Anyway, young Cyrus […] and his classmates spend practically every waking moment being little Tai-Pans. They study in classrooms, receive military training,1 and shadow the magistrates in their official duties; but all of these official lessons are just the backdrop against which the real lessons are taking place. The boys have missions to accomplish, missions which they cannot possibly accomplish individually. So they have to learn to put together a team, to apportion responsibilities, and to judge merit in the aftermath. Anytime one of the boys commits an infraction,2 the adults ensure that he is judged by the others. All of this is carefully monitored, and boys who show partiality or favoritism, or who simply judge poorly, are savagely punished.3
The most common sort of mission is a hunt, the boys are constantly going on hunts, because: “it seems to them that hunting is the truest of the exercises that pertain to war”. This is obvious at the level of basic physical skills: while hunting they run, they ride, they follow tracks, they shoot, and they stab. But the military lessons imparted by hunting are not just physical, they’re also mental. They learn to “deceive wild boars with nets and trenches, and … deer with traps and snares”. To battle a lion, a bear, or a leopard on an equal footing would be suicide, and so by necessity the boys learn to surprise them, or exhaust them, or to terrify them with psychological warfare, doing everything in their power to find an unfair advantage or to create one from circumstances.4 As Cyrus’s father tells him years later: “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”
There’s another reason that the boys constantly hunt wild animals, which is that it habituates them to hunger, sleep-deprivation, and extremes of heat and cold. When they depart on a hunt the boys are deliberately given too little food, and what they have is simple and bland (though that’s hardly an issue for those who “regularly use hunger as others use sauce”). Some of this is ascesis in the original Ancient Greek meaning of the word (ἄσκησις – “training”); by getting used to being tired and hungry and cold under controlled circumstances, they will be better at shrugging off these disadvantages when the stakes are higher.
But the real core of it lies in the phrase: “He did not think it was fitting for anyone to rule who was not better than his subjects.” Later, when they’ve reached manhood, the boys will oftentimes be called upon to share physical hardship with those they have been set over, and in that moment it is vital to this social order that they not be soft. “We must of necessity share with our slaves heat and cold, food and drink, and labor and sleep. In this sharing, however, we need first to try to appear better than they in regard to such.” Better in the sense of physically tougher, but also better in the sense of having achieved the absolute mastery of the will over any and all desires.5
Constant exposure to deprivation and hardship isn’t just supposed to improve their endurance, it’s also supposed to make them better at sneering at comforts.6 This is a society which believes that men are more easily destroyed by luxury than by hardship, and that it’s especially important that the leaders be seen to scorn luxury, for “whenever people see that he is moderate for whom it is especially possible to be insolent, then the weaker are more unwilling to do anything insolent in the open.”7 What I love about Xenophon is that unlike many Greek authors, who would deliver that line completely straight, he instead subverts (or at least balances) it with the observation that any kind of suffering is easier to bear when you’re in charge, and even easier when you’re bearing it in order to be seen to be bearing it.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-08.
1. If you’ve ever been a little boy, or the parent of a little boy, you know how true this is:
“Now the mode of battle that has been shown to us is one that I see all human beings understand by nature, just as also the various other animals each know a certain mode of battle that they learn not from another but from nature. For example, the ox strikes with his horn, the horse with his hoof, the dog with his mouth, the boar with his tusk … Even when I was a boy, I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, even though I did not learn how one must take hold of it from anywhere else, as I say, than from nature. I used to do this not because I was taught but even though I was opposed, just as there were also other things I was compelled to do by nature, though I was opposed by both my mother and father. And, yes, by Zeus, I used to strike with the sword everything I was able to without getting caught, for it was not only natural, like walking and running, but it also seemed to me to be pleasant in addition to being natural.”
2. Not just explicit violations of the rules though: “they also judge cases of ingratitude, an accusation for which human beings hate each other very much but very rarely adjudicate; and they punish severely whomever they judge not to have repaid a favor he was able to repay”.
3. “In one case, I was beaten because I did not judge correctly. The case was like this: A big boy with a little tunic took off the big tunic of a little boy, and he dressed him in his own tunic, while he himself put on that of the other. Now I, in judging it for them, recognized that it was better for both that each have the fitting tunic. Upon this the teacher beat me, saying that whenever I should be appointed judge of the fitting, I must do as I did; but when one must judge to whom the tunic belongs, then one must examine, he said, what is just possession.”
4. Players of old-school tabletop role-playing games might be reminded of the distinction between “combat as sport” and “combat as war” or the parable of Tucker’s Kobolds.
5. Years later one of Cyrus’s classmates gives a long speech about how falling in love is optional — a real man can make himself love any woman he chooses, and conversely can restrain himself from loving any woman, no matter how desirable. All poetic references to being made a prisoner by love, or forced by love to do certain things, are excuses made by weaklings who wish to give into their desires. This is a message right in line with the most inhuman aspects of Greek philosophy, and to his credit Xenophon immediately subverts it by having the guy who delivers it immediately fall madly in love with his beautiful female captive.
6. One of the highest compliments ever paid to Cyrus is when an older mentor remarks of his posse that:
“I saw them bearing labors and risks with enthusiasm, but now I see them bearing good things moderately. It seems to me, Cyrus, to be more difficult to find a man who bears good things nobly than one who bears evil things nobly, for the former infuse insolence in the many, but the latter infuse moderation in all.”
7. Compare this to the American ruling class, which is also weirdly Spartan in its own way. The wealthiest Americans on average work a crazy number of hours, lead highly regimented lives, and avoid drugs. The difference is that whereas the Persian aristocracy does this as an example for the lower classes, the American aristocracy actively encourages the lower classes to consume themselves in cheap luxury and sensual dissipation.
September 6, 2025
QotD: Leadership training for Persian nobles
September 5, 2025
QotD: Hillary Clinton in the White House
As some of you know, I was the Air Force Military Aide for Bill Clinton, lived in the White House, traveled everywhere they traveled, and carried the “nuclear football”. As such, I was always in close proximity to both Bill and Hill.
Among the military who served in the White House and the professional White House staff, the Clinton administration was infamously known for its lack of professionalism and courtesy, though few ever spoke about it. But when it came to rudeness, it was Hillary Clinton who was the most feared person in the administration. She set the tone. From the very first day in my assignment.
When I first arrived to work in the White House, my predecessor warned me. “You can get away with pissing off Bill but if you make her mad, she’ll rip your heart out.” I heeded those words. I did make him mad a few times, but I never really pissed her off. I knew the ramifications. I learned very quickly that the administration’s day-to-day character, whether inside or outside of DC, depended solely on the presence or absence of Hillary. Her reputation preceded her. We used to say that when Hillary was gone, it was a frat party. When she was home, it was Schindler’s List.
In my first few days on the job, and remember I essentially lived there, I realized there were different rules for Hillary. She instructed the senior staff, including me, that she didn’t want to be forced to encounter us. We were instructed that “whenever Mrs. Clinton is moving through the halls, be as inconspicuous as possible”. She did not want to see “staff” and be forced to “interact” with anyone. No matter their position in the building. Many a time, I’d see mature, professional adults, working in the most important building in the world, scurrying into office doorways to escape Hillary’s line of sight. I’d hear whispering, “She’s coming, she’s coming!” I could be walking down a West Wing hallway, midday, busier than hell, people doing the administration’s work whether in the press office, medical unit, wherever. She’d walk in and they’d scatter. She was the Nazi schoolmarm and the rest of us were expected to hide as though we were kids in trouble. I wasn’t a kid, I was a professional officer and pilot. I said “I’m not doing that”.
There was also a period of time when she attempted to ban military uniforms in the White House. It was the reelection year of 1996, and she was trying to craft the narrative that the military was not a priority in the Clinton administration. As a military aide, carrying the football, and working closely with the Secret Service, I objected to that. It simply wasn’t a matter of her political agenda; it was national security. If the balloon went up, the Secret Service would need to find me as quickly as possible. Seconds matter. Finding the aide in military uniform made complete sense. Besides, what commander in chief wouldn’t want to advertise his leadership and command? She finally relented because the Secret Service weighed in.
The Clintons are corrupt beyond words. Hillary is evil, vindictive, and profane. Hillary is a bitch.
Buzz Patterson, Twitter, 2025-05-17.
September 4, 2025
QotD: The development of the “halftrack” during the interwar period
What drove the differences in tank development between countries were differences between how each of those countries imagined using their tanks, that is differences in tank doctrine. Now we should be clear here that there were some fundamental commonalities between the major schools of tank thinking: in just about all cases tanks were supposed to support infantry in the offensive by providing armor and direct fire support, including knocking out enemy tanks. Where doctrine differed is exactly how that would be accomplished: France’s doctrine of “Methodical Battle” generally envisaged tanks moving at the speed of mostly foot infantry and being distributed fairly evenly throughout primarily infantry formations. That led to tanks that were fairly slow with limited range but heavily armored, often with just a one-man turret (which was a terrible idea, but the doctrine reasoned you wouldn’t need more in a slow-moving combat environment). Of course this worked poorly in the event.
More successful maneuver warfare doctrines recognized that the tank needed infantry to perform its intended function (it has to have infantry to support) but that tanks could now move fast enough and coordinate well enough (with radios) that any supporting arms like infantry or artillery needed to move a lot faster than walking speed to keep up. Both German “maneuver warfare” (Bewegungskrieg) and Soviet “Deep Operations” (or “Deep Battle”) doctrine saw the value in concentrating their tanks into powerful striking formations that could punch hard and move fast. But tanks alone are very vulnerable and in any event to attack effectively they need things like artillery support or anti-air protection. So it was necessary to find ways to allow those arms to keep up with the tanks (and indeed, a “Panzer divsion” is not only or even mostly made up of tanks!).
At the most basic level, one could simply put the infantry on trucks or other converted unarmored civilian vehicles, making “motorized” infantry, but […] part of the design of tanks is to allow them to go places that conventional civilian vehicles designed for roads cannot and in any event an unarmored truck is a large, vulnerable tempting target on the battlefield.
The result is the steady emergence of what are sometimes jokingly called “battle taxis” – specialized armored vehicles designed to allow the infantry to keep up with the tanks so that they can continue to be mutually supporting, while being more off-road capable and less vulnerable than a truck. In WWII, these sorts of vehicles were often “half-tracks” – semi-armored, open-topped vehicles with tires on the front wheels and tracks for the back wheels, though the British “Universal Carrier” was fully tracked. Crucially, while these half-tracks might mount a heavy machine gun for defense, providing fire support was not their job; being open-topped made them particularly vulnerable to air-bursting shells and while they were less vulnerable to fire than a truck, they weren’t invulnerable by any means. The intended use was to deposit infantry at the edge of the combat area, which they’d then move through on foot, not to drive straight through the fight.
The particular vulnerability of the open-top design led to the emergence of fully-enclosed armored personnel carriers almost immediately after WWII in the form of vehicles like the M75 Armored Infantry Vehicle (though the later M113 APC was eventually to be far more common) and the Soviet BTRs (“Bronetransporter” or “armored transport”), beginning with the BTR-40; Soviet BTRs tended to be wheeled whereas American APCs tend to be tracked, something that also goes for their IFVs (discussed below). These vehicles often look to a journalist or the lay observer like a tank, but they do not function like tanks. The M113 APC, for instance, has just about 1.7 inches of aluminum-alloy armor, compared to the almost four inches of much heavier steel armor on the contemporary M60 “Patton” tank. So while these vehicles are armored, they are not intended to stick in the fight and are vulnerable to much lighter munitions than contemporary tank would be.
At the same time, it wasn’t just the infantry that needed to be able to keep up: these powerful striking units (German Panzer divisions, Soviet mechanized corps or US armored divisions, etc.) needed to be able to also bring their heavy weaponry with them. At the start of WWII, artillery, anti-tank guns and anti-air artillery remained almost entirely “towed” artillery – that is, it was pulled into position by a truck (or frequently in this period still by horses) and emplaced (“unlimbered”) to be fired. Such systems couldn’t really keep up with the tanks they needed to support and so we see those weapons also get mechanized into self-propelled artillery and anti-air (and for some armies, tank destroyers, although the tank eventually usurps this role entirely).
Self-propelled platforms proved to have another advantage that became a lot more important over time: they could fire and then immediately reposition. Whereas a conventional howitzer has to be towed into position, unlimbered, set up, loaded, fired, then limbered again before it can move, something like the M7 Priest can drive itself into position, fire almost immediately and then immediately move. This maneuver, called “shoot-and-scoot” (or, more boringly, “fire-and-displace”) enables artillery to avoid counter-battery fire (when an army tries to shut down enemy artillery by returning fire with its own artillery). As artillery got more accurate and especially with the advent of anti-artillery radars, being able to shoot-and-scoot became essential.
Now while self-propelled platforms were tracked (indeed, often using the same chassis as the tanks they supported), they’re not tanks. They’re designed primarily for indirect fire (there is, of course, a sidebar to be written here on German “assault guns” – Sturmgeschütz – and their awkward place in this typology, but let’s keep it simple), that is firing at a high arc from long range where the shell practically falls on the target and thus are expected to be operating well behind the lines. Consequently, their armor is generally much thinner because they’re not designed to be tanks, but to play the same role that towed artillery (or anti-air, or rocket artillery, etc.) would have, only with more mobility.
So by the end of WWII, we have both tanks of various weight-classes, along with a number of tank-like objects (APCs, self-propelled artillery and anti-air) which are not tanks but are instead meant to allow their various arms to keep up with the tanks as part of a combined arms package.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: When is a ‘Tank’ Not a Tank?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-05-06.
September 3, 2025
QotD: The distance between NHS PR and NHS reality
It wasn’t difficult to promote such historiography by using horror stories from the past, stories which were perfectly plausible because almost any conceivable system will give rise to such stories. If, per impossibile, a new system were to replace the NHS, it would not be difficult to justify it by reference to horror stories, whether or not the new system was better. A war of anecdotes, while always gratifying to the human mind, is not the way to decide important questions such as the superiority or inferiority of a system of health care. Only anecdotes that also illustrate statistical trends or truths are valuable in such a context.
The statistics are not favourable to the NHS, at least if one chooses reasonable standards of comparison, namely other European countries. The results are not disastrous, but they are not good either. The NHS has failed even in its egalitarian goal: the gap between the health of the richest and poorest in society has only grown under its dispensation. And yet the belief in its levelling effect persists.
The propaganda in favour of the NHS has been so successful that it now accords with the sentiments of the population, a triumph that no communist regime achieved despite herculean efforts at indoctrination. The triumph has been achieved without compulsion or violence and ought to be an interesting case for political scientists who study the successful inculcation of political mythology. Of course, the danger of such a study would be that it might induce doubt or cynicism about other political mythologies, and we all need such mythologies to live by.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Worshipping the NHS”, New English Review, 2020-05-07.
September 2, 2025
QotD: “Fixers” and “minders” for foreign visitors
Ted Campbell, “A new front in Cold War 2.0”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2020-06-26.
September 1, 2025
QotD: The Ivy League
The Ivies are now what they’ve pretty much always been — the equivalent of those Higher Party Academies in Moscow. They’re finishing schools for the Apparat. Oh sure, you can probably find a graduate of Ohio State or some such place at Quantico or Foggy Bottom … but I promise you, he hears about it every single day of his life. If they don’t actually teach classes called “How to be a Toady in the DOJ” and “Catching a Senator’s Farts” at Dartmouth, they might as well.
Take your Basic College Girl, make her unisex, crank her up way past eleven on meth and steroids, and that’s the typical Ivy League grad. And they all go directly into Government. Just in case you still cherished some vague hope we could vote our way out of this, remember that guys like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were the absolute best the Ivy League has produced in the modern era. The Democratic People’s Republic of Vietnam says hi!
Severian, “First Mailbag of the New Year”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-07.
Update, 2 September: 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.
August 31, 2025
QotD: The “working” world
In other words, at least a fifth of our working time is spent doing nothing, or rather nothing productive. Most people are incapable of doing nothing, in the strict sense that a meditator does nothing. Moreover, much of their activity may not merely be unproductive but positively counterproductive, in so far as most people at work feel obliged to do something, and by far the easiest thing for them to do with their superfluous time is to obstruct others, to have unnecessary meetings and so forth.
If taken seriously, not only offices, but millions of journeys to offices, would become unnecessary, pollution would decline and leisure time would increase. This latter would be a disaster, since most people do not know what to do with themselves as it is. It is for this reason that work is not arranged as efficiently as possible, but its productive aspect is diluted by myriad unnecessary tasks — unnecessary, that is, from the narrow point of view of production. Except in the factories of the East, where production is all, a great deal of work is designed to keep us occupied while we produce nothing. It ameliorates boredom and prevents the bad behaviour in which boredom results.
Anthony Daniels, “The Pleasant Embrace of Fear”, Quadrant, 2020-05-06.
August 30, 2025
QotD: SaaS – software as an “intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches”
But my friend @DrInsensitive reports that the enshittification is accelerating. He says that in addition to a lot of tediously stupid UI changes, his most recent upgrade of CorelDraw now spams ads at him even when CorelDraw itself is not running! Furthermore the plague of microtransactions that has afflicted AA games for years is spreading — the set of free fill patterns for rectangles that his old version had is gone, instead when he tries to fill a rectangle he gets a pop-up invitation to buy an extra-cost feature pack of them.
When one asshole vendor thinks they’ve successfully numbed their user base into accepting this kind of crap, others immediately follow. We’ve seen this movie before, we know how it ends — with applications, like games, designed to be deliberately frustrating and low-level awful, intended to give you itches that you can only scratch by buying their endless parade of “enhancements”.
I’m sure a surcharge to suppress the spammy CorelDraw ads won’t be long in coming. And soon after that it will be everywhere.
If this goes on, open-source software will finally win the desktop not because it’s gotten enough better but because closed-source desktop applications have reached final form as an intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches.
This is not the way I was looking forward to winning.
ESR, Twitter, 2025-03-22.
August 29, 2025
QotD: The early “Motte and Bailey” castles
But as noted, the personal manor home of a significant noble (the rank in this case is often a “castellan”, literally the keeper of a castle, so entrusted by one of the more powerful nobles who holds sway over a larger territory; the castellan has the job of holding the castle and administering the countryside around it) is also an administrative center, managing the extraction of agricultural surplus from the countryside and also a military base, housing the physical infrastructure for that noble’s retinue, which again is the fundamental building block of larger armies. Which means that it is going to need more structures to house those functions: stables for horses, storehouses for food, possibly food processing facilities (bakeries, mills) and living space both for retainers (be they administrators or military retainers) and for the small army of servants such a household expects. Those structures (to the degree they can’t exist in the keep) are put in the bailey, a wider enclosed part of the settlement constructed at the base of the motte. As with the motte, the bailey is typically enclosed only by a wooden palisade; naturally that means the most valuable things (the physical treasury, the lord’s family) go in the keep on the motte, while the more space-demanding but less valuable things go in the bailey. There is a lot of room for variation in this basic type, but for now the simple version will serve.
The resulting fortification seems almost paradoxically vulnerable. The bailey, after all, is protected only by a ditch and a wooden palisade which a determined work-party could breach with just iron axes and an afternoon to kill. The core defensive motte with its keep adds perhaps only one more palisade and a steep climb. But in fact, these relatively modest defenses have greatly increased the cost of attacking this settlement. The motte and bailey castle, at least in its early wooden form, won’t stand up to a determined assault by a large and well-coordinated enemy, but that isn’t its purpose. Instead, the purpose of the motte and bailey castle is to raise the cost of an assault such that a potential opponent must bring a significant force and make a careful, well-planned assault; this the motte and bailey accomplishes quite well, which explains the long durability of the basic design, with stone versions of the motte and bailey persisting into the 15th century.
The quick mounted raid is now impossible; precisely because it will take a solid afternoon to breach the defenses, there is little hope of surprising the defenders. At the same time, the ditches will make any such work party vulnerable to missile fire (arrows, yes, but also javelins or just large rocks) from the palisade. And most of all, taking the place now demands you coordinate a work party, with some of your attackers splitting up to suppress the defenders, some making sure to block the exits so the defenders don’t rush out and attack your work party directly, and still more of your attackers in the work party itself. These very basic defenses have suddenly taken you from a position where a bit of surprise and rough numerical parity was enough to contemplate an assault to a position where you need several times as many attackers (for each of those divisions needs to be large enough to confidently win against the defenders if assailed).
Perhaps most importantly, the basic structure of this defense demands that you do this multiple times in sequence. We’ve already discussed the value of defense-in-depth, but in brief, every attack is at its strongest in the moment after it jumps off: everyone is alive, in the right positions, at the right time, coordinated and at least in theory clear on their objectives. Every movement and action beyond this point diminishes the power of the effort as coordination breaks down, attackers are killed and things break; this is what Clausewitz terms (drink!) friction – the unpredictable interaction of probabilities takes their toll on any plan, no matter how carefully designed. This is, by the by, more true in real warfare, where coordination is limited by communications technology, than it is in film or video games, where armies appear to mostly communicate by some form of instantaneous telepathy (it is amazing just how many clever sounding movie or game assault plans fall apart once you imagine trying to coordinate them with nothing more than shouting, or even a radio). As more and more things turn out unexpectedly or have to be improvised, the plan slowly shakes apart until eventually all of the momentum is lost.
The basic structure of a motte and bailey castle exploits this feature of warfare, forcing an attacker to overcome a series of obstacles in sequence, all while in contact with the enemy. Recall that this is a defense which really doesn’t envisage enemy artillery (because armies with lots of effective siege artillery were not common in the often small-scale warfare of the period; that’s not to say they didn’t exist, but if your motte and bailey castle forces the enemy to only attack with a big, expensive army that can build catapults, it has done its job, not the least because most possible enemies won’t have that capability at all), so an attacker is going to have to breach each layer in sequence while in contact with the defense and to pierce them all more or less “in one go”. Consequently, taking the castle by storm means crossing (and probably filling in) at least one deep ditch, breaching a palisade under fire, then moving up a steep hill under fire, then breaching another palisade, at the end of all of which, the attacker must arrive at the keep with enough force and cohesion to take it. All of that is going to take a substantial attack and a lot of coordination and most potential attackers, the defender may hope, will lack either the resources or the determination to go through so much effort, especially as they are likely to have to do it multiple times: being entirely wooden, motte and bailey castles were fairly cheap and so a large territory could have quite a lot of them (note on the Bayeux Tapestry how William has to take several such castles in order to capture Conan II of Britanny). Each motte and bailey castle thus raises the cost of trying to seize control of the territory; collectively they make that cost prohibitive.
Of course our principle of “antagonistic co-evolution” is not done and the vulnerabilities of a wooden motte and bailey castle are fairly clear and easy to exploit. For one, the wooden palisade is mostly a blocking element, rather than a fighting position; attackers that reach the wall can actually use it as cover while tearing it down or setting it on fire. The entire setup, being made of wood, is vulnerable to fire but also to any kind of even-quite-modest catapult. And quite naturally, any military leader (which is to say, the military aristocracy which was emerging at the very same time as these castles) is going to want to build the kind of capabilities which will allow for successful castle assaults because, as we’ve already noted, castles function more or less as the “nails” on the map which hold down the canvas of revenue extraction and military power.
Which in turn means evolving castle design to resist the methods by which a motte and bailey castle might fall. The most immediate change is in building material: wooden walls can only be so high, so thick and so resistant to fire. Stone, though far more expensive, offers advantages on all three fronts. And so, already in the late 10th century, we start to see stone keeps and gatehouses (supporting still wooden palisades); full stone castles would soon follow.
As an aside, one solution to this problem which doesn’t much appear in the Middle Ages but was very well-used in Iron Age Europe was what the Romans called the murus Gallicus, a hybrid wood-and-stone wall system. Gallic hillforts (called oppida) were built on hills, as the name suggests; their outer walls could be built by using earth fill to construct what was essentially a retaining wall, faced in stone, with transverse reinforcing wood beams every few feet. That created, in turn, a vertical stone surface, supported by the hillside itself, on which could be additionally built a wooden palisade for added height. The result was a very formidable fortification, assuming one had the hill to work with initially. You couldn’t knock it over or really undermine it effectively and the stone face was nearly vertical; the height of the hill meant that effective escalade meant coming up with a mole, tower or ladder taller than the hill (a thing, naturally, that the Romans ended up doing). That this style of fortification didn’t really reemerge in the Middle Ages speaks to the degree of path dependence in fortification design. Because fortification design tends to be evolutionary, it is possible in similar conditions to get very different responses as different designers try to meet the same threats by modifying different preexisting systems of fortification.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
August 28, 2025
QotD: The rise and fall of the chariot in combat
The classic chariot was driver and archer or spearmen. A friend describes them as being like a pilot and a navigator (or bomb-aimer) on a bombing run. The pilot/charioteer concentrates on getting the pair of you where you need to be (or not to be). The archer/spearmen/navigator/bomb-aimer concentrates on killing the enemy.
The most famous driver/warrior pairing in myth and literature is Krishna and Prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata and, specifically, the Bhagavad Gita. (Normally, the driver serves the warrior, but if your driver is an incarnation of Vishnu, things work differently.) The warriors of the Iliad are also chariot-driving warriors — hence scenes such as Achilles dragging Hector‘s dead body behind his chariot. Chariots were a major element in Chinese warfare up to the Warring States period. New Kingdom Egypt was very much a chariot empire, as were their great rivals, the Hittites.
Once recurve bows able to match chariot archery from horseback arrived, chariots largely disappeared from combat in the major Eurasian civilisations. This began to occur around the time of the Assyrians — who were a transitional case using both chariots and cavalry — about a thousand years before the invention of the stirrup and even longer before the stirrup’s arrival in the Mediterranean world. Lancers — the heavily armoured version of which was the cataphract — then developed as a way of dealing with horse archers.
Lorenzo Warby, “Stirrups, a rant”, Lorenzo from Oz, 2025-02-28.
August 27, 2025
QotD: A critical bureaucratic talent
Someone nudged the Archchancellor of Unseen University, who had nodded off.
“Eh? What?” said the wizard, startled into wakefulness.
“We were wondering,” said the Patrician loudly, “what you were intending to do about this dragon of yours?”
The Archchancellor was old, but a lifetime of survival in the world of competitive wizardry and the byzantine politics of Unseen University meant that he could whip up a defensive argument in a split second. You didn’t remain Archchancellor for long if you let that sort of ingenuous remark whizz past your ear.
“My dragon?” he said.
“It’s well known that the great dragons are extinct,” said the Patrician brusquely. “And, besides, their natural habitat was definitely rural. So it seems to me that this one must be mag—”
“With respect, Lord Vetinari,” said the Archchancellor, “it has often been claimed that dragons are extinct, but the current evidence, if I may make so bold, tends to cast a certain doubt on the theory. As to habitat, what we are seeing here is simply a change of behavior pattern, occasioned by the spread of urban areas into the countryside which has led many hitherto rural creatures to adopt, nay in many cases to positively embrace, a more municipal mode of existence, and many of them thrive on the new opportunities thereby opened to them. For example, foxes are always knocking over my dustbins.”
He beamed. He’d managed to get all the way through it without actually needing to engage his brain.
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!, 1989.
August 26, 2025
QotD: Problem-solving in large organizations
… except no, now Accounting chimes in, that looks like it might be a violation of some codicil to some sub-paragraph of an addendum to a regulation, better check with Compliance. But before you can do that, the Division Managers get into it, because hotshot has called his Department Supervisor over and said look, Dave, I brought in seventy gorillion dollars last fiscal year, you owe me this one …
… and so forth. Everybody with me? No one is corrupt in this scenario. Nobody’s trying to pull a fast one on anybody else. Indeed, everybody’s on the same page, and everybody has every incentive to find a solution, because all our Christmas bonuses are going to look a little nicer if the firm lands this fat client. All we’re trying to do is add one task to the existing Customer Service workflow, but it’s going to take at least a Division Manager-level meeting, if not the direct input of the Big Boss himself, to get it hammered out. It’s an exponential increase in energy expenditure.
And of course it ramifies, and of course that’s true no matter what solution you come up with. Make an exception to the workflow for this one client, and pretty soon you’re going to be making exceptions for every client — every wannabe-hotshot up in Sales is going to demand the works for every little podunk potential client. Same deal if you designate one guy from Customer Service as the dedicated exception-handler. Same deal if you create a whole new sub-unit inside Customer Service (but a lot faster). And so forth.
I’m sure everyone has had that experience, too: Watching your company lose out on a potential big client because the various Departments couldn’t get on the same page for whatever reason.
And that’s just around the office! Meaning: yeah, it’d be nice if we could land that big client, maybe see an extra hundred bucks on our Christmas bonus, but nobody’s losing any sleep over it. Well, ok, Hotshot up in Sales probably is, but even the best salesman loses far more often than he wins. He’ll get over it in a day or two, or he won’t be a salesman much longer.
But the same thing happens when it comes to stuff that matters, which is why complex societies collapse.
Severian, “Collapse II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-09.
August 25, 2025
The Sharpest Pen of the Edwardian Age | Who Was Saki?
Vault of Lost Tales
Published 5 Apr 2025Delve into the razor-sharp world of Saki in this engaging author talk exploring his chillingly clever short story, “The Open Window”. Discover the man behind the pen name — H.H. Munro — and uncover how his biting satire, Edwardian upbringing, and darkly humorous worldview shaped this unforgettable tale. Perfect for fans of classic literature, Oscar Wilde-style wit, and unsettling plot twists, this literary deep dive offers historical context, thematic insights, and just enough spookiness to keep you on edge. Whether you’re a student, a short story lover, or just curious about the mind that created one of literature’s most deviously satisfying endings, this talk is your open invitation.
“Saki”, the wickedly sharp pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, masked a man whose wit could slice through Edwardian society like a silver butter knife through scandal.
Born in 1870 in British Burma and raised in England, Munro brought an acerbic wit to the drawing rooms of empire, crafting tales that balanced dry humor, social critique, and sudden, often shocking twists. Writing under the name “Saki”, he produced short stories that mocked the pretensions of the upper class, exposed the darkness beneath genteel facades, and made readers laugh — sometimes uncomfortably. His life, marked by loss, repressed identity, and service in World War I, ended tragically in 1916 on the battlefield, but his stories continue to delight and disturb to this day.
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QotD: The rise of the state … the rise of the egregore
Peasantries with long experience of on-the-ground statecraft have always understood that the state is a recording, registering, and measuring machine. So when a government surveyor arrives with a plane table, or census takers come with their clipboards and questionnaires to register households, the subjects understand that trouble in the form of conscription, forced labor, land seizures, head taxes, or new taxes on cropland cannot be far behind. They understand implicitly that behind the coercive machinery lie piles of paperwork: lists, documents, tax rolls, population registers, regulations, requisitions, orders — paperwork that is for the most part mystifying and beyond their ken. The firm identification in their minds between paper documents and the source of their oppression has meant that the first act of many peasant rebellions has been to burn down the local records office where these documents are housed. Grasping the fact that the state saw its land and subjects through record keeping, the peasantry implicitly assumed that blinding the state might end their woes. As an ancient Sumerian saying aptly puts it: “You can have a king and you can have a lord, but the man to fear is the tax collector”.
This “state as egregore” language recurs throughout the book. Scott writes that the state “arises by harnessing the late Neolithic grain and manpower module as a basis of control and appropriation”. It “battens itself” on the concentration of grain and manpower to “maximiz[e] the possibilities of appropriation, stratification, and inequality”, and with its birth “thousands of cultivators, artisans, traders, and laborers [are] … repurposed as subjects and … counted, taxed, conscripted, put to work, and subordinated to a new form of control”.1 But it’s vital to remember that this metaphor is just a metaphor: the state isn’t actually an alien brainworm or a memetic infohazard that will hijack your neocortex the moment you set eyes on a triumphal arch and force you to spend the rest of your life making lists of things and renaming roads with numbers;2 it’s just an institution that people have invented, because hierarchy and inequality are inescapable facts of life in a society of any scale and the state is a particularly effective bundle of social technologies to leverage those hierarchies. There’s a reason that, after states had their “pristine” invention at least three separate times, they’ve proliferated across every part of the world that can support them!
But more interesting than “are we better off with the state?” is to ask ourselves, as Ronald Blythe does in Akenfield, what has been lost. Here Scott offers some fascinating musings on the way not merely the state but the entire agriculturalist life-world limits us:
We might … think of hunters and gatherers as having an entire library of almanacs: one for natural stands of cereals, subdivided into wheats, barleys and oats; one for forest nuts and fruits, subdivided into acorns, beechnuts, and various berries; one for fishing, subdivided by shellfish, eels, herring, and shad; and so on. … one might think of hunters and gatherers as attentive to the distinct metronome of a great diversity of natural rhythms. Farmers, especially fixed-field, cereal-grain farmers, are largely confined to a single food web, and their routines are geared to its particular tempo. … It is no exaggeration to say that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.
The Neolithic Revolution, he argues, was like the Industrial Revolution, a great boost to human productivity and social complexity but at the same time a de-skilling. The surface area of our contact with the world shrank from hundreds of plants and animals, used in different ways at different times of year, to a mere handful of domesticates whose biological clocks became the measure of our lives. Of course, the modern contact area is smaller still — dimensional lumber purchased from a store in place of felling and milling your own trees, natural gas at the turn of a knob with nary a need to build a fire — and is sometimes reduced all the way to your fingertip on a smooth glass screen. The ease and efficiency are undeniable, and I’m sure a forager or premodern farmer would kill for Home Depot and seamless pizza delivery (I certainly wouldn’t want to give them up). But there has been “a contraction of our species’ attention to and practical knowledge of the natural world” because that knowledge and attention is no longer necessary, and I think that Scott is right to suggest that there is something richer about a more extensive involvement with the world. That said, Scott’s case is somewhat overstated: after all, even hunter-gatherers have specialized craftsmen who engage deeply with particular materials at the expense of other endeavors, and farmers3 have a far more intimate relationship with their animals than a hunter does with his many different kinds of prey. Similarly, farmers may be on one particular bit of land but (especially in a preindustrial context) all that plowing and hedging and draining and spiling, not to mention the gathering of various woodland foodstuffs, can rival forager familiarity when it comes to their bit of landscape. (My new favorite poem is Kipling’s “The Land“, on just this idea.)
Scott closes the book with an elegy for the “late barbarians”, who had the best of both worlds: healthier and longer-lived than farmers, and with greater leisure, they were “not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of sedentary agriculture and the state” but were still able to benefit tremendously from lucrative trade with those states. Unfortunately, much of that trade was in weaker non-state peoples whom they captured and sold as agricultural slaves, thereby “reinforc[ing] the state core at the expense of their fellow barbarians”, and much of the rest was in their own martial skills as mercenaries (which of course also served to protect and expand the influence of the state). It’s a salutary reminder for the aspiring modern barbarian: the best place to be is just outside the purview of the state, where you can reap its benefits4 without being under its control. But beware, because in a world of states even those “outside the map” must fill niches created by the state. It’s great to have a cushy work-from-home laptop job that lets you live somewhere nice, with trees and no screaming meth-heads on your subway commute, but more land comes under the plow every year, and your time, too, may come.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Against the Grain, by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-21.
- And of course Scott argues that the state is a parasite in the most literal way, since the word derives from the Greek παρά “beside” + σῖτος “grain.”
- Although this would be a pretty sweet novel, sort of a Tim Powers alt-history: anarcho-primitivist occultists go back in time to ancient Mesopotamia to destroy the me of kingship and render the state metaphysically impossible. Someone write this.
- Like Scott, in fact, who keeps sheep on 46 acres of Connecticut. There’s a funny little aside in the book where he complains about people using “sheeplike” in a derogatory sense, given that we’ve spent several millennia selectively breeding sheep to behave that way.
- Better yet, wait for the peasants to do the reaping then ride in on your shaggy little ponies and take it all. Uh, metaphorically.
August 24, 2025
QotD: Police culture
Cops form a culture all to themselves, like professional soldiers, and usually have little to do with those who are not cops. They do call us “civilians”. […] They also call us “assholes” and say that the public just consists of criminals who haven’t been caught yet. I know because I was there at one time.
Yeah, I understand the theory that they’re civilians, too. I repeat that it’s bullshit. What they are, in fact, is an occupying military force, with strategic bases in every hamlet in the nation — which is why they and their hangers-on lie to us and possibly to themselves about being civilians, too.
They are the very standing army that the Founding Fathers were afraid of.
L. Neil Smith, “Letter from L. Neil Smith” Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-05-01.
