Diagram of von Thünen’s model from The Isolated State, after Morley (1996), 62. The agriculture ring is subdivided by intensity (intensive, long-lay and three-field), but here I have merged them for simplicity. The agriculture zone is wider because it did, in fact, tend to cover a larger area. The fade in the pastoralism zone is meant to indicate shifts from ranching to transhumance.
Once out of the innermost zone of very high intensity usage, we reach the middle zones of von Thünen’s model, which are devoted primarily to agriculture, falling in degrees of intensity as we move away from the city. This is where you should expect to see rolling seas of wheat and barley, as well as large scale cultivation of things like olives and grapes, as the climate permits. This seems to be what, for instance, Tolkien has in mind when he describes the Pelennor as fair and fertile townlands running down to the Anduin.
(I should note this this zone is subdivided into three groups: intensive agriculture, long-lay agriculture and three-field agriculture. We might discuss those terms further if future posts bring us to discussing how pre-modern farms work, but for now, I don’t want to get too – pardon the pun – deep in the weeds.)
Now, I noted before that for small cities, the horticultural zone might be entirely contained inside the city walls. The reverse is true as well – the larger the city, the further out these zones can get pushed – and this is especially true of the middle zone. As it extends, it tends to create miniature population centers within it (villages) – usually along roads (we’ll get to them).
But for very large cities, the area of grain cultivation can be truly massive. As I’ve noted in an earlier post, a city of around 500,000 would need to pull cereal production from an area of arable land close to the size of the state of Massachusetts. Rome – at nearly a million – imported grain from up and down the entire Italian coast, North Africa and even Egypt. A middle zone that large could contain not merely villages, but other towns and even large cities, whose own land-use patterns would be substantially distorted by the “pull” of the mega-city at the center. […] as a rule of thumb, if the cereal cultivation zone extends more than 20 miles out from the center, you should expect to see smaller market towns within it (because people want a market within a day’s walk).
What does this kind of zone look like? That actually depends a lot on terrain – expect villages surrounded by fields on areas of good, arable land. In a fairly wet environment (like Northern Europe), those villages might radiate out from the city. In arid environments like Egypt or Mesopotamia, the farmland (and thus the peasant population) is densely concentrated along the rivers, because water availability becomes a strong determinant of arability.
One thing Americans specifically tend to get a bit off here is that the farms are not likely to be evenly spaced over the terrain. We are very used to the agricultural landscape created by things like the Homestead Acts (1862-1930), which offered very large chunks of land (often as many as 640 acres) for purchase, creating a lot of very spaced out farms. Peasant agriculture in the pre-modern period doesn’t tend to organize like this.
Instead, peasant agriculture tends to cluster in villages, with fields radiating out from the villages (which in turn, often have their own micro-garden zone and local forests for wood). Part of the reason for this is that farmland within the village is typically not held as big, standalone farmsteads. Instead, it is either held communally, or else each family owns several small plots spread over different ecological zones (the better to be protected from the risk of a year being wet or dry or cold or whatever – if you have a little land everywhere, then probably something will grow somewhere every year. I’ll talk more about subsistence survival strategies in a future post).
In some societies, these peasant villages may also be mixed in with large elite-held (often slave worked) estates, but there’s an important caveat here. The grand estates – like Roman villas and latifundia – generally do not completely displace the local peasantry (in part because they rely on that peasantry to supply surplus labor). The role of the “big man” and these sorts of large market-oriented estates is complex and worth its own post. But in terms of land-use patterns, such estates generally exist within a landscape of smaller farmers, not in a vast sea of other large estates.
The outermost zone in the model is dedicated to pastoralism (“ranching” technically, but I’d like to be a bit more broad). Pastoralism can take the form of enclosed ranching, but can also be mobile in various ways. I won’t describe ranching too much – this human terrain is still much in evidence and well documented. But mobile forms of pastoralism are more foreign, I suspect, to most of my readers. Transhumance – the moving of livestock between seasonal summer and winter pastures (often up the mountain in summer and down the mountain in winter, for instance – this is “vertical” transhumance) is a common form of limited pastoral mobility.
Transhumant pastoralists do tend to have permanent homes at one end of the route (typically the lower winter pastures for vertical transhumance). These may cluster in villages and are likely to plug into the infrastructure network spreading out from the city. I bring this up mostly because this is how you do get the “rolling hills of empty grassland” terrain so common in depictions of fantasy cities: these areas aren’t empty at all, but merely transhumant pastures not currently in use.
(Side note: This fact about pastoralism is especially worth noting: pastures which are regrowing in the “off” season often might look empty and unused to an outsider, but trespassing on such grounds can bring lethal retaliation. Because these pastures are not unused, but in fact engaged in the vital task of regrowing to support the herd in the following season. This is also the case for true nomads as well, by the by. The reason, of course, is that if those pastures are not grown when the herds are migrated back, the pastoralist’s entire pattern of subsistence is disrupted, endangering his survival. This is a not infrequent cause of friction between pastoralists and agricultural peoples who neighbor each other).
Pastoralism exists on the outer edge of the model for two reasons. First, it is very low density. While the goods it produces (wool, milk, meat) are important, it produces them at a very low density. Agriculture can support massively greater population densities than pastoralism, so high population density tends to push the pastoralists out. There’s a political/military dimension to this as well: the concerns of the farmers tend to dominate political thinking in the city (where, you will recall, the political and military elite are), and the farmer’s greater population density tends to allow them to “push” the pastoralists further from the city and onto marginal lands – either economically (buy the land) or militarily (fight the pastoralists and shove them off).
Second, pastoralism has very low transportation costs. This is because the goods produced by pastoralists can, by and large, walk themselves to market. This is called transporting them “on the hoof”, a phrase my students continue to find funny and are surprised to learn is a real term. Major cattle and animal markets are often still located within city centers, but a shepherd can simply walk his animals to market for sale. That greatly reduces transportation costs, which also tends to push pastoralism out to the edges of the economic network.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.
October 27, 2026
QotD: The outer “zones” surrounding a typical pre-modern city
October 26, 2026
QotD: When Lester Pearson “invented” peacekeeping
… most Canadians neither know nor care much about either foreign or defence policy. They, the societal mainstream, were and are still being fed a load of codswallop in schools and universities about Canada’s military history. It begins with the lie about how Canada “invented” peacekeeping. Anyone who believes that “baby-blue-beret” style United Nations peacekeeping was Lester B. Pearson’s idea is too bloody stupid to walk around loose. In fact, Dr. Ralph Bunche, a distinguished American diplomat got the Nobel Prize (1950) for “inventing” peacekeeping in the late 1940s. The outcome of his negotiations was UNTSO, The United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization, the UN’s first ever peacekeeping mission. There was parallel work going on at the same time, involving Canadians like General Andrew McNaughton and Lester Pearson, to use military officers to supervise the India-Pakistan truce in Kashmir. The two original missions, UNTSO and UNMOGIP (the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan) are still working.
What Lester B. Pearson did was to use his diplomatic and political skills — and both were of a high order — to, almost literally save the Western alliance after Britain and France made a strategically stupid decision to capture the Suez Canal after Egyptian President Nasser nationalized it. That move infuriated US President Eisenhower because it upset his own Middle East strategy, and nearly destroyed the Western alliance. Mike Pearson, under orders from Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, repaired the damage before the USSR and its cronies could take strategic advantage of the rift that had opened in the US-led West. Mike Pearson moved peacekeeping from small observer and truce supervisory missions to major undertakings involving troops in a “trip-wire” role. He and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld were able to stick handle a complex plan through President Eisenhower and around the Soviet bloc in just a few days. Some people said the pair “saved the world”; they certainly saved the Western Alliance.
If you don’t know that then you are a typical Canadian who has been failed by the education system.
Ted Campbell, “Being prepared”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2020-12-17.
October 25, 2026
QotD: Feminism as a luxury belief
However, just as most people aren’t members of Heath’s self-control aristocracy, most women do not combine high intellect with disagreeableness and conscientiousness. Some feminists have realised this — albeit in an ad hoc way — and because feminism as a wider movement was/is wedded to blank-slatism, they believed they could shift the dial on what was then called “female socialisation”. That is, they thought it would be possible to make women as a group more closely resemble the able, disagreeable women who were by the 70s and 80s entering the professions, politics, academia, lobbying outfits, and think-tanks.
Or, of course, men. Men more often combine high trait disagreeableness with high trait conscientiousness (although even among males, the combination is rare). This is despite the fact that there are more agreeable women than agreeable men, and more conscientious women than conscientious men.
No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.
“A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir”, in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, Random House, 1976, p. 397.
de Beauvoir’s suggestion is both authoritarian and hilarious, and represents a panicked response — not unlike the howls from Marxists when it became clear the proletariat was uninterested in revolution — to women unlike her. While it’s true (at least historically) that there were a number of strands to feminism — including a pro-motherhood one — careerist feminism finished up dominating all the others. I’m old enough to remember campaigns for wages for housework. If some old school wonks got hold of this idea, it could form part of a suite of policies directed to increasing the fertility rate.
You don’t see those feminist campaigns any more, though. They’ve been submarined. As I say, I’m old.
Women throughout the developed world — notoriously — tell pollsters they want more children than they have. Usually three is the preferred number, as opposed to two or one. The so-called “gender wage gap” exists because women have children.
Economists often decry this finding as a case of stated versus revealed preferences: what people do is more salient than what they say, something known since Roman times. Hence the Stoic quip acta non verba (“deeds not words”). However, even if fully half the “I want more kids than I have” response served up to pollsters is nothing more than windy stated preferences, that still leaves a lot of unborn but wanted children. Feminism, as Louise Perry is fond of pointing out, has simply dropped the ball on this one.
This insight is, I recognise, a genuine example of ad hominem. It suggests that people plump for ideologies that will give them a leg-up, and do so deliberately. That said, political ideology is, like conscientiousness, heritable. Henderson’s and Heath’s insight reminds us that everything social is emergent from the biological (the basis of Lorenzo Warby’s essays on this Substack). That’s why libertarianism is the way it is, and feminism is, and probably other ideologies too.
Helen Dale, “People Unlike Me”, Not On Your Team, But Always Fair, 2024-05-29.
October 24, 2026
QotD: Was Hitler stupid?
Hitler didn’t have that problem. It’s a mug’s game, trying to tie “measured IQ” to anything, much less to try to retroactively guess any given historical figure’s IQ. But it’s a useful-ish concept, so let’s call that “processor speed”. My buddy Jeremy was right at the apex of the bell curve re: processor speed. Hitler was clearly on the right hand side of that particular curve. Probably a fair ways out there, if the truth be known — no genius, Hitler, but pretty sharp nonetheless.
Unfortunately, that degree of smart makes one especially vulnerable to a certain kind of stupidity — let’s call it “the stupidity of misplaced self-esteem”. Snowflake stupid, maybe, for short. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of being the smartest guy in the room. I mean clearly, unquestionably the sharpest knife in that particular drawer. If you have too many experiences like that, you start thinking you’re the sharpest knife in every drawer; the smartest guy in any possible room. Which means you veer out of your lane on the regular.
It’s endemic in academia, so I’m particularly sensitive to that kind of stupidity. Most profs actually are fairly bright, processor speed-wise. […] If he’d used those brains to, say, open up a mechanic shop or something, he’d fall victim to Big Man Syndrome — every babymomma’s cousin’s sister’s former roommate would start coming around, expecting him to pimp her ride for free. Since academia produces nothing useful, the homies can’t freeride on you).
Throw in the fact that you control the grade book, and it’s really, really easy to convince yourself you’re the smartest guy in any room. With no one to hold you in check, and in the absence of reality testing — which the entire ivory tower ecosystem is designed to avoid — it’s sometimes a real battle not to let your freak flag fly. Indeed you frequently come to wonder why you bother …
… and that’s the kind of stupid Hitler was. Snowflake stupidity is, obviously, situational. There were lots of legit very smart guys in the Nazi party. I doubt Hitler was ever the processor-speed smartest guy in any room, but he was up there, and in the early days he knew it — both ways. Moreover, he had charisma. What the PUAs study like crazy to learn, he just naturally knew how to do. Even the people who were constitutionally immune to his charm could see how and why so many others fell for it.
That’s the most dangerous combo. He was smart enough to be right in there in most rooms … but he could dominate any room with his charisma. Which leads to another special kind of stupidity, what you might call “messianic stupidity”. Things just kind of work out for that kind of guy; have you noticed? I’m sure everyone has known someone like that — probably not to Hitler’s degree, but I’m sure there’s someone in your life that just seems to catch every possible break, all the time, and when something does start going south for him, he can just turn on those baby blues and it all kinda just … goes away.
That kind of person — and I had a buddy like this; I saw it at close range — “knows better”. In the sense that if you gave him a situation on paper, and had him dope it out Heuer-style, he’d come up with the “correct” choice. Nothing wrong with his decision making process in a vacuum, and of course he was smarter than the average bear, too. If you went to Ross with a problem and pitched it as something that might hypothetically happen to some guy, he’d give you solid to excellent advice.
If, however, you went to him with one of your problems, in a situation involving mutual acquaintances, his advice would be terrible. For instance, he was one of those guys who don’t look like anything special, but every girl in the room starts drooling when he walks in. So you ask him “Hey, what should I do about Jane?” and though he’ll try his best to help, it really just doesn’t compute. Because while whatever he advises would work out great for him — of course it would — for you it’ll be a big mess, even if you do your very best Ross impersonation, because you don’t have that thing he has, the one the Germans call je ne sais quoi.
Hitler did. His successes were due, in large part, to doing zany, completely off-the-wall shit, the kind no rational planner would ever even bother planning against. Which can work out spectacularly well — Joan of Arc had the same gift. Lenin did, too. Combine that with the devil’s own luck (at least initially) and you get the mystique of the messianic leader. He does zany stuff, and it just kinda works out … until it doesn’t.
Combine that with ideological stupidity and you’re bound to have tears before bedtime. The Nazis had absolutely no idea what they were going to do with Grossdeutschland. Not the first clue. There’s a wonderful book on this, by Mark Mazower, called Hitler’s Empire. To say “they had no clue” is actually an understatement. His thesis, which I agree with, is that Hitler — being a 19th century guy — thought of the conquered territories in terms of Germany’s lost colonies in Africa. Really. A kind of Bismarckian Weltpolitik, except in France instead of Tanzania.
That’s just dumb. It’s not processor-speed dumb; it’s a lifetime of mental habit dumb, combined with ideological enstupidation. Add to this Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, which is buried in my to-read pile somewhere, but you can find good reviews on it with a little googling. Is that IQ-dumb? No. Is it really fucking stupid? Oh yeah.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-12.
October 23, 2026
QotD: Peter Green on Epicureanism and Cynicism
Green picks neither of these interpretations, instead arguing that Epicureanism was totally a cult. Epicureans joined communes after swearing oaths to obey “the Leader”, whom they “flattered like a god”. “Act always”, they were told, “as though Epicurus is watching”. The Leader “seems to have enjoyed droit de seigneur with several of his followers’ wives and mistresses”. In Epicurus’s famous Garden outside Athens, nobody actually worked, with the commune instead sustained in “endowed leisure” by donations extracted from supporters across the Mediterranean. “Send us, for the care of our holy body, first fruits on behalf of yourself and your children”, Epicurus writes to one of his disciples. In Green’s telling, “Epicureanism was, in the last resort, the brainchild of an antisocial and anti-intellectual dogmatist, with a bee in his bonnet about providential gods, and more than a passing urge … to replace the deity himself”.
Quite the cynical attitude … except that Green is just as harsh on the literal Cynics. Being an ascetic who lives on the street in ostentatious poverty while engaging in public defecation and masturbation doesn’t make you a rebel, it just makes you a loser:
The lifestyle is strictly self-promoting; it has no real ulterior end in view. We adopt the lifestyle to be happy. Happiness is defined through the lifestyle, which becomes an end in itself. The manipulation of these social concepts, the “natural” and the “shameless”, simply gives the Cynic an excuse to thumb his nose at the society he is busy rejecting. … Worst of all, the so-called self-sufficiency is a patent sham. The Cynic, in the last resort, exists as a tolerated parasite on the society that he condemns. … The situation is not unfamiliar today.
Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.
October 21, 2026
QotD: Religious institutions in the late western Roman Empire
The emperors and the Roman state had also taken an active role beginning in the fourth century in defining exactly what the “right” sort of Christianity was. In response to a dispute over the ordination of bishops in North Africa (the “Donatist” schism), Constantine called a council of bishops to convene in Arles in 314 to resolve the matter (it didn’t work and Constantine began persecuting the remaining Donatists). But that council would hardly be the last – Constantine convoked the first ecumenical council (one that in theory reflected the entire Christian Church) in Nicaea in 325 in order to create a single universal Christian doctrine and resolve a number of internal disputes (having grown as a religion in secret and facing persecution, as you might imagine Christianity had a lot of significant local variations). The emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) convened the next major council at Constantinople in 381; after that it was the emperor Theodosius II (r. 402-450) who convened the next at Ephesus in 431 and then the emperor Marcian (r. 450-457) who convened the next at Chalcedon in 451. All of these councils served to define what the “right” Christianity was (“Chalcedonian” Christianity, named after the council), putting some belief systems outside of the doctrine of the Roman Church.
But whereas other Roman institutions didn’t survive the collapse of Roman political authority, the Church as an institution very much did. It was perhaps not obvious that it would – many of the “barbarians” had embraced a non-Chalcedonian Christianity, Arianism, and so might have been hostile to the Church as it existed in Rome. But in practice the need to consolidate the loyalty of their Roman Chalcedonian Christian subjects (on this, note Brown, op. cit. 2nd ed., 105-6, 133-8) and the prestige that the institutional Church held led the rulers of Rome’s successor states to convert to Chalcedonian Christianity; the last of the major Arian Christian kings was Garibald, King of the Lombards in 671.
Indeed, the institutional Church was in some ways a lifeboat in which other elements of the Late Roman world were carried through the storm of the fifth century into the Middle Ages. We’ve already talked about the Church’s role in preserving a fair chunk of the Latin literary tradition. Much of this was done through the spread and then perseverance of monasticism. The first communities of monks emerged in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fourth century and spread through the failing Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Western monastic tradition builds from this with the foundation of Monte Cassino in 529 by Benedict of Nursia and the promulgation of the Rule of Saint Benedict.
Meanwhile, the Church also emerged as one of the central institutions in the cities of the Roman world, with the bishop, the religious head of the Church in a given city, emerging as a key figure in civic governance. While the figure of the bishop rose to importance in both the east and the west, in the east, bishops largely did not move into becoming secular leaders alongside religious figures, in part presumably because the central Roman authority still existed to handle those functions. But in the west, the decline of both civic and centralized government left bishops in the breach. This in turn often preserved older Roman political geography as Liebeschuetz notes, with the civitas surviving as an administrative unit in the form of the diocese of a bishop, precisely because those bishoprics were originally established along Roman administrative lines and remained so even after Roman administration vanished. Bishops ended up taking up some of the tasks that in the past would have fallen to a Roman governor and since they had their seats in the embattled Roman cities, many of those cities survived the difficult fifth and sixth centuries precisely because they were the seat of a bishop.
And in order to run the institution of the Church, its bishoprics and their diocese, it needed both educated clergy who could read the Bible but also administrators who had learned the law – by which they meant Roman law. Secular learning had largely collapsed with the Roman Empire in the west – it had existed to provide training for wealthy men to become secular administrators for the central imperial government and so when the demand for that kind of training vanished, so too did the schools that trained the administrators and jurists. And so the Church had to train them itself, setting up episcopal and monastic schools which trained theology, but also law and administration (and of course provided the context for that survival of Latin literature as a teaching tool). As levels of education and literacy among the secular elite declined, it made sense for kings to employ bishops and other members of the clergy as members of their own administration, leading to this distinctly Roman religious institution having a key place within the secular “barbarian” kingdoms that followed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.
October 20, 2026
QotD: What is “hate speech”?
The answer is yes. There is nothing else for them to suppress. Repressive positions are difficult to defend for those who wish to keep their liberal credentials intact. They usually do so by quoting bits of pernicious nonsense from the kind of speech they would ban to illustrate how worthless and abhorrent it is. But pointing to the abhorrent nature of despised speech is insufficient because no speech is legislated against unless it’s abhorrent to some. Nobody outlaws Mary Poppins, not even the Human Rights Commissions (though this could be famous last words).
If suppressing opinion breaches axioms of liberalism, can it be justified by utility? Canadian defenders of hate-speech laws rarely offer any examples, other than the dubious benefit of distinguishing ourselves from Americans (one Human Rights-type called free speech an American concept in a recent court case) but one suggestion is that such laws would have stopped a Hitler. The problem is, the Weimar Republic had such laws. It used them freely against the Nazis. Far from stopping Hitler, they only made his day when he became Chancellor. They enabled Hitler to confront Social Democratic Party chairman Otto Wels, who stood up in the Reichstag to protest Nazi suspension of civil liberties, with a quotation from the poet Friedrich Schiller: “‘Late you come, but still you come'”, Hitler pointed at the hapless deputy. “You should have recognized the value of criticism during the years we were in opposition [when] our press was forbidden, our meetings were forbidden, and we were forbidden to speak for years on end.”
The Nazis would have been just as repressive without this excuse, but being able to offer it made Hitler’s task easier. Like Canadian supporters of hate-speech legislation, supporters of the Weimar Republic thought that their groups and causes would occupy all seats of authority and set all social and legal agendas forever. Shades of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association or the Canadian Jewish Congress! They couldn’t envisage the guns of their own laws being turned around to point at them one day. Eradicating hateful ideas through free discourse is liberal; trying to eradicate them through legislation is illiberal. “There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother’s keeper”, wrote Eric Hoffer, “will end up by being his jail keeper”.
Another thing: “Banned in Boston” sells tickets. As Victor Hugo put it: “The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people”. I’d think twice before banning neo-Nazis for this reason alone.
George Jonas, “Regulating speech that is not against any law”, CanWest Publications, 2008-04-02.
October 19, 2026
QotD: The “social norms” that enable society to exist
What makes these indignities so infuriating isn’t just that a few people game the system. It’s that their selfish gambits work only because the rest of us follow the rules. If every driver mobbed the freeway exit from the passing lanes, traffic would come to a halt. The student who fraudulently obtains extra test time gets a leg up only if most other students stick to the original time limit. And if every pet were designated an emotional-support animal, airplanes and restaurants would become full-time menageries. (Some airlines have begun tightening rules on support animals for just this reason.)
Thousands of norms, rules, and traditions make civilized life possible. Some, like paying taxes or not littering, are enshrined in law. Others are informal. Most of us take pride in adhering to basic standards of etiquette and fairness, to say nothing of following the law. And we have a deep emotional investment in having the people around us follow these norms as well. There’s a reason that we call selfish, disruptive, or criminal behavior “antisocial”. We know that if everyone stopped paying their taxes, or started running red lights and shoplifting, our society would be on its way to collapse.
James B. Meigs, “The Chump Effect”, City Journal, 2020-11-15.
October 18, 2026
QotD: The historian’s only real skill
And I’m not sure that’s a skill that can be taught. Maybe a little bit, probably “modeled” more than “taught”. It starts with healthy skepticism. Back when Facebook was first starting out, I’d bring in my “ridiculousness of the day” to class. You know how they did back then (and no doubt still do) — someone would find some fascinating “historical” fact and make a meme out of it. We’d go over it in class. Look, kids, not only is this not true, there’s no way it could possibly ever have been true. Let’s think it over […]
In other words, every single thing about that article is a lie … but what is it designed to accomplish, because I promise you, students, it’s not there by accident. Lots of people got paid a lot of money to put that together and publish it. Who, and to what end?
History class is about the only place you’re allowed to do that anymore. I always made a big deal out of “interrogating sources” for that reason. Can we trust anything reported about the past? How much weight do we have to put on the individual reporter? How do we judge social positions, weigh motives? What, if anything, are facts, and what relies on our own judgement? How can we make our judgement better?
Annnnnd that’s why there’s no more History class. It has been reduced to multiple choice tests, if for no other reason than the traditional essay gives the professor too many opportunities to point out this kind of error. What evidence do you have for that assertion? You seem to be making this or that assumption; why? Here’s an error of logic — your conclusion in paragraph 3 doesn’t follow from the evidence presented in paragraph 1. You’re either missing something, or you drew the wrong conclusion. Revise and resubmit for partial credit …
Obviously that kind of thing can’t be allowed to continue, comrades.
Severian, “History and Human Survival”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-27.
October 17, 2026
QotD: The original purpose of the European project
First, of course, was the fact that Europe was in no condition to wage another war. The continent was in ruins, the Germans were disarmed, the Americans would not have stood for it, and in any case the Germans had genuinely changed. There was no revanchisme to speak of in Germany, as there had been after the first war. Moreover, to the east was the looming presence of what in the 19th century was called the Russian steamroller, only infinitely worse than that of the time of Alexander I and Nicholas I, with a barbaric ideology that at the time attracted the allegiance of a considerable proportion of the population, especially of that part of it — the intelligentsia — that ought to have known better. Only American power prevented the steamroller from rolling west, and thereby kept the peace in Europe.
Even if the maintenance of peace was one of the original aims of the European project, this is a very weaselly way of putting it. Even without the European Union, Estonia would not attack Portugal, nor would Belgium attack Slovakia. What is meant by keeping the peace is ensuring that Germany does not again attack France (no one thinks that France would attack Germany): in other words, and to put it crudely, without the European Union people thought — even Germans themselves — that Germany would be up to its old tricks again. I do not believe this.
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
October 16, 2026
QotD: Niccolao Manucci as a “player character” in history
How do I know that? Well let’s return to the teenage Venetian, suddenly orphaned of his foster father: “I was left alone, sad and anxious, having nothing to console me, nor anywhere to turn in order to recover my things”. Then things go from bad to worse: two other Europeans show up and steal the rest of Manucci’s stuff and coerce him into traveling with them to Delhi. But then somehow the young man scores an interview with the king’s vizier and, using the bits of Persian he picked up along the journey, convinces him to arrest the men who’d tried to abduct him. He parlays the vizier’s friendship into a royal audience, and thence into an offer of employment from the crown prince. In a short while, Manucci is a courtier hanging around the palace in fine clothes paid for by the state, getting tutored in Indian languages and Mughal history and correct deportment. He tells us that the only difficulty in his life was the need to constantly scheme in order to avoid being forcibly converted to Islam, and then interrupts his own narration to give us a few hundred pages of ancient Mughal history.
Are you rolling your eyes yet? Every bit of this story so far, starting from the moment he snuck onto that ship, is literally unbelievable. Irvine certainly seemed to feel that way, if his footnotes and interjections are anything to go by. He evidently flung himself into a centuries-later posthumous cross-examination, looking for any detail in Manucci’s narrative that’s out of place. He doesn’t find any. Worse, he finds numerous corroborating accounts in other contemporaneous sources. But if this story actually happened, then we are left with a nasty trichotomy. One of three things must be true: (1) Manucci is the luckiest sonofabitch alive. (2) Manucci has superhuman powers of persuasion. (3) Manucci is leaving out something important. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a little bit of all three, because Manucci is a player character.
They walk among us. Lately the preferred jargon term has been “agency”. Before that people called them “live players”. In the old days they were referred to as “great men”, but that one’s my least favorite of the descriptors because it implies that they have to be like Cyrus the Great or Napoleon, when in reality they’re often much harder to spot. That’s because, as Samo Burja notes, player characters often deliberately cloak themselves in order to avoid detection by other player characters. These ones you may only notice by their aftereffects, like the lingering gravitational distortion after a singularity has whizzed by, reality warping as they knife through to their destination and then reconstituting itself behind them.
Humanity’s great sages have long known that every so often the planets are in a particular configuration, and a Child of Destiny is born. The real question is why. The fun-ruiners will note that in a world of billions of people, some of them are just going to be 6σ lucky. It is difficult for us even to conceive what it means to be 6σ lucky, and yet, like some bizarre object conjured by a non-constructive mathematical proof, we know such people are out there, somewhere in the wave function. But let’s not be fun-ruiners for a moment and consider the other possibilities. Maybe these individuals are chosen by God, or the gods. Or maybe they are the ones paying for the simulation, and therefore have access to the root login. Whatever their source, they exist. Often they spend part of their lives unaware of their true nature. And then … they awaken.
There was a little while when “NPC” was getting thrown around as a term of abuse, but as I have explained at some length,1 there’s nothing wrong with being an NPC. We come by it honestly. At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot stove. NPCs are formed from scar tissue, a fibrous mass of tough lessons about the nature of the world. But, as we have just deduced, there must exist people who, whether by divine ordinance or fluke of probability, had a very different experience on that fateful day. They pushed against the universe, and the universe gave in and gave them everything they wanted. And what lesson does that impart? Something like: “Rules are for the sheep, but you can hack the matrix and get what you want”. Now they are awakened. And the crazy thing is that if you keep getting lucky, not 6σ lucky, but just on-a-roll lucky, the awakened state can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some parts of the world really can be hacked with a little luck and a lot of determination. So there’s a feedback loop that can rapidly amplify mere one-in-a-billion luck into miraculous, reality-altering luck. That’s my attempt at a purely naturalistic explanation of player characters. Or maybe they’re just chosen by God.
Manucci is a slippery one. I only caught him because I read the first part of this book twice: once when I was reading it through casually, and then again as I sat down to write this review and tried to figure out how the hell to convey all this. Again, as with a Gene Wolfe novel, to understand the beginning you must have read the ending. In all the thousands of pages of narration, the one subject Manucci barely touches on is himself. That’s because Manucci is a player character practicing very high-level obfuscation techniques. This sort of misdirection is also the hallmark of a con-man, and what do you know: there is one brief, brief moment when Manucci gets a little too sure of himself and lets slip that he actually was functioning as a super-effective con-man back there in 17th century India. He wove his web of shadows around the Mughal aristocracy, and then he nearly got it around us the readers as well.
So we finally have Manucci pinned down: he is the subtype of player character known as a “guile hero“. You know them from stories: Odysseus, or Locke Lamora, or almost every character played by Kevin Spacey. Manucci is like them, his character class is either rogue or bard.2 At what age was he awakened? Was he already aware of his powers when he crept down that Venetian dock? And what really happened between him and Bellomont? Did he seduce the English gentleman? Or did he suss out his mission and blackmail him with a threat to make it public? Or did he just turn the full force of his personality on the hopeless cavalier and get 6σ lucky on his CHA roll? We shall never know. But if you are asking questions like these, then you now have the correct interpretive lens for what follows.3
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-09-08.
- Twice!
- This is a totally OP and broken build, since as a Venetian he already gets a racial bonus to DEX and CHA.
- And you’re one step ahead of Irvine, who as far as I can tell never figured it out.
October 15, 2026
QotD: The “political object” in war
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
October 14, 2026
QotD: The rise of the Reform Party of Canada
This small government conservatism wasn’t a homegrown ideology, it was adopted and imported from elsewhere. America especially. The dominant paradigm in postwar American conservatism became the fusionism that was associated with publications like National Review, and eventually became a dominant political force in Ronald Reagan. The success of this fusionism also made it appealing, and ready-made, to be imported to Canada and fused with this rejection of big government Liberal nationalism. In the process, Canadian conservatism begins to sound more American.
I’m not using this pejoratively and I don’t see this so much as a form of cultural imperialism. The adoption of this kind of conservatism made sense in response to the new Liberal nationalism. But it does present some serious problems for Canadian conservatism. This anti-nationalism and small government conservatism will appeal to some, especially in the West, but it’s not something that a national movement could be forged around.
This is what I mean when I say lots of conservatives don’t like Canada all that much. In adopting small government American conservatism, this kind of conservatism sounds like an American critique of Canada. Canadian healthcare looks “socialist” to American conservatives, and small government ideologues in America look at Canada and see big government “Soviet Canuckistan.” This is what Canadian conservatives adopting this kind of ideology sometimes sound like, and you can see why this has limited electoral appeal.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
October 13, 2026
QotD: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wokester avant la lettre
1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.
2. The “Noble Savage” is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.
3. The “General Will” is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were “properly enlightened”. Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.
4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every “liberation” movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.
5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.
6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda [hypocrisy] (remember the obłuda of communism👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.
7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.
Krzysztof Szczawinski, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-10. (Auto-translated from the original Polish by X)
October 12, 2026
QotD: Blame the “Silent generation” for The Sixties™, not the Boomers
Further, what could they really do? The voting age was 21 until 1971, and as hard as this is to hear, voting was just as pointless back then as it is now. St. Kennedy only won through massive voter fraud, and that was 1960. As John Derbyshire used to say, if the American People had been consulted on anything of importance since then, the USA would still be a White Christian nation … and yet, here we are.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee put on a better show back in the days, but the Uniparty was still the Uniparty. America’s ruling caste caught religion back in the 1920s, and on the long view, you could make a pretty robust argument that Mustache Guy and the Anime Club actually did us a huge fucking favor — left to his own devices, President-for-Life Roosevelt would’ve ushered in the USSA by the late 1930s, with the enthusiastic support of all the Beautiful People on both sides of the Uniparty.
… hats off to you [Isoroku Yamamoto] — you and your dipshit friends bought us a few decades. Decades we squandered, of course, but that’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, unless you think the boys on the Higgins boats should’ve shot their officers, turned the ships around, and conducted a massive air, land, and sea invasion of every faculty lounge and radio station in America … and even if you do think that, what are you going to do about it?
As for Gen X, we were no better. I can’t blame the Boomers for running with it, any more than I can blame myself for running with our thing. I spent most of college, for instance, getting drunk and chasing tail. Chasing tail is bad, full stop — I should’ve been saving it for marriage, with all that implies — and while getting drunk isn’t bad every now and again, I didn’t do it every now and again. I lived a life as dissolute as any Boomer’s, and while I was equally powerless to change anything in the broader culture, I could’ve been a much better person … but I wasn’t.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-23.
