Contemplating the riots/demonstrations of the weekend (statues defaced and pulled down, police officers assaulted, social distancing ignored, etc) I ask myself about the extraordinary power of events a thousand-plus miles away in the US to excite supposedly “spontaneous” reactions here in the UK. And yet if, say, French police get all heavy with yellow-jacket protesters, I don’t recall marches of demonstrators in front of the French embassy. Or nor do I see this if or when there are problems in Germany, Italy or Spain (racism is a thing in these countries, after all).
Ironically – and this must drive those of a pro-EU frame of mind nuts – it is still North America, with its rawer culture and politics, its legal similarities to the UK (for good and for ill) that resonates, even in the minds (for want of a better noun) of the sort of folk going on BLM demos. What goes on in France, Germany or Italy tends not to have the same grip on the mind. The Atlantic is wide and the Channel is narrow, but in every other sense, it is the other way around. To that extent, then, the Anglosphere lives, even in the hearts and minds of the far Left.
Johnathan Pearce, “The Anglosphere and our present discontents”, Samizdata, 2020-06-08.
December 5, 2025
QotD: The Anglosphere
December 4, 2025
QotD: Champagne
Winston Churchill
December 2, 2025
QotD: Brutalism “is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful”
I have long suspected, but cannot prove with an indisputable argument, that this architecture has played its part in the brutalization of daily life and social behavior in the country. Certainly, it has dehumanized the appearance of many towns and cities; its harsh surfaces and willfully austere and jagged designs leave the mere human being feeling that he is about as welcome as an ant on a kitchen counter — which, indeed, he now much resembles.
This architecture is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful, not despite the fact that so many people detest it, but because so many people detest it. They are like the doctors of old, who, if they could not cure their patients, could at least make them take the most repellent and noxious medicine, on the grounds that a little bit of what revolts you does you good.
The projected museum is in a former school in the north of London, designed in 1968. Here is fairly typical commentary on the building:
Despite decades of wear and some unfortunate interventions, the raw concrete structure has remained a cherished example of socially driven modernist design.
It is to be noticed that the cherishing done here is independent of anyone who cherishes; as for “socially driven modernist design”, we might read “totalitarian”. Indeed, the building exudes totalitarianism, as raw reinforced concrete exudes ghastly stains after a short time.
Le Corbusier, one of the founders of this kind of architecture, was indeed a fascist in the most literal sense, though he had no real objection to communist totalitarianism, either. What he most hated was what he called the street, that is to say the place where people behave spontaneously and without direction from above, and where they are not corralled into functions imposed on them by all-wise socially driven architects. It was for this reason that he and his acolytes preferred to build urban wildernesses of the kind that have now been built the world over, but especially in Britain.
The architects who have been given the task of renewing the school building where the museum dedicated to architectural brutalism is to be housed have “noted its distinct geometry, as well as its symbolic presence reflecting the ideals of the school’s broader 1960s Brutalist architecture conceived in an era of social progress”.
Apologists for such architecture write a pure Soviet langue de bois — or perhaps I should say langue de béton, since concrete rather than wood is their favorite material:
Consultation with the school, families and local stakeholders has underpinned the project from the outset, ensuring that the building’s next chapter remains tied to its founding ethos centered on architecture as a tool for collective learning and expression.
Does anyone, after the death of the late, not much lamented, Leonid Brezhnev, have thoughts that correspond to, or are couched in, words such as these? By their language shall ye know them.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architects of Our Own Destruction”, New English Review, 2025-08-08.
December 1, 2025
QotD: Young Cyrus, before he became “the Great”
And then … the most important single moment in Cyrus’s education, the moment when it becomes clear that he has actually set his sights appropriately high. He gets bored of the hunts. Cyrus deduces, correctly, that the hunts he is sent on, and all the other little missions, are contrived. Each is a problem designed to impart a lesson, a little puzzle box constructed by a demiurge with a solution in mind. In this respect, they’re like the problems in your math textbook. And like the problems in your math textbook, getting good at them is very dangerous, because it can mislead and delude you into thinking that you’ve gotten good at math, when actually you’ve gotten good at the sorts of problems that people put in textbooks.
When you’re taught from textbooks, you quickly learn a set of false lessons that are very useful for completing homework assignments but very bad in the real world. For example: all problems in textbooks are solvable, all problems in textbooks are worth solving (if you care about your grade), all problems in textbooks are solvable by yourself, and all of the problems are solvable using the techniques in the chapter you just read. But in the real world, the most important skills are not solving a quadratic by completing the square or whatever, the most important skills are: recognizing whether it’s possible to solve a given problem, recognizing whether solving it is worthwhile, figuring out who can help you with the task, and figuring out which tools can be brought to bear on it. The all-important meta-skills are not only left undeveloped by textbook problems, they’re actively sabotaged and undermined. This is why so many people who got straight As in school never amount to anything.
The section covering his childhood and education concludes with a dialogue between Cyrus and his father Astyages as the two ride together towards the border of Persia. Astyages recapitulates and summarizes all of the lessons that Cyrus has been taught, and adds one extra super-secret leadership tip. Cyrus wants to know how to attract followers and keep their loyalty, and his father gives him a very good answer which is: just be great. Be the best at what you do. Be phenomenally effective at everything. People aren’t stupid, they want to follow a winner, so be the kind of guy who’s going to win over and over again, and if you aren’t that guy, then maybe choose a different career.
Cyrus asks and so Astyages clarifies: no, he doesn’t mean be great at making speeches, or at crafting an image, or at appearing to be very good at things. He doesn’t mean attending “leadership seminars”, or getting an MBA, or joining a networking organization for “young leaders”. He means getting extremely good at the actual, workaday, object-level tasks of your trade: “There is no shorter road, son … to seeming to be prudent about such things … than becoming prudent about them”. In Cyrus’s case, this means tactics, logistics, personnel selection, drill, all the unglamorous parts of running an ancient army. People aren’t stupid. If they see that he is great at these things, they will flock to his banner. And then, one more ingredient, the final step: make it clear that you care about their welfare. “The road to it is the same as that one should take if he desires to be loved by his friends, for I think one must be evident doing good for them.”
There you have it. Two simple #lifehacks to winning undying loyalty: be the best in the world at what you do, and actually give a damn about the people under you. Our rulers could learn a thing or two from this book. So ends the education.1 The rest of this book, and the bulk of it, is Cyrus putting these lessons into practice by very rapidly conquering all of the Ancient Near East. It’s telegraphed well in advance that the final boss of this conquest will be the mighty Neo-Babylonian empire founded by Nebuchadnezzar,2 but before he takes them on Cyrus first has to grind levels by putting down an incipient rebellion by his grandfather’s Armenian vassals,3 then whipping the neighboring Chaldeans into line, then peeling away the allegiance of various Assyrian nobles, then defeating the Babylonians’ Greek allies and Egyptian mercenaries, before finally taking on the Great King in his Great City.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-08.
- There’s actually one other noteworthy bit of advice that Astyages gives:
“Above all else, remember for me never to delay providing provisions until need compels you; but when you are especially well off, then contrive before you are at a loss, for you will get more from whomever you ask if you do not seem to be in difficulty … be assured that you will be able to speak more persuasive words at just the moment when you are especially able to show that you are competent to do both good and harm.”
This is decent enough advice, but what makes it especially fun is that Astyages also applies it to the gods! Maybe it’s his own pagan spin on “God helps those who help themselves”, but Cyrus takes this advice and takes it a step further. He learns to interpret auguries himself so that he will never be at the mercy of priests. Then when he needs an omen, he performs the sacrifices, decides which of the entrails, the weather, the stars, and so on are pointing his way, loudly points them out, and ignores the rest.
Henrich notes in The Secret of our Success that divination can be an effective randomization strategy in certain sorts of game theoretic contests. But the true superpower is deciding on a case-by-case basis whether you’re going to act randomly, or just make everybody think you’re acting randomly.
- Yes, that Nebuchadnezzar.
- Somewhere in the middle of In Xanadu, Dalrymple recounts an old Arab proverb that goes: “Trust a snake before a Jew, and a Jew before a Greek. But never trust an Armenian.” The tricksy Armenian ruler more than lives up to this reputation. But when Cyrus outwits and captures him, his son shows up to beg for his life, and what follows is one of the more philosophically charged exchanges in the entire book. They go multiple rounds, but by the end of it the Armenian crown prince has put Cyrus in a logical box as deftly as Socrates ever did to one of his interlocutors, and Cyrus lets the king off with a warning. The prince goes on to combat anti-Armenian stereotypes by serving Cyrus faithfully to the end of his days.
November 30, 2025
QotD: US illegal immigration, or, creating a new helot class
I see many comments to the effect that restricting illegal immigration will cause all sorts of shortages in agriculture and construction. I call bullshit on this for two simple reasons. Before the Great Replacement became enshrined into law in 1965 we had few immigrants of any sort and somehow we managed to pick our own cotton and build houses. We did it the old fashioned way – white and black Americans worked. High school kids would work the fields at harvest time. Black people didn’t have welfare so they did unskilled and even skilled work – bricklayers, lathe-and-plaster work, etc. Is there any reason we can’t do this today?
None whatsoever. The Democrats (which includes the Republicans) don’t know the word “helot“, of course, but that’s what all this boils down to: They’re importing a helot class. It’s probably futile, attempting to pinpoint the exact moment in time when America transformed into AINO, but my best guess is “The moment the phrase ‘jobs Americans won’t do’ was uttered for the first time”. Who the fuck are you, to declare that work, any work, is beneath you?
That’s probably the main reason America became a word-bestriding colossus: Our bone-deep belief in the fundamental dignity of labor. Well within my lifetime, “He’s a hard worker” was considered high praise, at least among people who were still Americans (as opposed to AINO-ites). He might not have anything else going for him, but he pulls his weight, and that’s enough.
What’s more, the LEFT understood this, well within my lifetime. I never tire of pointing out that you could read well-written, well-supported, logically airtight articles against illegal immigration in the pages of The Nation and Mother Jones, right up to the very end of the 20th century. The poor negroes, for instance, can’t “break the cycle of poverty” — a phrase never heard anymore — because all the jobs once available to them have been taken from them by illegals.
But somehow, the Left convinced themselves that the only “jobs” worth having involve clicking a mouse; everything else is an insult to their special wonderfulness. And since the Left control everything, that became one of the defining assumptions of AINO culture — if you can’t do it with a laptop, it’s for peons. Compared to “the laptop class”, the Ancien Regime were kind, tolerant social reformers.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-01-31.
Update, 1 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
November 29, 2025
QotD: Are there no prisons? Are there no asylums?
The US is often pilloried for having a high level of imprisonment per capita relative to other countries. The US is also quite unusual in having shut down most of its insane asylums many decades ago.
My perspective on these facts changed a great deal when I learned that if you aggregate rates of imprisonment with rates of commitment to mental institutions, the US stops looking like an outlier.
The low-level mentally ill didn’t go away when we closed the asylums. Nor did they magically become more able to function in society when we pushed them out the doors. Instead, they now land in our prisons.
Another implication of all this is that it’s not “structural racism” or any other specific evil that gives the US high imprisonment rates. It’s an inevitable consequence of the social decision to make it very difficult to involuntarily commit people to asylums.
I’m not going to argue today about whether that decision should be reversed. I have an opinion about that, but this post is about facts and consequences, not value claims or what “should” be.
Let’s return to the homeless. It is now common knowledge that homeless people are almost never simply poor or down on their luck. Almost all have serious issues with mental illness or drug addiction, or both. Many refuse to go to shelters because they don’t want to — or are not capable of — complying with a homeless shelter’s behavioral restrictions.
While I don’t have firsthand knowledge or controlled studies to back me up, it seems obvious that the shelters are acting as a filter — the least damaged and most functional homeless go to them, leaving the crazies to inhabit the streets.
Thus, throwing homeless people who won’t go to shelters in prison is an exact functional equivalent of involuntary commitment to a mental asylum.
My question for people who object to imprisoning the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless is: what do you propose we do instead? Are we prepared to reopen the asylums and lower the bar for involuntary commitment?
I don’t think there’s a third alternative anymore. Donald Trump, whatever his other failings might be, has an acute sense of the zeitgeist; popular tolerance for having the streets of our cities inhabited by crazy people is collapsing. It turns out we can only tolerate so many news stories about naked screaming nut-jobs on the subway.
I’m not going to propose an answer to the question I just raised, because I’m conflicted about it myself. My goal is to start people thinking about the right question, which is a very large one.
What is the humane way to treat people who are too damaged or broken to be functional members of society, and who inflict large costs on others if they’re not separated from society?
If it’s not prisons or asylums, what are we going to do? And given how ineffective psychiatric treatment is at anything beyond management of symptoms, is “prison” vs. “asylum” even a meaningful distinction?
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-13.
November 28, 2025
QotD: Life is not a race to some arbitrary “finish line”
I wrote:
The hostility to inheritance also comes from a mistaken sense of fairness. As Robert Nozick argued in Anarchy, State and Utopia (I quote from memory), people wrongly think life resembles an athletics race, where the racers compete to hit the finishing line. As a result, those “lucky” athletes endowed by nature/god whatever with stronger muscles etc must be handicapped by having weights in their shoes, for example. Just as a child of rich parents must be deliberately held back to give poor kids a more “fair” chance of winning. But as Nozick said, life isn’t like that. It is about people exchanging goods, services and ideas with one another. There’s no fixed end-point to which we are all racing.
Also, the idea that there is some “prize” that humans compete for implies that someone or some entity has created that “prize” in the first place. But that’s smuggling in a sort of communitarian assumption into the actions of individuals. In an open society, the prizes on offer are varied and multiply constantly.
I should add that the second section of Nozick’s renowned book dissects and ultimately rejects forced redistribution for egalitarian or other forms of “patterned” notions of justice, and he robustly defends what he calls an “entitlement” concept of justice.
One of the approaches that the late Prof. Nozick used was the thought experiment, such as the example referenced above about a fictitious athletics race in which the entrants are hampered/favoured to make the race more “even”, and then assuming that society in general should be like this. A race, held by people who know the rules and seek to abide by them, is not like an open society. “Open” is the key word here: there is no single end to which persons are heading, such as winning the race.
And yet a lot of the metaphors one comes across around discussions around equality, including equality of opportunity as well as outcome, seem to borrow, perhaps unwittingly, from this “race competition” worldview. To give another example, I remember reading some months ago about a university professor (Warwick) who suggested that when parents read stories to their children, this is a form of privilege. This also plays to the idea that life has a fixed end-measure of success, so that anyone giving a value to someone else is giving the latter an unfair “head start” on someone else. It would require a State to exercise totalitarian control of our actions from the moment we wake up to go to sleep lest our actions unfairly advantage/hamper someone in the “race” they are considered, by this worldview, to be on. (It also, by the way, shows that today’s Higher Ed. is full of certifiable fools and worse.)
Johnathan Pearce, “The assault on inheritance and the assumptions that drive it”, Samizdata, 2025-08-21.
November 27, 2025
QotD: Honor, homage, and fealty in Game of Thrones
To refer to a distinction introduced in Wayne Lee’s talk [here] – Tywin cannot rely on force (do it because I will kill you if you don’t), he has to use power (do it because you think you ought). Because the apparatus of the state here is very limited, that power is largely generated through personal relationships – you ought to fight for your liege because you have a personal relationship with him. You see him fairly often, you swore loyalty to him (in person!!), he (or his ancestors) have helped resolve your problems in the past and most importantly, because he has kept faith with you in the past.
Which is a way of saying that this system runs on trust and reputation, and that runs both ways. Even as Tywin watches his vassals for signs of disloyalty, his vassals are watching him. Is he true to his word? Can I trust him? Because if the answer is no – I best start hedging my bets. And that bet-hedging is going to come in ways Tywin does not want – I might refuse to come out and fight, or redirect my efforts to fortifying my own holdings, or even switch over to another liege. And in the very early seasons, key characters – most notably Tywin and Tyrion – know this and act accordingly. Tywin talks a good game about lions and sheep, but when it comes down to it, he knows his reputation matters – what the sheep say about the lion matters a great deal, it turns out. Robb Stark’s failure to handle the Karstarks, Tullys and Freys is his eventual undoing. Tyrion berates Cersei on returning to King’s Landing for her actions which might call the Lannister reputation into question (“that bit of theatre will haunt our family for a generation”.)
What is unusual here is how frequently key characters deviate from the norms these societies need to function – Westerosi nobles are stunningly treacherous for people who rely on systems based in trust for survival. In a system which runs on trust and reputation, elites tend to value trust and reputation. They produce literature extolling it (as, indeed, do most “mirrors for princes” – guidebooks on how to be a good ruler – from the Middle Ages do; see, for instance, Book 3 of Dhouda’s Liber Manualis (9th cent.), which goes on and on about trustworthiness) and refine its practice. The sort of eye-popping treachery so common in Game of Thrones was far rarer in the actual historical Middle Ages for exactly the reason Game of Thrones would lead you to believe: it is almost always self-defeating.
The problem here comes in the later seasons and how they re-contextualize all of this concern. That problem has a name, and it is Cersei. Cersei breaks all of these rules. Even early on, she has her soldiers (who recall – are not paid mercenaries, but likely vassals of her house who can very much take their skills elsewhere if they don’t like their current employer) demonstrate her own capricious untrustworthiness on Lord Baelish (she has also, I will note, mistaken violence for power). She humiliates Barriston Selmy in court, a spectacle her own future vassals might have remembered. She incinerated her own family – by blood and marriage – along with her erstwhile allies. Cersei is endlessly treacherous, often foolishly and obviously so, and yet …
And yet it doesn’t matter. The Lannister bannermen in the penultimate episode mount the walls to fight a doomed battle for her anyway. Not only is that behavior inexplicable, it hardly seems possible. Who, after all, is raising and leading these men? Who is coordinating supplies and grain shipments to the capital? Remember, the reason for this distributed system of political leadership is that the central state does not have the administrative apparatus to raise armies or feed cities on its own – it has to outsource that to vassals. Vassals that Cersei has murdered or alienated, almost to a man. Cersei is defeated because dragons are unstoppable monsters, but she should have been defeated because she would have simply been incapable of raising an army at all.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.
November 26, 2025
QotD: Racism and social justice
This very American problem is poisoning the world through the dominance of US popular culture and the influence of the wealthy US universities. On this side of the Pond we have our own problems. We really don’t need a whole raft of America’s too. But white privilege is such a wonderful tool for creating and exploiting division that our leftists can’t leave it be. It’s a social A-bomb just lying there waiting to be detonated.
The Left is an immoral political movement. It seeks to divide. It seeks to promote hatred between classes and other groupings in society in order to create problems that can only be “solved” by employing legions of leftists with no otherwise marketable skills to direct us to the “correct” path. The extent to which it’s already achieved its real, unstated aim of creating a well-paid cadre of apparatchiks is visible in the present pandemic. The only jobs that are safe are of those employed by the state and rewarded by reference to almost anything other than economic contribution. Those thus paid for are “essential workers.” Those who pay for them are not. Anyone who points this scam out is monstered by a leisured army of social “scientists” and their graduates in the media — also paid for by us “inessential” saps.
Judge them by the outcomes of their policies and governance and the theorists and politicians of the Left are clear failures. The squalor in which poor black Americans live is almost invariably presided over by them just as a Labour council in Britain is a promise of continued poverty for all but its apparatchiks. If the poor are your voters, the more poverty the better. If the oppressed are your voters, the more (real or imagined) oppression the merrier.
The perfect symbol of Leftist politicians in this respect is the character of Senator Clay Davis in The Wire — perhaps the greatest TV show ever made and (among many other marvellous things) a searing indictment of American racial politics. It’s a show that couldn’t be made today because it reeks of white privilege. By the way, the fact that this concept would have prevented The Wire being made is by itself a small proof that it’s a wicked one.
Tom Paine, “Checking my privilege”, The Last Ditch, 2020-06-02.
November 25, 2025
QotD: British Socialism in the 1930s
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
November 24, 2025
QotD: Talking like a Marxist, living like a Maharaja
My google-fu isn’t strong enough to come up with this particular piece of Pop Culture Kayfabe (didn’t they once open for Exploding Vagina Candle?), but I saw some comedian, my old tired brain says Dave Chappelle though it probably wasn’t, talking about how hard it must’ve been to be Prince’s personal assistant. So much of that job would boil down to “trying to convince your boss that the impossible is, in fact, impossible”.
Along the lines of “No, Prince, I can’t arrange for you to ride a giraffe around Central Park. For one thing, it’s 3am, all the zoos are closed …”
It was funny at the time, but considerably less so now, because Our Betters are really like that now. And they’re ALL like that. I’m pretty sure I told y’all about the time I fixed the toilet at a faculty party. It was in this beautiful “restored” Victorian house (“restored” meaning “it has all the most ostentatiously expensive Victorian ephemera, with all the most ultra-modern conveniences”). The toilet wouldn’t stop running if you flushed it without following this elaborate handle-jiggling procedure that they’d discovered over weeks of trial and error, then carefully wrote down and taped to the top of the tank. Due to scheduling conflicts they weren’t able to get the “restoration” specialist out there to look at it for another month or so …
I’m nobody’s idea of a plumber, but even I can recognize it when the little chain loops around the plug and keeps the float from rising all the way. So I finished my business, took the lid off the tank, unwrapped the chain, and told my hosts to go ahead, it’s “fixed” now. Carefully explaining what I did and why. You don’t even need a regular plumber, let alone some period-specialist interior decorator, I told them. Just … unloop the chain. Takes five seconds. Costs nothing.
They, and everyone else at the party, were aghast. Not at my mastery of the arcane details of plumbing, but that I’d fixed something. You know, with my hands. With that one little act — something so simple, it’d need to be ten times more complicated to even qualify as “basic plumbing” — I’d excommunicated myself from The Anointed. It’s just not done, old sock — we’re afraid you’re no longer our sort. Only Dirt People “fix” things.
That’s their mental world. Z Man used to talk about having worked for a Congressman as a kid, and having to mow the guy’s lawn. For whatever reason the lawn service didn’t make it on the day of some soiree, and none of the guy’s staffers — the very best and brightest, Ivy League grads all — could figure out how to start the mower. They’d never done it before. They’d never even seen it done.
If that’s the world you live in, is it any surprise they fall for the honey pot?
In their world, things just … happen. Electricity comes from the wall socket (remember Pete Buttigieg actually saying that, re: EVs? I can’t seem to find a clip for some reason, but I’m sure it happened). Food comes from the store. Indeed, it doesn’t even come from the store, it comes from the fridge.
You probably think I’m joking, but I’ve seen it at close range. Indeed I’ve experienced it myself, in India, where one simply doesn’t live without servants. Yes, in the very best Colonel Blimp style. It’s not a race thing, it’s a class thing — you will grievously offend your university sponsors, without whom no work can be done in-country, by not living in “middle class” style while you’re there. Which means they hook you up with servants; you tell them where you’re staying (and of course you follow their suggestions; you do not browse the classifieds in Delhi or Mumbai), and pretty soon Choti just … shows up.
N.b. that “Choti” isn’t her personal name. It’s a nickname, a pretty demeaning one — it literally means “shorty”. Little girl. Imagine you have some random chick coming into your house to do all your shopping and cleaning and laundry for you, and that’s what you call her, to her face: “Some chick”. Because they’re all called that.
At first it’s extremely uncomfortable … and then it’s really, really, really fucking nice. Hungry? Don’t worry about it — you just tell Choti what time you expect to be home for dinner, and it’ll be there. You just step out of your clothes wherever, and leave them there — they’ll be back tomorrow, laundered and pressed and folded and there in the drawer. Need to go somewhere? If you’re in a real hurry you can go down to the street and grab an autorickshaw — they’re everywhere — but if you want to arrive in style (which is to say, not drowning in your own sweat, because it’s 100 degrees out and autorickshaws don’t have air conditioning), you call a car.
How much does all this cost? Don’t worry about it. No, really — don’t worry about it. Don’t ask. For one thing, it’s impolite — yes yes, of course all Indian university people are not just Marxists, but usually batshit insane Naxalites, by which I mean they’re batshit by Academic Marxist standards. If you think that stops them from exploiting the poor Chotis of the world like the most obnoxious maharaja, then you, my friend, need to find another blog; you obviously don’t grok the first thing about Leftism.
But more important even than the social element is the fact that Indian currency is worthless. Don’t worry about it, because it’s a rounding error. I am not independently wealthy, and academic grants are not generous (except when you get a shitload of them, and launder the fuck out of them, which is what several big important University offices are designed to do … but individual grants are not generous, usually). It’s just that the exchange rate is like 200 : 1. Have you ever heard the terms “lakh” and “crore“? In India, cars, for example, are priced in lakhs and crores. If your Mercedes-Benz costs one crore rupees — that’s 10 million — then whatever you’re paying Choti doesn’t even qualify as a few pennies per day; Sally Struthers weeps.
(Anyone else remember those ads? The Christian Children’s Fund; they were everywhere in the 80s. Wonder what happened to it? Those ads seem to have been completely scrubbed from YouTube, although of course my google-fu is weak).
See what I mean? All that — cooking, cleaning, bespoke meals, car service, etc. etc. — “costs” what amounts to a handful of Monopoly money (like all Third World countries, India makes their currency look like toucan vomit.
Yep, all with the same picture of Gandhi-ji on the front).
Trust me: after a certain point, you really don’t worry about it. Everybody with me? And yes, I know I sound like a complete dick right about now — that’s the point. You end up acting like a dick, even when you try not to, because you can’t not. I mean that quite literally. You would insult everybody — your sponsors, Choti, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker — if you tried to do any of this yourself. It’s not done. And because it’s not done, you have no idea what anything really costs; you don’t even have any idea how to start finding out.
In short, and in the simplest possible terms: For any reasonable value of it, if you want it, you just tell a guy, and it appears.
That’s the world they live in. Now, it’s important to note that I didn’t try this with, uhhhh, outcall massage services and the like. Nor hard drugs. But I don’t doubt that I could’ve made that happen, with very little effort — I assume you just tell your driver, the way (I’ve heard) it’s done here, with cabbies and so forth. Or you just go down to the liquor store. Despite their prudish public image, Indians drink like fish; they just don’t buy it themselves. They send their guy for that (the male version of Choti, colloquially known as “Raju”, although for whatever reason that is an insult, where “Choti” isn’t). If you go down to the liquor store personally, you’ll be the only guy there who isn’t a version of Raju, so you’ll be spoiled for choice. I assume all you have to do is pick a Raju, flash him a discreet handful of Monopoly money, and let him take care of it.
Severian, “I Love the Honey Pot!”, Founding Questions, 2025-08-18.
November 23, 2025
QotD: “Operation Atlas Shrugged”
Ayn Rand foretold such a circumstance in Atlas Shrugged. It’s time for us all to go away into the mountains and let the Millennials and their boosters face life without a productive economy. It won’t take long for it to all collapse, but we should wait another generation before returning to rebuild civilisation. Certainly there will be no Millennial worthy of a statue – it will be a reprise of the dark ages following the collapse of Mycenae.
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, “Operation Atlas Shrugged”, Catallaxy Files, 2020-06-12.
November 22, 2025
QotD: The value of a human life
“How much?” I asked, catching my breath.
“Eighty dollars,” he replied, nonchalantly.
I told him I could not possibly pay that, and sadly released the book from my grip.
“Well,” the bookseller observed. “Thanks to this exercise, we know the value you place on a human life. Less than eighty dollars.”
In those days, I think I would have drawn the line at thirty. But to his moral credit and mine, the bookseller and I were finally able to agree on fifty-five dollars (plus sales tax).
David Warren, “Virtual March for Life”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-05-14.
November 21, 2025
QotD: Why did the (western) Roman Empire collapse?
Let’s start with the foederati.
After the Constitutio Antoniniana, there was no longer much need for the auxilia, as all persons in the empire were citizens, and so the structure distinction between the legions and other formations fades away (part of this is also the tendency of the legions in this period to be progressively split up into smaller units called vexillationes, meaning that the unit-sizes wouldn’t have been so different). But during the fourth century, with frontier pressures building, the Romans again looked for ways to utilize the manpower and fighting skill of non-Romans. What is striking here is that whereas in some ways […] the auxilia had represented almost a revival of the attitudes which had informed the system for the socii, the new system that emerged for using foreign troops, called foederati (“treaty men”) did not draw on the previously successful auxilia-system (which, to be clear, by this point had been effectively gone for more than a century). Instead, the Romans signed treaties with Germanic-speaking kings, exchanging chunks of (often depopulated, war-torn frontier) land in exchange for military service. Since these troops were bound by treaty (foedus) they were called foederati. They served in their own units, under their own leaders, up to their kings. Consequently, all of the mechanisms that encouraged the auxilia to adopt Roman practices and identify with the Roman Empire were lost; these men might view Rome as a friendly ally (at times) but they were never encouraged to think of themselves as Roman.
The reason for this different system of recruitment seem to be rooted in financial realities. The Roman army had already been expanded during the Crisis of the Third Century and only grew more under Diocletian and Constantine, probably by this point being between 400,000 and 500,000 men (compared to 300,000-350,000 earlier in the empire). Moreover, Diocletian had opted to reform the empire’s administration with a much more intensive, top-down, bureaucratic approach, which imposed further costs. Taxes had become heavy (although elites were increasingly allowed to dodge them), the economy was weak and revenues were short. The value of the foederati was that the empire didn’t have to pay them; they were handed land (again, in war-torn frontier zones) and expected to use that to pay for their military support. At the time, it must have seemed a brilliant work-around to get more military power out of a dwindling tax-base.
(I feel the need to note that I increasingly regard Diocletian (r. 284-305) as a ruinous emperor, even though he lacked the normal moralizing character flaws of “bad emperors”. While he was active, dedicated and focused, almost all of his reforms turned out to be quite bad ideas in the long run even before one gets to the Great Persecution. His currency reforms were catastrophic, his administrative reforms were top-heavy, his tax plan depended on a regular census which was never regular and the tetrarchy was doomed from its inception. Diocletian was pretty much a living, “Well, You Tried” meme. That said, to be clear, Diocletian wasn’t responsible for the foederati; it’s not quite clear who the first foederati were – they may have been the Franks in 358, which would make Julian (as a “Caesar” or junior-emperor under Constantius) the culprit for this bad idea – he had a surplus of those too.)
The problem, of course, is right there: the status of the foederati made it impossible for them to ever fully integrate into the empire. They had, after all, their own kings, their own local laws and served in their own military formations. While, interestingly, they would eventually adopt Latin from the local population which had already done so (leading to French, Spanish and Italian) they could never become Roman. That wasn’t always their choice, either! As O’Donnell (op. cit.) notes, many of these foederati wanted to be “in” in the Roman Empire; it was more frequently the Romans who were busy saying “no”. It is striking that this occurs in a period where social class in the Roman world was generally calcifying. Whereas citizenship had been an expanding category, after the Constitutio Antoniniana, the legal categories of honestiores and humiliores (lit. “respectable” and “humble” people, but in practice, “wealthy” and “commoners”) largely replaced citizenship as the legal dividing lines of Roman society. These were far less flexible categories, as economic social mobility in the ancient world was never very high. Even there, the tax reforms of Diocletian (with some “patches” under Constantine) began, for tax purposes, to tie tenant farmers (“coloni“) to their land, essentially barring both physical and economic mobility in the name of more efficient tax collection in a system that strongly resembled later medieval serfdom.
Nevertheless, the consequence of this system of organization was that as often as the foederati provided crucial soldiers to Roman armies, they were just as frequently the problem Roman armies were being sent to address. Never fully incorporated into the Roman army and under the command of their own kings, they proved deeply unreliable allies. Pitting one set of foederati against the next could work in the short-term, but in the long term, without any plan to permanently incorporate the foederati into Roman society, fragmentation was inevitable. The Roman abandonment of the successful older systems for managing diverse armies (on account that they were too expensive) turned the foederati from a potential source of vital manpower into the central cause of imperial collapse in the West.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
November 20, 2025
QotD: What happened to the “Lucky Country” when the luck ran out?
Without thinking too deeply about it, I sensed we had inherited some of the best British qualities: we understood that a batsman should walk when he knew he was out, regardless of the umpire’s decision; and that the best hangover cure began with a cup of tea.
We ridiculed our friends because there was no greater compliment than offensive humour, but didn’t overdo it because brevity was the soul of our wit. (Google it, Abdul.)
Then I discovered that the British colony in Australia was founded 12 years after Americans declared that all men (not just American ones) are created equal, and with certain inalienable rights, and realised that their belief in liberty, too, was part of our precious heritage.
By developing in lockstep with them and marching to every subsequent war alongside them, we had been imbued with Americans’ rugged individualism, but cleverly managed to avoid their gullibility for life’s more superficial panaceas.
For a while, we even gave the Americans a run for their money in the pursuit-of-happiness caper. Our island continent had more room, stranger animals and nicer cities, and we had a bigger middle class, which confirmed to us that egalitarianism, the bedrock of our culture, worked.
Then, in 1983, the crew aboard the Australia II yacht showed the New York elite that their unlimited money was no match for our gritty ingenuity.
What a time to be alive! How brilliant were we! We were six-foot-four and full of muscle, and we thought it would last forever.
That it hasn’t is partly our fault. We constantly called ourselves The Lucky Country, conveniently forgetting that Donald Horne coined the name as a warning, that one day the luck would run out. That’s what luck is: it changes.
We revelled in our prosperity and mocked the idea, fundamental to our founders, that prosperity is a two-way deal.
And we lazily imported “vibrancy” instead of building on the sophisticated western civilisation, going back to Socrates and Aristotle, we were unbelievably fortunate to inherit.
But for all our complacency, at least we never deliberately sought our own demise, which, it is now clear, is what our own government is doing with grim determination and sinister skill.
As a free and prosperous nation with unlimited resources, Australia should have the pick of the richest, cleverest, most urbane migrants in the entire world. Instead, it has opened the door to millions of low-skilled peasants from Third World countries who aren’t even slightly interested in assimilating, if they don’t outright hate our culture and want to subjugate us.
There is more to this than Labor merely symbiotically importing freeloaders whose votes can be bought with unaffordable largesse. […]
As the brilliant Adam Creighton said on X last week, referring to our demographic transformation: “The Australia of your youth won’t remotely exist in 20 years. It will still have nice weather, at least”.
Our cultural suicide aside, this record intake of migrants reduces our already inadequate amount of available housing.
By how much? The Australian Bureau of Statistics isn’t saying. Its biennial Survey of Income and Housing was due out about now, but will not be released at all because of “data collection issues”.
In other words, ABS staff were unable to survey the people most affected by unprecedented levels of immigration because those people kept shifting between city laneways and homeless shelters.
Fred Pawle, “All They Can Manage is Decline”, Fred Pawle, 2025-07-21.
