the loss of the town.
The Theodosian Walls are unusual in that they are a set of triple walls. The main fighting position was on the inner wall; in front of this was the peribolos, a low, flat, unobstructed gap, after which was the lower outer wall, a secondary forward fighting platform. The towers of the inner wall project out into the peribolos for exactly the same reason castle towers project: defenders on those towers can fire, unobstructed, down the peribolos, meaning that an attacker can find no safety here. The crenellation of the outer wall likewise only faced out, so attackers who seized the outer wall would have no cover from defenders fighting from the inner wall. Next, after another gap was a simple low forward wall, little more than a stone breastwork about 1.5m high. Finally, the low wall stood at the inner edge of a large moat, some 20m wide and 10m deep, because no good defensive system is complete without a ditch.
That low wall is a kind of what we call an “outwork”. This particular kind of outwork is a product of the ancient world and uncommon in medieval fortifications to my knowledge; it was a response to the increasing use of torsion catapults during the Hellenistic period. While it did offer a position for defenders to use to sally out (for instance to destroy enemy siege engines), the primary purpose was to prevent enemy catapults from being able to direct fire at the base of the main wall and its towers. Even if knocked down, such an outwork’s rubble would obstruct direct fire on the curtain wall or the towers. This idea – using an outwork to physically block lines of fire on the curtain wall – is going to come back a bit later.
In contrast, most later medieval town wall circuits generally only have a single curtain wall, supported by a moat. As with castles, the wall is supported by projecting towers which can direct fire along its length and hardened gatehouses. Where cities sometimes do employ defense-in-depth it is with a “citadel” – a hardened fallback position either inside the city or (more often) built in to the wall circuit; essentially a complete castle built into the city wall. The role of the citadel is important for thinking about what these defenses are intended to achieve: defenders who have lost the main area of the city but have held out in the citadel are unlikely to be in a position to recapture the city or even to seriously threaten to do so. But the citadel has important negotiating power. Even a small number of surviving defenders can likely hold a citadel (with its stockpile of supplies) for a long time; taking such a citadel by storm poses all of the problems of storming a castle, with the added disadvantage of having to do so through city streets. Consequently, defenders holed up in the citadel are in a good position to negotiate for terms: perhaps being able to march out unharmed in exchange for turning over the citadel, or else negotiate less onerous terms for the city in general (alternately, they might try to hold out until a friendly relief army could arrive).
And that brings the focus to something important about almost all medieval siegecraft: the siege and negotiations generally proceeded side-by-side. By raising the cost of a siege (either a blockade or a storming assault), the defender could improve their bargaining position, even if they were always going to have to surrender. Meanwhile the attacker, by very visibly preparing for a deliberate assault could signal to the defenders their resolve and thus attempt to encourage surrender. As far as I can tell, far more fortified medieval towns and castles surrendered than were ever taken by storm and so consequently a lot of this fortification work is as much about shifting bargaining positions in the event of an attack as it is resisting an attack.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
August 21, 2026
This is something we genuinely need today
Plus, as Kate at Small Dead Animals often points out “Mischief is important“:
In one of the only three management books anyone should bother to read — and everyone should read the three — Robert Townsend says that a CEO should, while on the road, try phoning his own company. Try the helpline and see how far he gets. Try calling his own office. Sure, you should end up with the Executive Secretary who then directs it to the right person but sometimes that correct person is going to be you. Say, Warren Buffett calling to make you rich by buying the company and thus crystallising all your stock options and RSUs.
This is a lesson that has been forgotten. From a Guardian list of things government should pass laws to make happen:
Force companies to put a phone number on their homepage
You’ve got a problem with a company and you want to get it sorted – and then you realise you cannot find a number for it anywhere. There are communications companies that have no “contact us” link anywhere to be seen, and energy companies that send you all round the houses looking for a way to get in touch.
One of the recurring themes of Guardian Money readers’ problems is the struggle to find someone to help when something goes wrong. Clearly, once you have published a phone number, you need staff at the other end answering the phone and offering some joined-up thinking, so this is only the start of the solution – but at least customers would not feel like companies were trying to hide from them.
This does not work as there is no guarantee that anyone will answer the call.
We’ve also that basic point that Burke and his Little Platoons can — and often do — solve problems better than government. So, here’s the pitch for that private sector service.
We set up a database of the home and work and mobile phone numbers — emails too — of the management of companies. Most importantly, the board of directors. If the company is owned by private equity — say — then the General Partners of the PE company.
Obviously, if a company has a helpline, which people answer, then all of that information stays private to us. If a company does not then we publish it as a page saying these are the contact numbers for that company. Say, Evri, the delivery people. The board members get their numbers and email publicly revealed. As I recall it they’re PE as well so some number of GPs over in the US also start getting aggrieved calls from Lesser Wallop about non-delivery. Not that any Septic would be able to understand Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop but it’s the instance of the call that matters. Evri is used as an example for a bit of looking around a few months back seemed to reveal that they had no UK phone number at all. Thus the directors it will be.
The top management of companies that do not provide a helpline — nor answer the one they claim to have — will have the customer complaints calls directed toward them. This will, of course, rapidly mean the opening of a useful customer complaint line that people actually answer. Those making that £250k a year as the board member of whatever do not want to be talking to Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop. Therefore phone calls from Ms. Aggrieved will lead to the creation of a useful customer services department.
At which point, of course, we take the board members’ phone numbers down and job done. But, clearly, we keep monitoring to ensure that those service times don’t then decline.
Make the bastards who make the decisions suffer the consequences of those decisions. Works this does, really, it works.
Now, there will be some who say that government can do that. Why use the Little Platoons when a law can simply be passed?
Which is to miss a basic philosophic point, which is that we should only use government when we, ourselves, cannot do it. Government is for when the Little Platoons cannot achieve it. Letters of Marque are lovely things but biffing the Frenchies is better done with a Royal Navy. Assuming we still had one of course. RNLI, on the other hand, works better without government than it would with.
But much more than that. For who are the worst at providing a contact number that works? Why, that would be government, wouldn’t it? Anyone ever tried to ‘phone HMRC? Quite.
August 20, 2026
The Frankfurt School – The most destructive intellectual project of the 20th Century
People tend to underestimate how influential intellectual movements can be, as they rarely get outside attention until they’re deeply entrenched in the university system. The Frankfurt School‘s damage record is unmatched by any other intellectual movement of the era:
Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.
The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.
The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.
1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.
2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.
3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it. This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.
4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name”. Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.
6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.
7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.
The answer is not another theory. It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.
The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.
Prove it wrong.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.
“It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand”
On his Substack, Andrew Doyle discusses the fine art of writing libellous things about someone without quite giving enough legally actionable material for the victim to have a chance to retaliate successfully:
Simon Edge on GB News.
Screencap from Andrew Doyle
How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a “racist” for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society. White supremacists have denounced me as a traitor for my opposition to racism.
It’s all noise, of course, and best filtered out. These aren’t serious people, and no serious person would believe their smears. However, last week an author called Simon Edge, well-known in gender-critical circles, published a blog post about me that I can only describe as defamatory. He’s very lucky that I’ve no appetite for litigation, but I think it’s worth discussing the nature of his smearing technique because it’s become so common among activists of the more mendacious ilk.
It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it.
Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.
Here’s how he did it. Recently, it was announced on X that Oldspeak Books, which bills itself as “Britain’s only centre-right bookshop”, has closed its doors. The manager posted a message on social media to explain.
Over time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced. The uncertainty around which customers were genuine, made it hard for me to greet everyone warmly, and my customer service suffered.
This looked like a clear case of cancel culture to me and, since Oldspeak had been kind enough to stock my books, I reposted her message with a comment to the effect that it was a shame that she had been pressurised into closing her shop. This was, according to Edge, my first foray into the murky world of fascist apologism. Who knew it could be so easy?
The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 3 – The Road to Thermopylae
seangabb
Published 25 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
Why did the Greeks resist — and how did they organise their defence?
In this lecture, we follow the formation of the Greek coalition against Persia and the strategic decisions that led to the famous stand at Thermopylae. Against overwhelming odds, a divided collection of city-states came together to resist the greatest power in the known world.
We examine:
– The creation of the Hellenic League
– Spartan leadership and Greek strategy
– The selection of Thermopylae as a defensive position
– The parallel naval strategy at Artemisium
– The events leading up to the battleThis lecture sets the stage for one of the most famous last stands in history, showing that Thermopylae was not an isolated act of heroism, but part of a carefully considered defensive strategy.
