Released 40 years ago by London Irish legends the Pogues, the album is named not after a decent night in old Soho, as the title would suggest, but an apocryphal quote of Churchill’s. “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition,” he’s purported to have said. “It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash”. For many years, listening to the album while writing and drinking in this adopted riverside local, I’d no idea it was recorded a stone’s throw away in Elephant Studio, in the basement of Metropolitan Wharf. Or that the pubs of the area, such as this one, were frequented by Pogues musicians: their frontman and chief songwriter Shane MacGowan and the album’s producer Elvis Costello.
The album was even launched on the river, upstream, on board HMS Belfast with the band wearing Nelson-era naval regalia. They’d been ferried to the moored cruiser from Traitor’s Gate, arriving to find the assembled journalists (one of whom ended up, temporarily, in the Thames) already tearing into the drink. After the gig, MacGowan’s admiral’s hat vanished; in one story settling onto the river bed with all that other historical debris. At the time, the album felt like a raucous act of vandalism. Now, it’s viewed almost universally as a stone-cold classic.
The cover, a remade version of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, where the band themselves are among the wretched shipwrecked crew, acts as a framing device. What Rum Sodomy & the Lash does is allow erased, abandoned or sidelined histories to erupt — the piratical and press-ganged, the adventurous and the damned — in a way that gracefully, modestly hides the band’s self-taught virtuosity and the lyricist’s songwriting genius. It was an album that, at that time, socially and politically, shouldn’t have existed, but through courage and sheer force of nature had to.
The Thames may not forget, but society is all too willing to. There are, alas, few signs of gratitude or even recognition of the colossal impact the Irish have had on London. A statue of Oliver Cromwell, the Butcher of Drogheda, stands pride of place outside the House of Commons, but there’s scarce trace of his Hibernian victims. It took the London Irish Centre to erect a plaque in Camden Square, in 2017, to the “Forgotten Irish”, “who left their homes, counties and country … to work and rebuild this city and country, ravaged and destroyed by war … Many would never return to Ireland”.
[…]
Even at the time of the album, in fact, the Pogues ran into opposition, and not just among musical snobs and gatekeepers in England. In Ireland, their adversaries were two-fold — traditionalist embalmers of folk music, and cringe-beset “cosmopolitans” who were mortified with anything too Irish, too plebian, too diasporan. Ironically, it turned out that the Pogues were far more effective custodians of Irish traditional music, and more authentic examples of cosmopolitan hybrid-culture, than their adversaries, exemplifying the maxim that, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”.
At the heart of Rum Sodomy & the Lash‘s success and legacy is embrace of apparent opposites: high and low culture, Ireland and England, city and rural, home and exile, intellect and soul, sacred and profane, debauchery and dignity, stars and gutter. So you get “Navigator”, a tribute to the Irish workers who built the railways, and MacGowan’s rowdy “Sally MacLennane”, a tribute to his uncle’s Irish pub in Dagenham, the Irish car-making workforce it served and the real-life characters he encountered, some less than salubrious. There’s also a fierce and atmospheric instrumental, “The Wild Cats of Kilkenny”, inspired by Spaghetti Westerns, or else the industrial hangover of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”, especially poignant at a time of deindustrialisation.
The true legacy of the Pogues exists not in print, of course, but in music. Their inheritors include the drone and conscience of the modern band Lankum, the otherworldly transformations of the past in the music of Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn, and the pulse of the new in Fontaines DC. But the album also impels its listeners to articulate discontent, defy the rot, preserve the fire, to genuinely transgress, to face reality in surreal or raw terms, to lament and howl not in the transience of placards or social media, but in an art form that hits far deeper, than rusting plaques, and lasts much longer. It’s all out there, more than ever, out of sight, below decks or at the bottom of the river, waiting to escape.
Darran Anderson, “The Pogues soundtracked Irish London”, The Critic, 2025-08-05.
November 19, 2025
QotD: Rum Sodomy & the Lash
November 18, 2025
QotD: Echoes of the Thirty Years’ War
The analogy only extends so far, of course. Hillaire Belloc has argued that the dissolution of the monasteries in England kicked out one of the three legs supporting English culture — by putting all that land and money under the State’s direct control (that “Tudor revolution in government” again), the State and the Economy are inextricably merged. It’s proto-fascism (recall that The Servile State was written in 1912). Not only is this true, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Back in 1912, the Church was still alive as a cultural force. The Media was still at least somewhat capitalist — in competition for eyeballs — and in many cases led The Opposition, which also still existed as a cultural force.
Nowadays, of course, not only are the State and the Economy indistinguishable, they’re also indistinguishable from The Media. There IS no “opposition”; whatever anemic resistance to The State is stage managed like pro wrestling. Real dissidents are in the positions of recusants in Tudor England, except that the Church, instead of sending priests to minister to us in secret, is sending battalions of Inquisitors to help hunt us down.
In short, there’s no entry point for a new “Reformation”. As bad as the Period of the Wars of Religion was, gifted leaders had structural ways to achieve their objectives and keep the peace. Henry of Navarre could proclaim that “Paris is worth a mass”; Cardinal Richelieu could proclaim raison d’etat; the old Peace of Augsburg system — cuius regio; eius religio — could work well enough with a prince who understood his people and chose not to push too hard. “Separation of Church and State” wasn’t articulated as a formal political principle until the 19th century (and only there because it was badly misconstrued), but as a practical solution to politico-cultural problems it works just fine …
… provided you’ve got the structures in place to handle it, and we don’t. The Church, the State, the Economy, the Media, Academia, Technology … who can say where the one ends and the other begins? It’s all Poz, and there’s no aspect of our lives that the Poz doesn’t touch, because instead of separate and often competing socio-governmental structures, they’ve all merged. They’re ALL Poz.
Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-07.
November 17, 2025
QotD: Turns out Judaism isn’t the peaceful exception among Abrahamic montheisms
Yevardia @haravayin_hogh
Thread w/excerpts of Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion.
Shahak was an award-winning organic chemist & Classical Liberal. Born in Poland, his family moved to Israel as displaced persons in 1945.
For this book, he received death-threats for the rest of his life.Quoted thread is absolutely fascinating.
Like many American gentiles who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I have a fondness for Jewish culture as it manifested in this country. The food, the humor, the intellectual tradition. I read Mad Magazine as a kid and “The Joys of Yiddish” as a young man and cheerfully adopted some Yiddishisms into my idiolect.
It’s always been slightly difficult for me, though, to reconcile my fondness for the Jewish influence on American life with what I believe about monotheisms in general and Abrahamic monotheisms is in particular. Which is, basically, that they are pits of evil. Infectious insanities that bring mob violence, horror and death whenever they have actual power.
Judaism looked like an at least partial exception, a monotheism with a curious lack of horrific violence in its backstory. I thought this might be explained by its absence of coercive power ever since the destruction of the Second Temple — 2000 years of oppression by others teaching Judaism the virtue of tolerance the hard way.
Now comes Israel Shahak to tell me it wasn’t like that at all. That until historically recent times – basically, post-1800 — Judaism wasn’t tolerant and rational. Not even close. These are virtues of the secularized Jew, in reaction to traditional Jewish shtetl and ghetto communities that could best have been described as violently evil religious despotisms.
Shahak says gentiles — and many Jews — don’t know how terrible life was under pre-modern rabbis because Judaism has done a bang-up job of expurgating and sanitizing its own history.
Nobody talks about the fact that until the 19th century, rabbis routinely used the self-governance afforded them by a lack of state interest in universal secularized justice to abuse, torture, and often murder Jews they found to be in violation of religious law. I certainly had no idea of this, despite being quite well read in history and comparative religion.
Thought control, too. We think of Jews as readers and scholars, but it turns out the pre-modern rabbinate deliberately kept communal Jews ignorant of history, geography, science, and indeed all secular literature.
Shahak brings the receipts, with extensive quotation from primary sources. Even his critics — and there are many — can’t accuse him of making up these reports. They claim he misinterprets the evidence. But they can’t make the evidence go away.
In a way this comes as a relief to me. I no longer have to wonder why Judaism looks like an exception to the general evil of monotheisms. Because it isn’t one — like Christianity, it looks benign only to the extent that it’s been denatured by modernity and secularism.
On the other hand … I miss the Judaism I thought I knew. I’m disturbed that the evidence was so effectively suppressed, and that it took reading excerpts from Shahak to clue me in.
Damn shame copies of Shahak’s book are so rare that you can only find them for over a grand each. I’d like to read the whole thing, but everybody should read the excerpts in this thread.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-15.
November 16, 2025
QotD: Elon the gambler
Each of these bets might have been a smart one in a statistical sense, but it still requires a special kind of person to take a $200 billion market cap and bet it all on black. So why has Elon done this? Does he just not believe in the St. Petersburg paradox, like Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to do? No! It’s actually very simple: remember all that stuff about how SpaceX is less of a company and more of a religious movement, with a goal of making life multi-planetary? Elon and SpaceX behave the way that they do because they believe that stuff very sincerely. A version of SpaceX that merely became worth trillions of dollars, but never enabled the colonization of Mars, would be a disastrous failure in Elon’s eyes.
Every bit of company strategy is evaluated on the basis of whether it makes Mars more or less likely. This fully explains all the choices that look crazy from the outside. SpaceX does things that look incredibly risky to conventional business analysts because they reduce the risk of never getting to Mars, and that’s the only risk that matters. This has the nice side-benefit for shareholders that it’s revolutionized space travel several times and built several durable monopolies, but if Elon decided that actually blowing up the business increased the odds of getting to Mars, he would do it in a heartbeat. He’s said as much. This all has very important implications that we will return to in a moment.
A necessary, and to me charming, component of this approach is an utter disregard for bad press. Most corporate communications departments live in flinching terror of the slightest whiff of negative PR. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s puts out official blooper reels of exploding rockets. More seriously, one of the company’s lowest points came in the aftermath of the CRS-7 mission, when a rocket exploded two and a half minutes after launch and totally destroyed its payload. Most companies would do everything possible to minimize the risk of the following “return-to-flight” mission. SpaceX instead used it to debut a completely untested overhaul of the rocket and to attempt the first ever solid ground landing of an orbital-class booster. (It succeeded.)
Hopefully by now it’s not a mystery why SpaceX is a far more effective organization than NASA, but I think this last point is underappreciated. NASA, unfortunately, has boxed itself into a corner where it cannot publicly fail at anything.2 But if you aren’t failing, you aren’t learning, and you certainly aren’t trying to do things that are very hard. SpaceX, conversely, rapidly iterates in public and blows up rockets to deafening cheers. Permission to fail in public is one of the most powerful assets an organization has, and it flows directly from the top. This, too, is something for which Musk deserves credit.
The last thing I’ll say about Elon is that he is notably, uhhh, unafraid to disagree with people. In fact, this book literally has a chapter subheading called “Musk versus the entire human spaceflight community”.3 This quality can be a bit of a two-edged sword, but it’s safe to say that without it the company would never have gotten anywhere. Practically from the moment SpaceX came into existence, its enemies were trying to destroy it. Anybody who followed space policy in the early-to-mid 2010s knows what I’m talking about — politicians like the imbecilic NASA administrator Charles Bolden and the flamboyantly corrupt US Senator Richard Shelby did everything in their power to make life difficult for SpaceX and to smother the newborn company in its crib.
It’s a sign of how total SpaceX’s victory has been that some of those old episodes feel surreal in hindsight. Not just the antics of clowns like Bolden and crooks like Shelby, but also the honest-to-goodness competition in the form of Boeing and Lockheed, who fought dirty from the very beginning. For instance, they lobbied hard to block SpaceX from having any place to launch rockets at all, and dispatched their employees to stand around SpaceX facilities mocking and jeering while taking photographs of operations. In those early, desperate days, it would only have taken one or two successes of Boeing’s massive lobbying team to lock SpaceX completely out of government contracts and starve them of business. It was only Elon’s reputation as “a lunatic who will sue everyone” that prevented NASA from awarding the entire Commercial Crew Program to Boeing despite SpaceX offering to do it for about half as much money.4 And of course Elon actually did sue the Air Force when under intense lobbying they froze SpaceX out of the EELV program.
All of this is ancient history now. SpaceX’s competitors are no longer trying to stop the company with lawfare, because SpaceX no longer has any meaningful competition. But there are still people trying to slow down and sabotage the company; they’re just doing it for ideological rather than economic reasons. In the early days of SpaceX, the “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats who direct and control the United States government were huge supporters of the company, because back then the reigning ideology of that set was a sort of good-government technocratic progressivism and the idea of a scrappy new launch provider disrupting the incumbents genuinely pleased and excited them. A few years later, the state religion changed, and a few years after that, Musk revealed himself to be a definite heretic. And so, in utterly predictable and mechanistic fashion, the agencies that once made exceptions for SpaceX now began demanding years of delays in the Starship program in order to study the effects of sonic booms on tadpoles and so on.
One might be tempted to rage about how detrimental this all is to the rule of law. Think of the norms. Berger is certainly upset by it, and he ends his book (published in September 2024) by urging Musk to self-censor and stop antagonizing powerful forces with his political activism. Implicit to this demand is the advice, “If you just act like a good boy and stop making trouble, they’ll go back to leaving you alone.” Obviously, Musk did not take this advice. He instead further kicked the hornet’s nest by redoubling his support for Donald Trump. By October, the social network formerly known as Twitter was teeming with employees of US spy agencies and their allies demanding that SpaceX be nationalized and that Musk be deported.5 Given that Trump’s election was no sure thing, why would he take this risk?
There was a famous uprising against the Qin dynasty that happened when two generals realized that (1) they were going to be late, and (2) that the punishment for being late was death, and (3) that the punishment for treason was … also death. Elon Musk thinks being late to Mars is just as bad as being deported and having his companies taken away from him. He has already gambled the entire future of SpaceX on a coin flip five or six times, because he considers partial success and total failure to be literally equivalent. When it became clear that an FAA empowered by a Harris administration would put one roadblock after another in front of him, his only choice was to rebel and to flip the coin one more time.
When I saw Musk charging into the lion’s den back in October, I immediately thought of the Haywood Algorithm and its dreadful, stark simplicity. “Make a list of everything you need to do in order to succeed, and then do each item on your list.” When you run a normal company, the algorithm sometimes demands that you stay late at work or come in on a weekend. When you run a rocket company, the algorithm sometimes demands that you buy Twitter6 and use it to take over the United States government. It’s far from the riskiest thing Musk has done on his path to Mars. At this point, it might be wise to stop betting against him.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Reentry, by Eric Berger”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-12-09.
- “Propellant densification” may sound like a nerdy topic, but it’s actually one of the most interesting subplots in the entire book. In the interest of making the Falcon 9 the highest performing rocket ever, and especially in the interest of improving the economics of booster landing and reuse, SpaceX decided to try to just pack more fuel and oxidizer into the tanks. The way you fit more of a gas or liquid into a given volume is by making it colder. So they developed a way to chill liquid oxygen down to -340 degrees Fahrenheit, way colder than anybody had ever made it before. What they weren’t prepared for was that at these temperatures, liquid oxygen starts making all kinds of horrible, eerie noises that made the engineers not want to be around it.
- Remember propellant densification? NASA considered it in the 80s and 90s, but dismissed it. Not for technical reasons, but because the need to destructively test pressure vessels might result in negative news stories.
- The subject of this section is whether it’s acceptable to fuel a rocket when the astronauts are already inside. The position of “the entire human spaceflight community” was that fueling can be dangerous, so better to complete propellant loading first, wait for everything to settle, and only afterwards being the astronauts on board. Seems sensible enough, but remember propellant densification? SpaceX’s ultra-cold liquid oxygen immediately begins heating up after loading, so the only practical way to use it is to load at the last minute and then immediately launch the rocket. Densification was vital to eking out the last bit of performance margin that makes rocket reuse possible, so Musk stuck to his guns. So far zero astronauts have died as a result.
- NASA’s pretext for favoring Boeing over SpaceX was the former’s “reliability” and “experience” and “technical superiority”. In the decade since then, SpaceX has completely dozens of missions flawlessly, while Boeing has yet to actually make it to the International Space Station and back.
- It’s hard to tell when the radical centrists mean things “seriously but not literally”, but I sincerely think that had Trump lost the best case outcome for Musk would be something like Jack Ma: chastened, humiliated, wings clipped, freedom of action greatly reduced.
- It’s become fashionable to mock Musk for running Twitter into the ground, but control over the social network’s content policies probably had a major effect on the election outcome. Even if Twitter literally becomes worth zero dollars (which given Musk’s track record I doubt), surely you can imagine how when you have a tremendous amount of money, $44 billion might seem like a small price to pay to have the President of the United States owe you some major favors.
November 15, 2025
QotD: The innovation of infiltration tactics in trench warfare
The mature form of this tactical framework is often called “Hutier” tactics, after German general Oskar Emil von Hutier, though he was hardly the sole or even chief inventor of the method. In its mature form, the technique went thusly: instead of attacking with large waves of infantry which cleared each objective in sequential order, attacks ought to be proceeded by smaller units, carefully trained with the layout of the enemy positions. Those units, rather than having a very rigid plan of attack, would be given those general objectives and left to figure for themselves how to accomplish them (“mission tactics” or Auftragstaktik)1, giving them more freedom to make decisions based on local conditions and the ground.
These elite spearhead units, called Stoßtruppen or “Stormtroopers” were well equipped (in particular with a higher amount of automatic firearms and hand grenades, along with flamethrowers). Importantly, they were directed to bypass enemy strong-points and keep moving forward to meet their objectives. The idea here was that the follow-up waves of normal infantry could do the slow work of clearing out points where enemy resistance was strong, but the stormtroopers should aim to push as deeply as possible as rapidly as possible to disorient the defenders and rapidly envelop what defenses remained.2
These sets of infantry tactics were in turn combined with the hurricane barrage, a style of artillery use which focused on much shorter but more intense artillery barrages, particularly associated with Colonel Georg “Breakthrough” Bruchmüller. Rather than attempting to pulverize defenses out of existence, the hurricane barrage was designed merely to force enemies into their dugouts and disorient the defenders; much of the fire was directed at longer ranges to disrupt roads and artillery in the enemy rear. The short barrage left the ground relatively more intact. Meanwhile, those elite infiltration units could be trained to follow the creeping barrage very closely (being instructed, for instance, to run into the shell explosions, since as the barrage advantages, no gun should ever strike the same spot twice; a fresh shell-hole was, in theory, safe). Attentive readers will recognize the basic foundations of the “move fast, disorient the enemy” methods of the “modern system” here.
So did infiltration tactics break the trench stalemate? No.
First, it is necessary to note that while infiltration tactics were perhaps most fully developed by the Germans, they were not unique to them. The French were experimenting with many of the same ideas at the same time. For instance, basic principles of infiltration were being published by the French General Headquarters as early as April, 1915. André Laffargue, a French infantry captain, actually published a pamphlet, which was fairly widely distributed in both the French and British armies by the end of 1915 and in the American army in 1916, on exactly this sort of method. In many cases, like at the Second Battle of Artois, these French tactics bore significant fruit with big advances, but ran into the problem that the gains were almost invariably lost in the face of German counter-attacks. The Russians, particularly under Aleksei Brusilov, also started using some of these techniques, although Brusilov was as much making a virtue of necessity as the Russians just didn’t have that much artillery or shells and had to make do with less and Russian commanders (including Brusilov!) seem to have only unevenly taken the lessons of his successes.
The problem here is speed: infiltration tactics could absolutely more efficiently overrun the front enemy lines and even potentially defeat multiple layers of a defense-in-depth. But after that was done and the shock of the initial push wore off, you were still facing the same calculus: the attacker’s reinforcements, shells, artillery and supplies had to cross broken ground to reach the new front lines, while the defender’s counter-attack could ride railways, move over undamaged roads and then through prepared communications trenches. In the race between leg infantry and trains, the trains always won. On the Eastern Front or against the Italians fighting under the Worst General In History at Caporetto (1917), the already badly weakened enemy might simply collapse, producing massive gains (but even at Caporetto, no breakthrough – shoving the enemy is not a breakthrough, to qualify as a breakthrough, you need to get to the “green fields beyond” that is open ground undefended by the enemy), but against a determined foe, as with the 1918 Spring Offensives, these tactics, absent any other factor, simply knocked big salients3 in the line. Salients which were, in the event, harder to defend and brought the Germans no closer to victory. Eventually – often quite rapidly – the front stabilized again and the deadlock reasserted itself. Restoring maneuver, the actual end-goal of these tactics, remained out of reach.
None of this is to say that infiltration tactics were useless. They represented a real improvement on pre-war infantry tactics and continue to serve as the basis for modern infantry tactics. But they could not break the trench stalemate or restore maneuver.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
- Because it doesn’t fit anywhere else, I want to make a rather long note here. There is an odd tendency which I find quite frustrating, in which military concepts, unit designations and terminology from other languages are all translated into English when used, except for German terms. I suspect this has to do with the high reputation German military thinking holds in among the general public and some military practitioners. I do not share this view; both the German Imperial Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht (another term we never translated yet we feel no need to call the French army l’armée de terre) managed to lose the only major wars they were in, leading to the end of the states they served. Both armies were capable at some things and failed at others; their record certainly does not make German some sort of Holy Language of War. Nevertheless, where German technical terms are notable, I will include them so that the reader will know, should they encounter them elsewhere, that this is a term they are already familiar with, albeit in translation.
- It should be noted that the emphasis here remained on envelopment and destruction rather than on disorientation. The latter is a feature of subsequent systems based on German maneuver warfare, but was not a goal of the doctrine itself initially.
- A salient is a bulge in the line such that your position is bordered by the enemy on three sides. Such positions are very vulnerable, since they can be attacked from multiple directions and potentially “pinched off” at the base.
November 14, 2025
QotD: A modest Utilitarian proposal
– An avg person eats ~3,500 animals/yr (including shrimp)
– A human body has ~125,000 calories of edible tissueSo you only have to eat six humans/yr to meet your calorie needs, assuming you’re a good cook and don’t waste too much. Maybe 5.5 with veggies and sauces. And this saves the lives of roughly 150,000 animals, assuming you can catch a 30-year-old. But even if you just prey on the old and infirm, you’re still at bodhisattva levels of reducing suffering.
Anyway, I’ve tallied up the units of suffering and the logic is unassailable. The single best thing you can do — for the climate, the environment and the end of suffering for all sentient beings — is to switch to an all homovore diet. I’m shopping for chest freezers right now and plan to phase out all animals by the end of the year. Who’s with me?
Vivid Void, Twitter, 2025-08-11.
November 13, 2025
QotD: Anarchists
When I was younger and, perhaps, more spunky, I used to read Proudhon and Kropotkin. These were all very well, but the systemizing tendency had infected both. Utopianism also muddled their thinking. Without going back to Zeno of Cilium, let me just say that the posterior tradition in recommending anarchy was more subtle and arch. (Read the Antigone, for instance. Today it’s just the brand name for a Givenchy bag.) Anarchy was an inheritance from Greece and even Rome. It could never have been reduced to an election manifesto.
It is interesting that the first English use of the term, anarchisme, dates back to Henry VIII. Those resisting his Divorce and Reformation were taken to be anarchists. Nobly they defended the ancient liturgical order, in such spontaneous actions as the Pilgrimage of Grace.
Prominent anarchists of our modern age have, at their best (or worst, depending on one’s point-of-view), had dodgy ideological affiliations, but a real appreciation for economy of means. One thinks of e.g. Gavrilo Princip, the ingenious Serbian, able to ignite a Great War with a few gunshots, and bring down the Austro-Hungarian Empire almost as an aside. Or a certain Osama bin Laden, able to drag a superpower into pointless foreign wars, with very limited means. I do not approve of either gentleman, please note, but their efficiency was astounding.
David Warren, “Anarchia”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-07-09.
November 12, 2025
QotD: Horror Victorianorum and the anti-Wilhelminites
Which is fine, if you’re an art student (or in that most unemployable of majors, Art History). But we need to know what “mainstream” art looked like under Wilhelm II, and for all intents and purposes it was Biedermeier.
Everyone with me? I’m oversimplifying, but not too much, when I say that you can make a pretty good case that the ultimate cause of World War One was “tradition”. At least, the people who were there sure as hell thought so. If you’re not familiar with Wilhelmine culture — and I am very, very far from Expert — consider the analogous case in Great Britain. Horror Victorianorum has its own Wiki entry, and isn’t that odd? It’s great to see David Stove getting some of the credit he deserves, but if he hadn’t coined it, somebody would’ve, because the shift in English culture was so massive, so in-your-face, that you can see the 20th century being born, in whatever medium you choose: art, architecture, literature, music, interior design, whatever, it’s all stupendously, tremendously, egregiously anti-Victorian.
Imagine “Victorian culture” is Donald Trump. That’s how against it they were. By the end of Edward VII’s brief reign, anything and everything Victorian was not just wrong, not just outdated or silly or whatever, but THE WORST THING EVER. If the Victorians liked it, Edwardians hated it, for any and all values of it; if they’d discovered that any of the guys in Eminent Victorians had really enjoyed metabolizing oxygen, the entire Edwardian Smart Set would’ve asphyxiated themselves on principle.
At that point, Modernism was inevitable, because Modernism was all there could be.
Severian, “PoMo, P-O-M-O PoMo …”, Founding Questions, 2025-08-07.
November 11, 2025
QotD: Moltke the Younger and the Schlieffen Plan
Moltke therefore proved an ideal scapegoat for the “Schlieffen School”. For the Schlieffen School (mostly officers trained by Schlieffen), the Schlieffen Plan was a true recipe for victory bungled by incompetent execution. However, recent scholarship has shown a more nuanced picture. While Schlieffen did not fully approve of his successor, Moltke was a faithful student of Schlieffen’s concepts. The modifications he made to the plan were not because of a difference in opinion, but of circumstance. Following Schlieffen’s retirement, the French army became more aggressive, necessitating a stronger defense of the Rhine. Likewise, Russian strength and mobilization speed increased, necessitating a greater force allocated to the East. Moltke was also more realistic about the logistical limitations of the all-important right wing of the German offensive. While Schlieffen (allegedly with his dying breath) insisted “keep the right wing strong”, there were simply only so many divisions that could practically advance there. Moltke did his best to adapt the Schlieffen Plan to these changing circumstances, though with mounting fear that the strength of the Entente had placed victory beyond Germany’s strength.
Despite awareness of the long odds, officers continued to press for preventative war in succeeding European crises.3 The term “preventative war” did not mean “preempting the attack of hostile powers” but rather to initiate a war while the strategic balance was most favorable for Germany. While, as mentioned, they had their doubts about the surety of victory, they believed the odds would only get worse. The Schlieffen Plan had been designed for a one-front war against France (in 1905, the year of Schlieffen’s retirement, Russia was in the throes of revolution). Though adapted in later years, the plan remained tenable only so long as Germany had the chance to defeat France before Russian mobilization was completed. As the Russian army expanded and its rail system modernized, the General Staff saw the Schlieffen Plan nearing its expiration date.
The General Staff saw no alternative to Schlieffen’s concept because of its axiomatic focus on total victory. The kind of limited victory that the Elder Moltke had settled for in his later war plans had never entered the vocabulary of the General Staff. As such, the General Staff pressed strongly for war (which it believed was inevitable) to break out before the balance of power swung further against Germany.
The only alternative to this would have been to frankly state the perilous situation in which Germany stood militarily and admit that total military victory was out of reach and German diplomacy would need to be reoriented around this fact. Not only would this course of action been antithetical to the proud traditions of the officer corps, but it would also have been viewed as unacceptably political. What’s more, the Kaiser would have likely viewed such behavior as cowardly if not outright insubordinate. Once again, the Kaiser’s power over personnel decisions meant uncomfortable topics were not broached for fear of instant dismissal.
It is not entirely unjust to accuse German leaders of cowardice or careerism in avoiding these conversations. However, they — like so many who serve under capricious or incompetent heads of state — justified their silence and continued service under the logic of harm reduction. If they resigned (or clashed with the Kaiser leading to their dismissal) they knew they would be replaced by someone more compliant. The Kaiser’s power over personnel meant they understood clearly that they had no leverage.
The Chiefs of the General Staff, for all their influence, were incentivized to focus on the areas of their exclusive responsibility. Nevertheless, the younger Moltke was not passive in his efforts for war. He resumed contact with the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, assuring it of German support should Austria choose war in a crisis. As aforementioned, when crises came to Europe (some instigated by the German foreign ministry) he pressed the chancellor and Kaiser for a preventative war. Both, to their credit, while willing to risk war, would not choose it.
Perhaps most decisively, Moltke and his deputy, Erich von Ludendorff,4 made the decision to hinge the operational plan on an attack on the Belgian city of Liège (hosting a critical rail juncture) before the neutral country could mobilize.5 This modification was made because Moltke desired to avoid violating Dutch neutrality (as Schlieffen had called for). He wisely understood Germany could afford no more enemies and that invading the Netherlands would mean increasing the distance the German right wing would have to cover to gain the French flank, decreasing the odds of success. What’s more, Moltke hoped that Dutch neutrality would allow it to act as a “windpipe” in the event of a long war and a British blockade. However, avoiding Dutch territory complicated German logistics, necessitating the swift seizure of Liège to allow the offensive to meet its strict timetables.
This was a strictly operational decision, made on technical grounds. As such, neither the chancellor nor the Kaiser were informed of this detail of the plan (operational plans were kept strictly secret, with the prior year’s being systematically burned). However, as perceptive readers may have noticed, the need for a coup de main against a neutral country before it mobilized severely limited German strategic flexibility. There was only one deployment plan for war in the West (and only one at all after 1913). In a crisis, Germany was therefore bound to attack before the Belgians manned Liège’s fortifications. Yet this all-important point-of-no-return was unknown to the Kaiser, chancellor, and foreign minister. The General Staff had effectively stripped the Kaiser and civilian leaders of their “right to be wrong”.
Thus, the General Staff had drastically increased the likelihood of war in that the point-of-no-return was kept obscured from those who would be responsible for bring Germany to the brink. As would occur in 1914 during the July Crisis, the Kaiser and his minister could not understand why Moltke was pressing so strongly for war. As historian Annika Mombauer puts it, “Only Moltke knew that every hour counted”.6 The General Staff had — intentionally or not — engineered a situation in which political leadership would have to choose war or abandon its only operational plan. While political leadership was reticent to take this step (especially without the details of the plan) contributing to Moltke’s nervous breakdown, the General Staff ultimately got the war it so desired at the next crisis Germany found itself in. If the coup de main on Liège had been devised as a ploy to force political leadership to engage in a preventative war, it had succeeded.
Ultimately, the predominance of the military over German policy — both foreign and domestic — created an environment in which civilian leaders like Bethmann Hollweg were sidelined, and aggressive military strategies took precedence. This imbalance of prestige, coupled with the narrow, fatalistic worldview of military leaders, contributed to Germany’s march toward war, with little room to acknowledge alternative diplomatic or strategic approaches.
Kiran Pfitzner and Secretary of Defense Rock, “The Kaiser and His Men: Civil-Military Relations in Wilhelmine Germany”, Dead Carl and You, 2024-10-02.
- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder was his uncle.
- Mombauer, Moltke, 109.
- Better known for other work.
- Mombauer, 96.
- Mombauer, 219.
- Rosinski, “Scharnhorst to Schlieffen”, 99.
November 10, 2025
QotD: “Is it a boy or a girl?”
People are intrinsically fascinated by psychological sex differences — the average differences between men and women in personality, behavior, and preferences. Psychologists have studied this topic systematically for decades, beginning with landmark works like The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974) by Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin. That book helped spark a wave of research that continues to this day. Since then, increasingly sophisticated methods have enabled researchers to detect subtle but consistent differences in how men and women think, feel, and act.
Men and women use language and think about the world in broadly similar ways. They experience the same basic emotions. Both seek kind, intelligent, and attractive romantic partners, enjoy sex, get jealous, make sacrifices for their children, compete for status, and sometimes resort to aggression in pursuit of their interests. In the end, women and men are more alike than different. But they are not identical.
To be sure, sociocultural influences play a role in creating those differences. But environmental factors don’t act on blank slates. To understand young men and young women, we must consider not only cultural context but also evolved sex differences. We are, after all, biological creatures. Like other mammals, we share similar physiology and emotional systems, so it’s not surprising that meaningful differences exist between human males and females.
To understand why psychological and behavioral sex differences evolved, the key concept is parental investment theory, developed by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in 1972. The basic idea is straightforward: the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be more selective when choosing a mate. This selectivity follows basic evolutionary logic: those with more to lose are more cautious and risk-averse. To put the stakes in perspective: raising a child from birth to independence in a traditional, preindustrial society requires an estimated 10 million to 13 million calories — the equivalent of about 20,000 Big Macs. For women, reproduction is enormously expensive.
Men also incur reproductive costs, though of a different kind. On average, they have about 20 percent more active metabolic tissue — such as muscle — that fuels their efforts in competition, courtship, and provisioning. While pregnancy requires a large, immediate investment from women, men’s reproductive effort is more gradual, spread out over a lifetime. In evolutionary terms, both sexes pay a price for reproduction, but in different currencies — women through gestation and caregiving, men through physical competition and resource acquisition.
Yet while nature can inform our understanding of human behavior, it does not dictate how we ought to live. A clearer grasp of sex differences can help guide our decisions. It cannot define our values.
Rob Henderson, “Sex Differences Don’t Go Away Just Because You Want Them To”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2025-08-03.
November 9, 2025
QotD: Historical training is not “spending 7 years memorizing dates”
James @TTJamesG
The fact that you spent 7 years memorizing dates and the culmination of that is arguing semantics on X is depressing. Is it too late for a refund? You wrote an entire thread addressing a point I never made, a point you intentionally misconstrued.Another thing that has come up a fair bit here recently is the idea that historical training consists of “spend[ing] 7 years memorizing dates” which is a severe misunderstanding of what historians do.
It confuses the job of reading history books for the job of writing them.
While any historian is going to end up knowing a lot of names and dates simply as a byproduct of teaching and working with their material, raw memorization is not a significant part of the PhD training process.
Instead, the focus is on research skills and analysis.
In practice, we can divide a lot of historical training into three components: the historical method, “theory”, and then field-specific training.
The historical method is the process and heuristics we use to assess historical sources.
While history students work from history books that are “pre-chewed” as it were, historians work with their evidence in its raw, unprocessed form: archives of documents, ancient texts, inscriptions, memoirs, archaeological remains and so on.
The historical method is how we approach that raw material: who produced it? What information would they have had (eyewitness? second hand?), what sources might they have had? What might their own aims have been?
And how can we most plausibly fill in gaps in our evidence?
Then there is historical theory. No good historian is a doctrinaire follower of a single theory of history — rather these are toolboxes of ideas we use to frame the research questions we’re asking.
But to use those ideas, you must know and understand them first.
So “critical theory” is interested in power relationships, while an Annales framework is interested in long-term structures and cultural assumptions, while a materialist framework focuses on material conditions and so on.
Each would imply different questions of the evidence.
Part of the point of learning theory, of course, is that each theory lens is, in and of itself, incomplete. Cultural structures matter, individual choices matter, material conditions matter, etc. etc.
You learn and think about a bunch of these to know the blindspots of each.
Finally, historians are going to learn a bunch of research skills specific to our period and place. For ancient Roman history, that’s Latin, Greek, epigraphy, paleography, some philology and a lot of archaeology.
For a more modern field, archive research methods are huge.
On top of that, you’re also going to develop knowledge in other disciplines — sciences, social sciences — that touch on your topic of interest. I work on the costs of warfare, so military science and theory, along with economics and a bit of demographics, matter to me.
What the historian is actually doing is taking that skillset to the raw evidence of the past — sometimes asking new questions of old material, frequently asking old questions of material no one has studied intensively before — to discover new information about the past.
Of course we also assemble a broad knowledge of the societies we study (like how Roman citizenship works), which we’d need to understand our sources and our evidence.
Roman citizenship, for instance, matters a lot for understanding the Roman army!
That broad knowledge is what we’re drawing on in teaching and for that we are relying on the work of our colleagues in the discipline: each historian is doing their own original discovering-the-past work, but also keeping up-to-date on our colleagues’ work.
The end result is both a steadily improving understanding of the past but also the ability, as our own conditions and interests change, to ask new questions, rather than simply endlessly rehash old questions and old (potentially flawed) answers.
“Online Rent-a-Sage” Bret Devereaux, Twitter, 2025-08-05.
November 8, 2025
QotD: Singing in church
Note: I used to have a good singing voice, not quite commercial quality, IMHO, no, but quite good nonetheless. I loved to sing. I still do, the songs I can still handle, too.
Almost nobody sings reliably in my church. Oh, they can, but they generally do not. The exceptions are hymns everybody knows the tunes to, some of the responsorials, ditto, and, notably, last 4 July, “America the Beautiful”. And, at Christmas, the traditional Christmas songs.
So why those and not the others. Well, the typical hymn in the typical modern church was penned by a couple of nuns from the Order of the Discalced Sisters of Sappho, or priests from the Gay Jesuit Alliance, and printed in the hymnal largely as an exercise in flattery.
Okay, that’s not really true … or not entirely anyway. No, the real problem is that, and I cannot emphasize this enough, NOBODY KNOWS THE BLOODY TUNES, SO OF FREAKING COURSE THEY DON’T SING, WHILE THEY CHANGE THE HYMNS SO OFTEN — WEEKLY, AS A MATTER OF FACT — THAT NOBODY EVER HAS THE CHANCE TO LEARN THE TUNES.
So I propose the following: Pick five hymns — among my recommendations, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “We Gather Together”, “Amazing Grace”, “How Great Thou Art”, “Abide with Me”; but I’m not a fanatic about it — and use only those five for however long it takes for 75% of the congregation to sing all of them. Then change ONE and keep at that until 75% will sing that. And keep doing that until you have a repertoire of 20-25 songs everybody knows and most everybody will sing.
“Make a joyful sound unto the Lord” and see if your parish doesn’t grow and if your parishioners aren’t a lot happier in mass.
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-03.
November 7, 2025
QotD: The Boomer career path
After that they got bored and became Glam rockers, and then switched to Disco because it had a better beat. They used all their free money from Disco record deals to buy cocaine and Malibu real estate at $3 per acre. In 1980 they decided there was even more money in selling cocaine, so they all moved to Miami and drove around shooting machine guns from their Lamborghini Countachs to Giorgio Morodo synth music.
After Reagan’s re-election the Boomers decided greed was good and they all moved to NY where they became serial killer investment bankers and collected up all the Andy Warhol originals. That’s when all of their real estate holdings made them billionaires which they leveraged to get in on the bottom floor of the Internet bubble in the 90s while taking designer drugs.
Today those same Boomers are all driving around to orgies at The Villages in $500k luxury golf carts waving giant Trump flags, laughing it up while lighting doobies with their Social Security cash and executing Howdy Doody’s Final Plan: the secret Boomer Immortality Pill that will allow them to keep their money away from Millennials and Zoomers FOREVER
David Burge, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-30.
November 6, 2025
QotD: The Reformation
It’s easy to get lost in this stuff — I had a long bit about Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, the Supplication Against the Ordinaries, the Annates Bill, and so on here — but the upshot is, pulling the Church down in England revealed the massive scale of its corruption. I want to say that the Annates Bill alone doubled the King’s revenue, and the dissolution of the monasteries (well underway in Cardinal Wolsey’s time, incidentally) unlocked unimaginable wealth. But it also fatally undermined the regime, because now an attack on the existing Church structure was also an attack on the King … and vice versa.
What you got, in short, was a total social conflagration. The “Reformation” wasn’t really about theology. Nothing Luther said was particularly new. Jan Huss and John Wyclif said basically the same things 100 years earlier; hell, St. Augustine said them 1000 years before. There’s still an irreconcilable “Protestant” strain in Catholicism now — Cornelius Jansen was just a Catholic Luther, and in a lot of ways a much better one; he was declared a heretic because reasons, and “because reasons” was good enough in Jansen’s time (the very nastiest phase of the Thirty Years’ War), but since he’s just quoting St. Augustine …
The point is, the undeniable rottenness of the Catholic Church made it a convenient whipping boy for any conceivable beef against society as a whole. Because it wasn’t just the Church that was too decadent, depraved, and corrupt to go on — it was the entirety of Late Medieval society. Again, stop me if this sounds familiar, but Late Medieval society looks a lot like spoiled, histrionic children playing dress up. They look like kings, and they act like kings (popes, bishops, etc.), but it’s obvious it’s just an act — they know they’re supposed to do these things (put on tournaments, hold jubilees, preach sermons, fight wars, etc.) but they have no idea why.
Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-07.
November 5, 2025
QotD: Progressive anger
As they did so in this case, I could not help but think of the analogy with our present situation. We have a huge fund of very angry people buzzing about in mobs looking for somewhere on which their anger can settle. It seems an epoch ago that it landed on #MeToo and turned all men into Harvey Weinstein. Then, under the direction of little Greta, who somehow managed to combine an autistic manner with hysteria, opposing tendencies reconciled no doubt by the ineffable self-pity of the privileged, global warming provided a temporary resting place. However, with the killing of George Floyd, climate change seems as passé as Mussolini’s spats. (“Too many spats, too many spats!” someone once said of him.) But if no new thing is found after all the statues have been pulled down, the books burned, and the films withdrawn from circulation, climate change could return faute de mieux. On the other hand, free-floating anger is highly inventive as to the reasons for its existence: It can attach itself to almost anything, as flies can walk upside down on ceilings. Being no prophet myself, I have no idea what will be the next object of angry righteousness by people brought up to believe in moral relativism.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Bees With Degrees”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-07-02.
