Quotulatiousness

July 31, 2026

Nobody “designed” capitalism

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Education, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of Karl Marx’s cleverer notions was to come up with a label for the economic system that had slowly emerged from the feudal period in Europe. It wasn’t ever the result of some overarching plan or campaign, it was just the easiest way for producers and consumers to connect without coercion or force. It had no real name until its declared enemy named it:

Capitalism did not begin in a boardroom. Voluntary exchange, repeated across generations, built the fairs, the credit networks, the double-entry books that Luca Pacioli codified in 1494. Nobody planned this. That’s the whole point.

The story you learned in school runs backwards. You were taught that greedy factory owners exploited children until noble legislators rescued them in 1833. What actually happened: the Industrial Revolution dragged English living standards up so fast that population doubled between 1750 and 1850 because people stopped dying. Wages rose. Life expectancy rose. The factory that horrifies the modern reader was an upgrade from a life of starving on a tenant farm at the mercy of the harvest. Children worked because their families were poor, and the factory made those families less poor. The reformers arrived after the market had already done the heavy lifting, then took credit for the sunrise.

Real capitalism needs sound money, and here is where the tragedy sharpens. Between 1815 and 1914, under a classical gold standard, prices in Britain fell gently while output exploded. You could save a coin and expect it to buy more later. That world died in stages: 1914, when governments suspended gold to print [money for] war; 1933, when Roosevelt confiscated citizens’ gold at $20.67 an ounce then revalued it to $35; 1971, when Nixon closed the window entirely and handed us the pure fiat regime you live under now.

What followed was corporatism wearing capitalism’s coat. When the Federal Reserve can conjure trillions and hand them to the banks and firms closest to the spigot, you no longer have a market allocating capital. You have a cartel allocating privilege. The 2008 bailouts were a monetary system doing exactly what a monetary system built on the printing press does.

When someone blames “unfettered capitalism” for the mess around you, ask them to point to the fetters.

The answer is to let go. Less regulation, no central bank, less tax, less government. Not more!

A few days ago, Severian point out:

Title page of Das Kapital in the first German edition of Volume 1.
Wikimedia Commons.

At its broadest, “system” means something like “the appearance of rule-governed behavior”, and so yeah, “capitalism” is a “system” in that sense. The “law” of Supply and Demand is a “rule”, if you like, and we can start piling on the ACK-shullies from there. But it’s not particularly useful trying to analyze why and how it happens; the only thing we need to proceed is to acknowledge that it does.

“It” being “reification“, which you’ll recall means “treating an abstraction as if it were a real object”. Synonyms (per Wiki) include “concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, and while I personally dig “hypostatization” — it’s got that groovy Gnostic ring to it — “reification” is easier to type; plus it was very successfully repurposed by Marx and we might need that later, so “reification” it is. Calling “the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage” Capitalism is a reification. It’s useful rhetorical shorthand …

… but it carries with it a tendency to mistake the map for the territory, you dig? Instead of confining yourself to “the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage”, you inevitably start talking about the “rules” or “laws” of Capitalism. And from there, it’s just a short leap to our course title: the morality of Capitalism.

Because that’s what rules are for, no? To keep things fair — or equal, if you prefer. If we want to find out who’s better at tennis, let’s say, we set up a bunch of rules, to eliminate from the outcome every “inequality” but skill (and dumb luck). Both players have to agree on the scoring. Tennis, therefore, really is a system, strictly speaking. It really is a game, in the mathematical and linguistic senses.

Tennis is not a reification. When we talk about tennis, we are talking about the rules of the game, or the outcome of an individual match. That’s it.

But watch what happens when we start talking about the “rules” of Capitalism. The very word “rule” (or “law”) unavoidably contains the notion of fairness. The rule determining “out of bounds” in tennis is explicitly designed to make the game fair, because that’s what game rules are for — to make the players equal in every respect but skill. You couldn’t know who is the better tennis player if the rules were arbitrary; “out of bounds” has to be clearly defined, and universally applicable.

If you start talking about the “rules” of Capitalism, then, you might not think about “fairness”, but you can’t help but feel it.

Which the contrast with Communism makes worse. Because of course “Capitalism” and “Communism” are “dialectically constructed”. I don’t like throwing Marxist jargon around, but it’s useful in this case. Because Communism is a system, or a game, or whatever word you prefer. Communism does have rules, and they are explicitly designed — like the rules of all games — to ensure equality.

(And they do, comrades, they really do. As P.J. O’Rourke pointed out back when he was funny, Communism is as fair as it gets. We’re all equally broke, starving, and dead, but goddamn it, we’re equal).

I’m sure I don’t have to tell this crowd what a bad idea it is to let your enemies define things for you, but that’s what “Capitalism” does. Karl Marx his own self invented that term. Pick your famous “Capitalist” thinker — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, whoever. They didn’t call themselves “Capitalists”; they called themselves political economists. They weren’t devising rules for a game; they were describing phenomena they observed. It was only after Marx slapped the “Capitalism” tag on the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage, that we started seeing “Capitalists”.

QotD: Cuisine on campaign

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

War is not a picnic. I [used to] find it difficult to cook in the proximity of squalling children; I suppose the rattle of gunfire, incendiary bombs, and the whistle of mortars might be equally distracting to the higher sort of culinary exercise. But the circumstances of a field kitchen are not wholly grim. Dried herbs and spices are very light to carry, and wherever one happens to be on a campaign, there are the fruits of that countryside. Moreover, as most old soldiers will recall, and the readers of their diaries and memoirs in their absence, most days are not that exciting. There is plenty of time to think about food. There are long periods of boredom and waiting with nothing to look at but the sky; interspersed with short periods of pant-shitting terror.

Supposing, for a moment, a bit of imagination on the part of quartermasters and cooks, and a semi-intelligent rationing authority, a war might be conducted with a bit of style. There could be rivalry between regimental kitchens, or between the galleys in Her Majesty’s fleet. Food could be made a powerful inducement in the recruitment drives.

There are some little sparks like this, in history. In the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, that extraordinary lantern-bearing angel, procured the voluntary help of Alexis Soyer, the leading London hotel chef of the day, to advise her on the organization of field hospital kitchens. These quickly became the place to eat — almost worth getting wounded. M. Soyer applied his very broad mind to analyzing the limitations of field cookery, then turning each limitation into a strength. (I recommend his Culinary Campaign in the Crimea, 1857.)

Morale is not a small thing in the conduct of war. A hot meal served in defiance of logistics in the cold wet of a hideous trench, comes to remind us of victory, in the very face of the enemy.

David Warren, “Non-idlers”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-11-11.

July 29, 2026

Britain’s new PM is yet another Net Zero fanatic

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Daily Sceptic, Chris Morrison points out that moving from Manchester to Downing Street has not changed Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s devotion to the climate change agenda and Net Zero fanaticism:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official MP portrait, July 2026.
© House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

Praise the Lord, a Saviour from the North walks amongst us. The UK’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has apparently hinted that a tad more oil and gas might be taken from Britain’s remaining treasure trove lying undisturbed in the North Sea. Is this a push back on fanatical Net Zero treason as some commentators have suggested? Probably not. As always there is no need for conspiracy theories – just look at what they supported and said in the past. The new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh is a green blob-funded whack job straight out of central climate casting, while the new tee-shirt wearing top dog is all signed up to the evil, society-destroying Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill.

It didn’t take long for the bill promoter Zero Hour (ka-ching, Green Blob money) to list the new Prime Minister as one of 193 MPs who support the proposed private member’s CAN legislation that will cut the country’s entire use of hydrocarbons – domestic and overseas – to just 10% within 10 years. Zero Hour notes of Burnham: “In 2024, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he backed the Climate and Nature Bill because he recognised that Britain needed bold, science-led action to tackle the climate and nature crisis”.

Other more accurate interpretations are available along the lines that the bill is an abominable neo-Marxist Trojan horse that would lead to mass starvation, death and almost immediate industrial and societal collapse. With little or no hydrocarbons available from any source, food supplies would be cut in half due to a lack of fertiliser, while most medicines would be unavailable. In the regular periods of wind and solar drought, particularly in the winter, thousands would die in their blacked-out and unheated homes. Thankfully, the bill failed in the House of Commons when it was debated last year, but a terrifying 200 MPs agreed with its vile contents. Over 90 Labour MPs, all the Greens and LibDems plus two crackpot Tories said they supported the bill.

We can but pray that the two unhinged Tories, Sir Roger Gale and Simon Hoare, are currently receiving sympathetic re-education treatment as the Kemi Badenoch-led Conservative party now rushes towards the Net Zero exit. Similar classes of course are required for wayward Tories who believe that men can become women, and open borders lead to civilisation contentment.

Just three reasons come to mind to explain the heavy support for the House of Commons horror show.

  1. Rank stupidity: If the IQ score of any supporter was much lower, steps might have to be taken to ensure regular watering.
  2. Blinding ignorance: Five decades of dumbed-down education must take some blame, but the inability not to use at least one critical-thinking brain cell is worrying.
  3. Tunnel-vision zealotry: Overwhelming desire to re-order society along State-controlling communist lines – and if the majority kulaks get it, too bad. Inventing a climate crisis without a scintilla of conclusive proof is justified to create an equal, virtuous, brave new post-truth world.

Of course, allowing the two North Sea fields Rosebank and Jackdaw to open is little more than re-arranging the deckchairs on the Net Zero Ship of Fools. Thanks to the 2008 Climate Change Act and later amendments made by the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, Britain is legally committed to short-order Net Zero destruction. Unless the legislation is torn up, new drilling is likely to be challenged in the courts. As 2050 looms closer, lawfare will likely stop almost all new projects where emissions are likely to arise from using hydrocarbons.

The small Burnham North Sea relaxation, along with the removal of 5% VAT on electricity bills, is an obvious electoral ploy to disguise the fact that Britain now has some of the highest energy costs in the industrial world – and they are likely to get a great deal higher in the future.

1960s British Army Recruitment Film | Cold War Training & Life Inside the Army

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Militaria Collectors Network
Published 23 Mar 2026

Step back into the 1960s and experience how the British Army trained the soldiers of the Cold War era. This rare archival recruitment film offers a fascinating look at military life, basic training, and the wide range of technical and career opportunities available to new recruits during a time of global tension and rapid modernisation.

From infantry drills and weapons training to engineering, communications, and education programmes, this film highlights how the British Army prepared men for both combat and skilled professions. Whether you’re interested in Cold War history, military training, or vintage government films, this is a unique glimpse into a defining period of British military history.

📽️ In this film:
– 1960s British Army basic training
– Infantry tactics and weapons familiarisation
– Technical trades and career paths
– Cold War-era military strategy and preparation
– Life as a British Army recruit
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QotD: Asymmetric warfare

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Asymmetric Warfare is a term used to describe warfare between two belligerents with either starkly different amounts of resources or different warfare styles or systems. It is crucial to note this term denotes something about the relationship between two belligerents, not something essential to one of them; an army or a state is not asymmetric except in relations to another (the mistake here is often to set the modern western industrialized form of warfare as the “norm” against which all other forms are somehow asymmetric). While this term has been used to describe the war in Ukraine, it is ill-suited for it: both Ukraine and Russia are attempting to make use of a similar set of equipment (including the use of artillery and airstrikes) using a uniformed soldiery; they are both, to borrow one of my earlier definitions, attempting to operate within the “third system of war“. Ukrainian efforts to have uniformed soldiers use maneuver and surprise to engage Russian logistics and rear echelon units are not “asymmetric”, but rather a standard part of both Russian and Ukrainian warfighting, albeit one that Ukraine appears more skilled at in the present moment. Likewise, both sides are attempting a parallel “political struggle” of demonstrations and information warfare; Ukrainian success here too does not make their methods asymmetric.

Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.

July 28, 2026

The establishment pretends not to understand why AfD is still on the rise

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Normally, I get my updates on German politics from eugyppius’ Substack, but this article is from the New English Review with Bruce Bawer reporting:

… even as the problematic aspects of Islam become increasingly manifest, mainstream politicians and journalists in Germany feign puzzlement over the growing popularity of AfD, which ever since its founding in 2013 has been characterized by the German establishment as heralding a Nazi renaissance. How, the German elites pretend to wonder, can so many voters transfer their loyalty from seasoned, sensible, upright political leaders to ragtag radicals who bring to mind Munich putsches and Nuremberg rallies? How on earth can they have become so misguided? Such is the coy approach of Jochen-Martin Gutsch in a recent article for Der Spiegel, in which he takes a spin around the former East Germany in purported search for an explanation as to why the “far-right” AfD has won majority backing in that part of the Bundesrepublik.

Gutsch’s first move is to act astonished at the fact that an AfD gathering in Salzwedel, Saxony-Anhalt, drew ordinary-looking families, plus “[a] surprising number of young people in their twenties, smartly dressed in blazers”. What, no Hitler Youth uniforms? Gutsch’s line is that he’s just plain perplexed by the numbers: “in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is currently polling at more than 40 percent. In the ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, the AfD is in first place; it’s even the most popular party, nationwide.” But it’s one thing to read the numbers, another thing to see all these – gasp! – ordinary-looking people flocking to show their support. This is what really blows Gutsch’s mind, or so we are meant to believe: the “normalization” of AfD, the party’s growing “acceptance”, its rapid “transformation into a mainstream party in the east”, all of which was, in Salzwedel, brought to vivid, terrible life before his eyes.

Ten years ago, Gutsch recalls, AfD received 20 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, and he, for one, was sure that it had peaked. He’s from eastern Germany himself, and he thought he knew his neighbors. He was wrong, and now, he claims, he’s alarmed – unlike his “friends and colleagues sitting in Hamburg, Cologne, or Munich, who give a friendly, bored look when I talk about the AfD. For them it’s still far away. Somewhere ‘over there’, whereas for me it’s a reality I can’t escape.” Therefore, he tells us, it’s important for him to make unravel the mystery of the AfD‘s remarkable rise in the polls.

Of course, the reason for the rise of AfD is obvious to anyone who’s been following developments in Western Europe for the last quarter-century or so. More and more voters have been demanding that immigration, especially from Muslim countries, be drastically curbed, if not altogether ended, and that the unassimilated masses who’ve already relocated to Western Europe from the Muslim world – only to swell the welfare rolls and the crime statistics – be sent back to where they came from. We’re told that the Berlin Pride killer, Abdul Ballout, belongs to “Islamist circles” in Germany. Why, ask AfD voters quite reasonably, should there be “Islamist circles” in Germany?

Yet Gutsch is, or pretends to be, blind to such concerns. His initial hypothesis, as he heads into the east, is supposedly that AfD is gaining popularity there because of economic hardship. But no, when he drives through Brandenburg now, he encounters prosperity. The city of Großräschen, once the Ruhr of East Germany, became a “ghost town” after 1990; now it’s thriving again, with the unemployment rate a mere seven percent, the old lignite mine converted into a lake with “a lovely beach” lined by “white houses” with “luxury SUVs parked out front”. Why, then, asks Gutsch, are the residents of these stately homes casting their ballots for AfD?

A veteran local politician tells Gutsch that he travels often to Bochum, in western Germany, which, compared to Großräschen, is an economic basket case. And yet the residents of Bochum are “more easygoing” than those in Großräschen. They possess a “fundamental optimism”. They “trust” and “respect” their political leaders. “What beautiful words”, Gutsch comments. He’s not being ironic. To be sure, he understands why eastern Germans aren’t brimming over with love for their leaders, whether in Berlin or Brussels. Many of them are old enough to remember 1990, when the once-mighty East German state “crumbled … before their very eyes.” One might add that before 1990, that same state was the very picture of totalitarian tyranny, as chillingly depicted in the film The Lives of Others. And before that – well, you know. Then there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to insufficiently vetted Muslim immigrants, who proceeded to cause mayhem in both east and west.

But why, then, do so many western Germans still “trust” and “respect” their leaders? It seems baffling. Yet to listen to Gutsch, loyalty to the political establishment remains the way to go – the only intelligent, mature, and reasonable option. When he talks with an AfD politician, Karsten Hilse, to get the latter’s perspective on things, he’s lost at sea. In Hilse’s opinion, mainstream German politicians are too obsessed with “tolerance”; they have at least a degree of hostility toward Germany; and they accept without question the preposterous ideologies of gender and climate-change.

“The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization”

Filed under: Europe, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski discusses the history of the right to bear arms from ancient Greece to modern America:

The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real.

1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else.

2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after.

3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state.

4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging.

5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design.

6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign.

7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.

Adventures in Surplus! Type 38 Arisaka Carbine in World War One

Filed under: Britain, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Mar 2026

In the fall of 1914 it became apparent that the minor fracas in Serbia was going to stretch a lot longer than anyone had expected, and governments began scrambling to secure weapons production. Japan was one source of small arms for the Entente powers, and Britain purchased about 150,000 Arisaka rifles and carbines from the Japanese in late 1914 and early 1915. These were used to equip Royal Navy crews and Army raining and reserve units, but by late 1915 Enfield production had caught up and the guns were no longer needed.

In the fall of 1915, the British sent most of their Arisakas (about 128,000) to Russia, which had also been purchasing large numbers from Japan. There they were again used to arm second-line units, including troops occupying the Grand Duchy of Finland. When Finland declared its independence in December 1917, most of the Russian soldiers went home and left their weapons in Finland. As a result, the Arisaka was the second most common type of rifle available at Finland’s independence, and was used by the Civil Guard until about 1927.

This particular Type 38 Carbine was made at the Tokyo Army Arsenal in 1910, then sold to the British where it was given a set of unit marks on the stock. It was subsequently transferred to Russia, where a metal clip was added to prevent accidental magazine release. It stayed in Finland through the Finnish Civil War and afterwards, only being imported into the US recently by Postrock of Garden City, Kansas.
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QotD: Projecting the effect of a maximum wage law

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What would be the impact of such a policy?

We cannot know exactly, because we would struggle to find a real-world example of it in a comparable country. But we could think of it as, effectively, a 100% marginal tax rate on incomes above £100,000. We could then look at the empirical literature on how responsive top earners are to tax incentives, and extrapolate from that.

We know from previous studies that the behaviour of top earners is quite sensitive to tax changes. Last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) tried to model the impact of a proposal to increase the tax burden on the top 5% of earners. In this case, the proposal was to lower the threshold for the 45% additional rate of income tax from £150,000 to £80,000 per annum, and to introduce an “additional additional rate” of 50% for incomes above £125,000.

If nobody changed their behaviour, such a policy would increase tax revenue by just over £9 billion per annum. But people would, of course, change their behaviour. Some top earners would switch to less demanding positions, some would retire earlier, some would reduce working hours, some would engage in more proactive tax planning (i.e. legal tax avoidance), some would simply emigrate, and so on.

We know for certain that responses of that kind exist. But we cannot exactly quantify them. So the IFS came up with a range of plausible outcomes rather than one definite number. It turns out that at the most optimistic end of the spectrum, behavioural changes would still knock over a third off the potential additional tax revenue, reducing it from over £9 billion to under £6 billion. At the most pessimistic end of the spectrum, the policy would fail to raise any additional tax revenue – it would, in fact, reduce revenue by almost £1 billion. (Stop smirking, Dr Laffer.)

If a tax rate of 50% can be predicted to trigger such strong behavioural responses, you can guess how much damage an implicit rate of 100% would do.

Kristian Niemietz, “The public love it, so what’s wrong with the idea of a maximum wage?”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-10-14.

July 27, 2026

The shambolic Fifth Crusade, or “Waiting for Fredot”

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Anatoly Grablevsky reviews a new book on one of the less well-known attempts to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Islamic conquerors:

By the early 13th century, the military and geopolitical situation of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem was dire. After the Third Crusade (1189-92) had failed to retake Jerusalem, the Frankish realm in the Holy Land was reduced to a thin coastal strip centred on the heavily fortified city of Acre. The rest of the Near East was in the hands of the Ayyubids, the successors of Saladin.

In response to Ayyubid encroachment, in 1213 Pope Innocent III called for a new holy war to reinforce the Kingdom of Jerusalem and reclaim the Holy City for Christendom. The bulk of the expedition was recruited in the Holy Roman Empire, whose young emperor, Frederick II, the wonder of the world himself, ostentatiously took up the cross. He was, however, in no hurry to join his countrymen in the east.

Learning from their bitter past experiences, this time around the Crusaders adopted a novel strategy. Instead of focusing their efforts on the Holy Land, the Christians targeted Egypt, the political and economic heartland of the Ayyubids.

The Crusader army’s first port of call was the coastal city of Damietta, which, after a lengthy siege, fell in 1219. This was a major victory for Christendom: Crusaders had not captured a city of Damietta’s size, wealth and strategic importance since the fall of Jerusalem in 1099.

The Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil, under pressure from Mongol attacks at the rear, now offered attractive peace terms that included the return of Jerusalem to the Christians. The Crusaders, overconfident and under orders from the absentee emperor, rebuffed Al-Kamil and instead decided to march on the Ayyubid capital of Cairo.

Here, the crusade took a shambolic turn. The Christians wasted precious months awaiting the arrival of Frederick II, but the emperor never bothered to show up (Smith might have called his book “Waiting for Fredot”). By the time the Crusaders finally began the march south, Al-Kamil had gathered his strength, and the Franks were quickly outmanoeuvred by the Sultan, who used his superior knowledge of the Nile’s flooding patterns to trap them against the river.

The Crusaders reacted by launching an all-out assault on their substantial wine provisions so that, when the Muslims attacked, the Christian army disintegrated in a drunken rout.

In the ensuing peace deal, Al-Kamil regained Damietta, in return for giving safe passage back to Europe to the Christian survivors.

Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs

Filed under: Greece, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The tag in my chosen headline means roughly “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, which anyone who has read anything about the Trojan War can understand. A huge problem for modern translators of works like The Iliad and The Odyssey is that there’s a double layer of cultural change built in before you start: the Mycenaean Greek culture of the Bronze Age — the setting of the Trojan War — is significantly different from the Greek culture of the classic era — when the oral tales were first written down (and attributed to Homer).

Classic Greek culture is often misunderstood by modern audiences through the most prominent survivals of that time: especially Greek philosophy, as the philosophers we think of as most representative of Athenian and the wider Greek culture were actually a fairly small and relatively powerless subculture at odds with the mainstream of their times.

All that said, going from a translation to an on-screen interpretation requires a lot of picking and choosing of elements to highlight and others to leave unrepresented or actively suppressed. In the most recent film of Odysseus and his extended return journey from Troy to Ithaca, director Christopher Nolan chose to portray Odysseus as a modern man in ways that may suit today’s audiences, but don’t accurately portray the Homeric interpretation or the times in which it is set:

Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.

In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.

But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.

During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.

This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.

This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?

Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.

Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film The Northman asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But The Northman was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.

Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.

In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.

The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.

The Total Erasure of Carthage | Part Four

Filed under: Africa, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rest Is History
Published 12 Feb 2026

Three decades after the defeat of Hannibal, how had the Roman Empire managed to conquer vast swathes of the known world? Why did the predatory eyes of this terrifying behemoth turn once more to Carthage? And, could this mighty city defy the odds and repel Rome one last time …?

Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the climactic, final phase of the Punic Wars; the greatest military struggle of all ancient history.
(more…)

July 26, 2026

Woodworking workbenches – the earliest artistic representation

Filed under: History, Italy, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Christopher Schwarz recounts a visit to the historical remains of the town of Herculaneum under the volcano that erupted in 79 AD, killing many thousands, but preserving a lot of the Roman town under many metres of volcanic ash:

The beginning. In the House of the Vetti, this dining room fresco is perhaps the earliest depiction of a workbench in the West. (Photo by Narayan Nayar)

The journey to the summit of Mount Vesuvius has all the romance of visiting an unlicensed reptile farm. It begins in Ercolano, Italy, a touristy village in the shadow of the volcano and home to Herculaneum, one of the towns buried by Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 C.E.

As Narayan Nayar (the photographer for the journey) and I stepped off the train from Naples we were assaulted by young, attractive Italians. Their job: Bait tourists to nearby restaurants. We glanced around and saw only one escape route from the train station’s cul-de-sac. So, we plowed through the crowd of eager human fishing lures.

We emerged from the other side a bit relieved. Then we realized we’d scurried past the bus company that was supposed to drive us up the volcano. We turned around and dove back into the swarm of too-perky people in order to catch our bus.

The twisty-turny bus ride ended 660 feet below the volcano’s summit, and we then climbed a steep trail to the volcano’s rim. The top resembles a gravel pit where one of Frank Herbert’s worms might emerge. There’s no deep hole for tossing human sacrifices – throw a virgin into Vesuvius and she’s only going to get skinned knees and a sunburn. I looked around the volcano and promptly excused the early settlers of the area for building their homes at the base of Vesuvius. The only evidence you’re on a volcano (besides the little gift shops) is the occasional tiny plume of gas and the odd rocks below your feet.

I picked up a few rocks. For rocks, they were young – likely the result of the 1944 eruption, which destroyed several villages. I looked out from our 4,200-foot perch at the buildings in every direction below, which are built on top of villages that were covered in ash from earlier eruptions. It’s a grim scene if you think about it too much – 600,000 people now live in the so-called “red zone” for a future eruption.

And yet, as I fondled the rocks in my hand I felt only gratitude for this deadly, fire-breathing mountain.

The Earliest Workbenches

The recorded history of woodworking begins with the Egyptians. But the recorded history of workbenches begins (for now) with Vesuvius. Its massive eruption in 79 C.E. buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and other sites, preserving frescoes, buildings, pottery, human remains and even wooden furniture.

At Pompeii, the ash blanketed a fresco showing a low, four-legged workbench being used for mortising by a man in Greek attire. At nearby Herculaneum, the eruption preserved a fresco showing “erotes” – what we might call “buck nekkid cupids” – sawing a board at an eight-legged low workbench. It features a holdfast and other holdfast holes. This fresco has since been destroyed, but we have engravings that were made soon after its discovery (more on both the frescoes’ stories is ahead).

These two images are the earliest representations of workbenches of which I’m aware. And they launched my interest in exploring knee-high workbenches and how to use them to build furniture, boats, storage containers and wagon wheels.

The conventional wisdom is that these low benches were used in former times for simple work and were replaced by superior modern benches, which are thigh-high or taller. But the more I studied low benches, the more I found that they never disappeared. They are still in use. Additionally, these low benches can be used for complex work, including steam bending compound shapes and lutherie.

The low bench is more than a thick plank of wood with legs. It’s also a collection of simple jigs and appliances that allow you to do remarkable work while sitting comfortably on an easy-to-build platform. For centuries, these simple jigs remained hidden in plain sight in paintings and drawings in museums. And their appliances have been proven to work, both at my low benches and by the modern craftsmen who still use them.

How to Provoke a War – Death of Democracy 25 – Q1 1939

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Jul 2026

By March 1939, appeasement has failed.

Hitler’s Germany has moved from threats and persecution inside the Reich to the destruction of Czechoslovakia, the seizure of Memel, and renewed pressure on Poland. No shots have yet been fired between the great powers — but Europe is now locked on a course toward war.

In this episode of Death of Democracy, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin at the end of Q1 1939: the “Israel” and “Sara” decree, Schacht’s dismissal, Göring’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Hitler’s genocidal Reichstag threat, the launch of Bismarck, the coerced occupation of Prague, the Memel ultimatum, and Britain’s guarantee to Poland.

This is the moment when the Munich illusion collapses. Hitler is no longer pretending to unite Germans. He is dismantling states.

The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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.

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