Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.
Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.
In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.
It collapsed almost immediately.
The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?
Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.
American inventor Josiah Warren, one of the country’s earliest libertarian thinkers, was there. He watched the community fail from the inside and later wrote about why. His conclusion: “The difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity”. The more the community demanded unity, the more it fractured. Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics.
When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.
Owen finally admitted defeat in 1827. In his farewell address, he blamed the settlers themselves, saying they were “unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality”.
Translation: the system would have worked if only people had been different.
Every socialist regime since has offered some version of that excuse.
His own son, Robert Dale Owen, put it plainly years later: “All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall”. He had lived through the collapse. He knew what killed it.
Every socialist experiment since New Harmony has ended the same way, and for the same reasons.
Prices communicate what things are worth. Ownership creates responsibility for maintaining them. When both are abolished, production collapses because no one can calculate what to make or repair.
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-09.
October 11, 2026
October 10, 2026
QotD: JFK’s soft coup to destroy Diefenbaker and install Pearson
His name was Lou Harris. He was John F. Kennedy’s personal pollster, one of the handful of men who had just put a president in the White House, and he was moving under a false identity because the job he had come north to do could never be seen to be done. He had come to take down the Government of Canada.
It worked. Within months, John Diefenbaker’s nationalist Conservative government was gone, and the Liberal campaign that replaced it had been quietly run on American polling, American media tactics, and American psychological warfare, with Harris directing from the shadows. No shots were fired. No tanks crossed the border. Most Canadians lived out their lives never knowing it happened at all.
That is not a theory. This is documented history, laid out in painstaking detail in John Boyko’s Cold Fire: Kennedy’s Northern Front, and once you know it, you cannot look at this country the same way again. Because here is the question nobody has had the nerve to ask in the sixty years since: if Washington toppled a Canadian government in 1963 and paid no price of any kind, why on earth would it have stopped?
It didn’t stop. That is the argument of this essay, and I intend to prove it with receipts. What began as a Kennedy operation against one stubborn prime minister became the permanent condition of Canadian politics. Blue America captured our governing party, its money, its methods, its personnel, and eventually its policy. Red America, more quietly, built our opposition, supplying the ideas, the operatives, and the reflexes of what now calls itself Canadian conservatism. Two parties, two foreign patrons, one country in between, and not one law against any of it. By the end, you will understand why every election feels like choosing between American factions. Because it is. And you will have, in plain terms, the only program that can end it.
Start where the occupation started: with the prime minister who said no.
Diefenbaker’s crime, in Washington’s eyes, was sovereignty. JFK despised him for defending Canadian autonomy, and teamed up with Lester B. Pearson’s Liberals to permanently rewire this country’s trajectory. Harris and his fake passport were only the covert half. The overt half played out in public, and it is somehow more shocking. The breaking point was Diefenbaker’s refusal to accept American nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missiles Washington had parked on our soil, and refusing to put our forces on alert on Washington’s schedule during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He insisted a Canadian government would decide these things in Ottawa. For this, on January 30, 1963, the United States State Department did something no ally had ever done to another: it issued a press release publicly calling the Prime Minister of Canada a liar about the state of defence negotiations. A foreign power’s foreign ministry, openly contradicting our head of government, in writing, to force his hand. Within a week, Diefenbaker’s government fell on a non-confidence vote. Within months, Kennedy’s friend Ben Bradlee put Diefenbaker on the cover of Newsweek in a hit piece so vicious it read like an obituary. The pollster in the shadows, the press release in the open, the friendly magazine on the newsstand. Every layer of American power, aimed at one Canadian who said no.
What happened to Canada was not an isolated incident. It was one front in a global campaign of regime change Washington ran throughout the 1960s. The same decade they were meddling in Ottawa, they were toppling governments worldwide to secure their sphere of influence. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration laid the groundwork for the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, finalized in Mobutu Sese Seko’s military coup. In 1961, the Kennedy administration financed race riots and engineered an electoral coup in British Guiana to depose the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan. By 1963, Washington was backing the violent coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. A year later, the Johnson administration ran Operation Brother Sam, providing military backing to the coup in Brazil that replaced President João Goulart with a military dictatorship.
By installing Pearson, Washington broke Canada’s nationalist resistance using the exact playbook it deployed on developing nations, locking us permanently into a continentalist framework.
And look at what the new management delivered, and how fast. Within two years of taking office, Pearson gave Washington the warheads Diefenbaker had refused. In 1965 he signed the Auto Pact, integrating the commanding heights of Canadian manufacturing into the American industrial system, the economic annexation the National Policy had been built to prevent, accomplished with a signature. And in the same year came the new flag. Understand what that meant to the men who fought it. The Red Ensign, the banner Canadians had carried up Vimy Ridge and across the beaches of Normandy, was struck, and with it the visible sign that this country belonged to a British inheritance rather than an American continent. Diefenbaker fought the flag change with everything he had left, and he was mocked for it as a relic, because the men mocking him understood exactly what he understood: a country’s symbols are its memory, and a country stripped of its memory will accept a new identity from whoever supplies one. The supplier was already chosen.
That 1963 intervention laid the structural tracks for Pierre Trudeau to dismantle our traditional British and Loyalist inheritance entirely, replacing it with official multiculturalism, a weaponized Charter, and a hyper-progressive legal order. The horrors you see today are not random accidents. They are the long-term realization of the colony Kennedy and Pearson engineered decades ago.
But here is what even the people who know the Diefenbaker story get wrong. They think 1963 was a coup against Canada’s right. It was bigger than that. It was a proof of concept. Washington learned that Canadian politics could be run from outside, cheaply, legally, and without consequence. And in the sixty years since, both American political tribes have taken the lesson. Blue America perfected the Pearson playbook and used it to capture our government. Red America ran a quieter operation and captured the opposition. Not two conspiracies. One condition. A satellite country whose entire political spectrum, left flank and right flank, answers to a foreign capital’s internal quarrels.
Upper Canadian Cavalier, “The Occupied Dominion”, Upper Canadian Cavalier, 2026-07-06.
October 9, 2026
QotD: Polis magistrates – Archons
Numbers however is the first key difference here. Most modern governments have a single magistrate – a president or prime minister – from whom flows all executive power, delegated down to subordinates who are often unelected and whose power thus derives from the one chief magistrate at the top. In some cases, that power is less vested in the person of a prime minister as it is in the collective cabinet (where the cabinet wields power and notionally takes responsibility collectively), but there is still one line of power, reaching from the people, through a single executive person or body, then down to many functionaries whose role is to implement the will of the single executive.
This is not how ancient Greek magistrates (or indeed, ancient magistrates generally) worked.
Instead, Greek magistrates were a product of efforts to weaken royal power by dividing it, which of course only works if executive power was truly divided, that is vested in different autonomous figures. Thus it is important to not to see these magistrates as organized into a “chain of command” or even engaged in collective decision-making. Instead, the best way to understand most magistrates is to imagine them as individual actors whose powers are restricted to a single sphere of action (that is, they have a specific job) and that a city might have many of them. Thus there isn’t one executive power in a polis, but many. Even in cases where magistrates function as a board, it is often the case that each member of that board carries the full power of the magistracy – it is a board of ten magistrates, not a board of ten acting as a magistrate, which means the individuals can act independent of the board.
So instead of one executive, what you have in a polis are many independent, little executives, each with a fragment of the overall executive power. And if you are thinking, “that sounds like an awkward system, since magistrates might be working at cross-purposes with each other”, well, yes. There’s a reason we don’t generally structure governments this way. But the Greeks did and they liked it that way, because this sort of structure keeps the powers of the magistrates in check.
So what might the high magistrates of a polis do exactly? Though there are many different configurations for high magistrates, they tend to do the same basic set of jobs (again, split up usually). You need magistrates to 1) lead the armies and fleets (not usually a distinct job; strategoi are generals and admirals), 2) manage and organize the law courts (which may or may not include making summary judgements in minor cases), and 3) conduct key religious rituals on behalf of the community. Those who have been here a while will note how this maps on neatly to the three roles of kingship (chief general, chief judge, chief priest), though the shift from royal law maker-enforcer-judge to “court scheduling specialist” is a meaningful one.
So at Athens, we have the initial three archons which slot neatly into these roles: the polemarch (πολέμαρχος, polemarchos, lit, “war-leader”) was in charge of the army, the archon basileus (ἄρχων βασιλεύς, lit, “king archon“) who filled in for the king in religious rituals which required his presence but had no broader non-religious powers, and finally the eponymous archon, who lent his name to the year (“in the year of the archonship of so-and-so” being a standard dating form) and ran the courts. It seems fairly clear that early on the eponymous archon often stood as judge and initially also presided over the meetings of the Athenian boule and ekklesia as its chief magistrate (and so supervising the law making process as well).
Over time these offices in Athens were weakened or supplanted, breaking power up further in order to buttress the democracy against both oligarchic power (remember: strong magistrates are a tool of “the few”) and tyranny (strong magistrates have a good position to overthrow the democracy and institute a tyranny). The eponymous archon slowly lost most of his power; the boule came to be a select council which ran the ekklesia and in turn there was an even smaller select council, the prytaneis who acted as a select of the boule and presided over it. Meanwhile, the polemarch became mostly an organizational, “managing the home front” figure, while the war leading role was replaced with a board of ten generals, the strategoi. The strategoi ended up being a pretty key office. As everyone understood you needed generals with expertise, it was an office where one could be elected multiple times in succession and was never determined by lot the way the archonships were; that meant a capable politician could secure a permanent role in the state by getting elected over and over again as strategos; this is for instance the position Pericles held.
As for the courts, these got bigger even as the eponymous archon got smaller and so the Athenians created six lesser archons, the thesmothetai (θεσμοθέται, sing. θεσμοθέτης; “law-giver”) who operated the courts (but did not dispense justice; these are jury courts). Still the eponymous archon kept some vestigial legal powers, like a supervisory role over the epikleroi, sometimes translated as “heiresses” (although that’s not quite right – they weren’t and indeed under Athenian law couldn’t inherit, but rather property was passing through them to legally valid inheritors – they were required to marry into their paternal line in order to generate a husband who could be such a valid inheritor – which in most poleis had to be male.).
At Sparta, the ephors and the two hereditary Spartan kings filled the role of high magistrates; the existence of the two hereditary kings is, we know, quite unusual but the board of ephors is not. We know that several other poleis had ephors and evidently on Crete they had kosmoi (described by Aristotle but epigraphically attested at Eleutherna, Eltynia, Gortyn, Knosos, Lyktos, etc.; Inventory 1159, 1160, 1164, 1169, 1175) whose powers were apparently much like the ephors. Ephors and kosmoi appear invariably as boards of officials with a wide range of executive powers: the Spartan ephors (of whom we are best informed) handled most foreign policy, served as a high court and could propose legislation to the assembly. At Sparta the ephors had the job of making sure the kings did their job, including their religious role, but also had some of their own ritual functions, like the ritual declaring of war on the helots (Plut. Lyc. 28.4). As you might imagine, a board of magistrates with such wide-ranging powers tended to be tools of “the few” and indeed Aristotle notes that the Spartan ephors were easy to bribe (Arist. Pol. 2.1271a) while the Cretan kosmoi monopolized power to produce an effectively hereditary oligarchy (Arist. Pol. 2.1272b). Also notably it seems like one of the ephors or kosmoi was always eponymous, giving their name to the year just like the Athenian eponymous archon.
Athens and Sparta weren’t the only poleis with these kinds of high officials, of course, but as noted the magistrates of other poleis are often very poorly attested. Thebes had an eponymous archon (of unclear powers) and at least two polemarchs by 382 (Inventory, 455); the Boeotian confederation, of which Thebes was the leading power, also had seven Boiotarchs (Βοιωτάρχης, a fusion of βοιωτία (the name of the region) and that ἀρχ- root meaning “leader”), elected for a term of one year who led the combined armies of the Boeotian poleis. Argos’ assembly had a presiding magistrate attested in inscriptions, who was assisted by a secretary with a six month term of office; they also had board of five strategoi who commanded the army reported by Thucydides as well as a board of treasurers (ἀρτῦναι, artunai; Inventory, 604).
Demiourgoi (“public workers”) appear in a number of poleis, often as a board or group of magistrates (Larissa had these, Arist. Pol. 1275b; Inventory 696), though the role of demiourgoi seems to vary from polis to polis as you might expect with so general a name (at Larissa they were apparently able to make new citizens, but the title was also used for the officials of the Hellenistic-era Achaean League (a federal alliance of poleis) and the representatives of the Peloponnesian League (Dem. 18.157) among quite a few others.) That said, demiourgos is a word with a wide range of meanings, to include magistrates but also skilled workers in public employ as well as being used in a philosophical sense to mean a kind of “creator god”, so it’s a tricky word.
All told then what should you expect in terms of the high magistrates of a polis? Well, first that the key jobs here are leading the army, organizing the courts (and/or acting as a court as a board) and filling religious roles; you should expect these jobs to split over multiple magistrates. In democracies, offices that don’t require a lot of technical know-how may be selected by lot, but the rest tend to be elected (in oligarchies often from a subset of the polis, defined by wealth). In either case, magistrates serve relatively short terms, usually just one year (but sometimes a little longer or shorter). It is generally only the “specialist” offices (read: generals) that can be held multiple times consecutively. The more powerful the magistracy, the more likely it is to be organized as a board of magistrates.
Now those are the most important and central magistrates, but a large polis with thousands of politai (and even more non-citizens) is going to need a slew of other state officers to handle a lot of the day to day matters. That brings us neatly to minor magistrates …
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIb: Archons“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-24.
October 8, 2026
QotD: Headlines for modern audiences
Popcorn: you’re making it wrong. This is a classic formulation that produces both anger and curiosity. It’s confrontational and contemptuous, but you think hey, once I learn the secret, I can smirk at other people who don’t know the true way.
We talked to popcorn experts. Here’s why they say you should smear butter on your chest. This style has become the norm, and appeals to people who regard themselves as the sort of people who respect the experts. They trust the popcorn science.
The FDA has banned this poison from popcorn: here’s what we know. Then you discover there’s some 1964 rule that forbids using DDT on corn.
Gut doctor begs: stop doing this with popcorn (Picture of a doctor pointing at a cadaver with its chest blown out from the inside)
Sorry. The closest I can come is this:
If you stop eating popcorn on a regular basis, an unexpected thing happens: it becomes unappetizing. It ceases to be something you consider as “food”. It’s stuff you’d put in a box of plates to keep them from chipping.
But, you say, I make absolutely delightful popcorn with butter and salt! I don’t doubt it. Everything is better with butter and salt. You could say that popcorn is just a delivery mechanism for butter and salt. Golden, rich butter, seeping into the tiny caverns of the detonated kernel, salt falling like snow on Christmas Eve –
Hold on, be right back; I really want some popcorn now.
James Lileks, “Experts say these are the most overrated headlines; number 4 is scary”, LILEKS (James), 2026-07-06.
October 7, 2026
QotD: The cultural dominance of “Yankeedom”
So there’s Tidewater, lost and forgotten except for some guys in Virginia who still put on red jackets to hunt foxes from horseback — and maybe in slightly different voting patterns. What about the nation that won, the one that’s everywhere?
I refer, of course, to Yankeedom.
“But Jane,” you say, “Yankeedom isn’t everywhere! Scroll back up to your own map — it’s in New England, sure, and, uh, northeastern Ohio and, wow, okay, the entire Upper Midwest. But that’s not everywhere.” But ignore the map for a moment: that’s Woodard’s idea, based on settlement patterns and voting behavior. What is Yankeedom, really? What are its fundamental beliefs, its vision of how life ought to be, and where do they show up today?
Of course you know the story of Yankeedom’s founding: radical Calvinists from East Anglia, settled around the Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s and 30s, funny hats? Maybe you made one of those hats for your construction paper turkey in first grade — or, if you’re a little younger, maybe you learned a nice poem about welcoming new immigrants for a glowing future of multiculturalism and prosperity. In fact the emphasis on “the Pilgrims” in American civic mythology — never mind the traditional Thanksgiving menu, heavy on quintessentially New England dishes like pie1 — is itself a product of Yankeedom’s cultural dominance, as is the insistence in that familiar story that they left England for religious freedom. It’s true! They did! But there’s a very important final bit that we somehow leave out of the version we teach to elementary schoolers: religious freedom for themselves.
The earliest Yankees imagined their new society as a Protestant utopia, a new Zion, in which they would work out their collective salvation. Any deviation from the straight-and-narrow could doom everyone, so enforcing moral and religious conformity — through banishing heretics or, if necessary, even executing them — was of paramount importance. Yankeedom was meant to be a “city on a hill”, a model for mankind: if only they could be good enough, pure enough, and holy enough, God would bless them abundantly — and then everyone else, seeing their manifest blessings, would naturally emulate them and become holy themselves! The important thing, then, was not merely to do right but to be seen to do right, as an example to neighbors and foreigners alike. Yankeedom also put a tremendous emphasis on education (literacy was necessary to read the Word of God), encouraged subordinating the interests of the individual to the greater good of the community, and saw government as an extension of the citizenry. Government, then, since it was run by and for the people, was naturally called to propagate God’s will in a corrupt and sinful world by prohibiting or regulating immoral activities.
As Yankeedom moved west, out of the strict control of the Congregationalist ministers who dominated the New England colonies, they began to abandon their specific religious tenets. Sometimes this meant exciting new religious — the Yankee-settled western portions of New York State gave rise to such religious enthusiasms that people began to call it the “Burned-Over District“2 — but just as often it meant becoming a Methodist, Unitarian, or Baptist. Wherever they went, though, the Yankees clung to their belief that you could make earthly society resemble Heaven, or at least that there was no excuse for not trying as hard as you could. Yankees were at the heart of every push for social reform, from abolitionism and the temperance movement to Reconstruction, the minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and an end to child labor. For example, the members of New York City’s Committee of Fifteen, which militated against gambling and prostitution, were mostly Yankees or German-Jewish immigrants; none were culturally New Netherlanders.
By now this should all be sounding familiar. Heavy emphasis on education, embrace of the government regulation or prohibition of immoral behavior as the central bulwark of societal virtue, extremely visible adherence to highly specific rules and norms of behavior as proof of righteousness? Oh, look, it’s woke! It’s the ideology of the professional-managerial class, the meritocratic elite — it’s the same people with the same bumper stickers on the same Mercedes SUVs in the Whole Foods parking lot that you see in every major American city, regardless of which “nation” most of the other residents belong to.
There are two things going on here, I think: first, high-cultural capital Americans are far more mobile than they used to be. Plenty of people spend a few years in DC, then a few years in Austin, or maybe San Francisco or Boulder or Brooklyn, regardless of where they grew up. Second, and perhaps more important, is the role of education. Maintaining or improving your class position depends far more on a “good” college than it used to (witness the to-do when someone claims the distinction of Harvard on a night school degree!). The Yankee emphasis on education means that most of America’s prestigious colleges and universities are in Yankee-settled areas.3 Thus, membership in a higher stratum of society practically depends on four or eight years marinating in Yankeedom. What’s a kid from rural Nebraska to do?
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Oldtown Folks, as quoted in Albion’s Seed:
“The pie is an English institution, which, planted in American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum plies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, — pies with top crusts, and pies without, — pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when let loose in a given direction.”
For more on the history of distinctly American pies, including why they’re so different from the English pies you may have seen on The Great British Bake-Off, I highly recommend BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, which is somehow both the best history of American sweets I’ve ever read and the best cookbook for them.
- Famous alumni of the Burned-Over District include the Seventh-Day Adventists, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. (Yes, Mormons are Yankees. Obviously.) But my favorite wacky Yankee religious enthusiasm — actually in Massachusetts, where they weren’t branding people with H for heretic any more — was John Murray Spear‘s “New Motive Power”, an attempt to build an electric perpetual motion machine Jesus.
- The exceptions are generally the flagship school of a large non-Yankee region or in California, the culture of which I’ve entirely elided for reasons of brevity. Sorry. The tl;dr is that Woodard argues the “Left Coast” is a hybrid of Yankees settling the cities and Greater Appalachia in the countryside, which leads to culture fairly similar to that of Yankeedom.
October 6, 2026
QotD: The decline of academic standards over the years
Twenty years before that, and it would’ve been called “basic cultural literacy”; the kind of thing any college man — indeed, any graduate of a remotely decent high school — would know cold. I’ve written many times that the not-elite-but-certainly-very-respectable school which awarded my PhD wouldn’t have admitted me as an undergrad as late as 1960; they would’ve been sticking me in some serious remedial classes as late as 1980. Watching my buddy struggling mightily — and failing miserably — to get even the ridiculously watered-down, extremely fake and utterly gay version of this stuff across to the brown-nosing test-acers of the Current Year sent me sobbing into the arms of Jack Daniel.
Not because I would’ve done better, mind you, but because I would’ve done so much worse. The only way I got through my last few semesters in academia was to regard it as acting. The University is paying me to stand on stage and say my lines, so I’ll stand there and say them. Aside from that, all they want to do is check the appropriate box: Students have attended thus-and-such class, taught by someone with a PhD (crucial for those “best college” rankings!), and … there it is.
What actual knowledge am I supposed to be conveying? What skill set? What world view?
Category error. If it doesn’t fit on the standardized test, which is the only thing that matters to the bottom line, then it’s useless.
Severian, “On the Absurdity of Life”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-12.
October 5, 2026
QotD: Socialism and the world wars
The tragedy was that those who promised utopia generally delivered hell on earth. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism, the “grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million” for the twentieth century as a whole. The lowest estimate for the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. Mao alone, as Frank Dikötter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: two million between 1949 and 1951, another three million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the Great Leap Forward, yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. Other communist regimes around the world, including the very durable dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba, were strikingly similar in the miseries they inflicted on their own citizens.
The various socialist regimes could not even justify their murderous behavior by providing those they spared with higher living standards than their counterparts living under capitalism. On the contrary, they were economically disastrous. The collectivization of agriculture invariably reduced farming productivity. A substantial proportion of the victims of communism lost their lives because of the famines that resulted from collectivization in the Soviet Union and China. North Korea had a similarly disastrous experience. Central planning was a miserable failure for reasons long ago identified by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Janos Kornai, amongst others. Indeed, the economic performance of strictly socialist countries got worse over time because of rigidities and perverse incentives institutionalized by planning.
Moreover, the evidence is clear that, as countries moved away from socialist policies of state ownership and toward a greater reliance on market forces, they did better economically. The most striking example — but one of many — is that of China, which achieved a true great leap forward in economic output after beginning to dismantle restrictions on private initiative in 1978. After the collapse of “real existing socialism” in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was widespread recognition (the “Washington consensus”) that all countries would benefit from reducing state ownership of the economy through privatization and from lowering marginal tax rates. […] the highest marginal personal income tax rate was reduced in nearly all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
October 4, 2026
QotD: Auditors and the taxation system
One thing that’s really unfair about our tax system is that it is rigged in favor of people who have more resources. Government meddling makes it more costly to conduct business. The more complicated the regulatory burden, the more smaller companies can’t compete. Make the laws complicated enough and the only companies that stay in business are the ones who can afford to pay for twenty guys like me. (my last regular accounting job paid extremely well, and nearly everything I did was jump through government mandated hoops, filling out government mandated paperwork which nobody in the government would probably ever read)
Trump has those resources. I bet he’s got a room full of accountants, and their leader is probably a grizzled old CPA with an eye patch and a raven who sits on his shoulder. The raven also has an eye patch and an accounting degree. This man has wrestled bears, and he’s going to take advantage of every tax break in the US Code for his client, and do so gleefully, knowing that many of those laws were signed by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset. When he shows up to audit your company, he appears a flash of fire and brimstone, as a Finnish death metal band plays his theme song. He is an auditor bereft of mercy, compassion, or pity, and beneath his leathery wings serve a legion of IRS goblins, who will crawl into every nook and cranny of the Trump Corporation’s P&L looking for errors, and if a mouse so much as shits a turd large enough to unbalance that ledger, there will be hell to pay.
Is it unfair that rich guys can employ Gandalf level CPAs and take advantage of more complicated tax laws, while regular people use TurboTax? Yep. But in the meantime, as long as those tax laws are there, the rich guys would be utter fools not to take advantage of them.
Larry Correia, “No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2020-09-28.
October 3, 2026
QotD: How to besiege a trace italienne fortress
At the same time, this shift back towards defensive stalemate didn’t lead towards more fragmentation – as the castle had – because trace italienne fortresses were too expensive for any individual aristocrat to build merely to protect his house. Not merely because of the massive fortifications themselves, but the large garrisons they required, either of full-time soldiers or town militia, which were simply beyond the resources of what was left of the old medieval aristocracy. Indeed, warfare in this period (both offensive and defensive) largely proved to be beyond the resources of Europe’s newly centralizing states; the Spanish crown, for instance, went bankrupt, primarily from military expenses, in 1557, 1560, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647 and 1653.
It is part and parcel of the era that as much as building and defending a trace italienne fortress was an exercise in mathematics, so was attacking one. Because the entire point of the fortress is to project firepower – often at great distances (with cannon) – the attacker cannot simply form up outside or just set up their artillery in an open field and begin firing; they’d be cut up by counter-battery fire before they had gotten very far. So the attacker had to set up their own earthworks, which naturally being based on the same principles and weapons as the defender’s, would resemble them.
First, the attacking army would generally set up its own fortified camp, outside of cannon-shot. Because that camp needed to be resistant to enemy attack either from the garrison of a relieving army, it was likely to be built in the same style as a trace italienne fortification, albeit with earthworks and gabions (wicker baskets filled with earth) in place of the heavier stonework of the fort. The attacker then has to isolate their target from help, preventing the defenders from leaving, or supplies or reinforcements from arriving. The act of enclosing a besieged settlement in a wall is called circumvallation (recall our word vallum there; this is “walling around”). The act of constructing a line of outward facing defenses to defend that line from attack by a relieving army from behind is called contravallation. Armies in this period would do both.
The first such line of defenses was often started from the fortified camps and was built effectively out of range of the fort; this was the “first parallel”. Now, by the time this project was well along, both the defenders and the attackers could do some basic calculations. They both might have a sense of how quickly reinforcements could arrive and if they were likely to be large enough to give battle or lift the siege. Both sides also know how long their supplies will last and can probably have a decent guess of how long their opponent’s supplies will last. And at this point, they can both calculate fairly well how many meters of earthwork and trench the attackers can dig per day and how many they need to dig to complete their siege operations.
But – and this is important – no one wants this siege to come down to its conclusive, final assault. The attackers don’t want this: every day their siege army sits out here, it is eating money such that each day wasted besieging this town limits what this army can accomplish overall before supplies and money run out. Moreover, the actual assault is likely to incur very high losses on the attackers, because even with a breach, they have to cross all of that open, fire-swept ground and then force the breach in close combat – and the defenders will know exactly where they are going days in advance. On the other hand, if the defenders make the attackers go through all of that effort, danger and death and lose – and they must assume the attackers wouldn’t have laid siege if they weren’t confident they had enough men to take the breach when it comes to it – then the city would be looted, its populace raped or massacred as the attackers vent their rage on the city. This was, at the time, considered the normal result of holding out, to the point that it seems to have been general practice that it was appropriate to wait something like three days before beginning the process of getting control of an army that had breached a city in this fashion.
So once the attacker has completed that first parallel, he is going to send a message to the garrison, announcing that he has done so and offering them the chance to surrender. The standard terms for such surrender was called the “honors of war” – normally the defenders would be permitted to march out, with its flags flying, bayonets fixed, matches (for their matchlock muskets) lot on both ends and “ball in mouth” (that is, a musketball held in their mouth ready to be swiftly loaded as protection against treachery). The defeated army was generally required to turn over its arms, but generally allowed to march back to their own territory. And finally, a town that surrenders like this might have to pay a ransom, but ought to be immune from pillage. To modern readers, these sorts of rituals seem quaint, like having a battle break for tea in the midafternoon (a thing that, to be clear, did not happen), but in fact these were fairly hard-nosed considerations: generous surrender terms aimed to induce a garrison or town to surrender and so spare the attacker both the time but also the blood of storming the place, because after all the goal here isn’t to destroy the enemy garrison but to get control of the town.
One that first parallel is completed, assuming the defender, upon doing the math, doesn’t decide the matter is hopeless and just give up, the attacker now proceeds to begin digging his works forward to set up advanced firing positions (most of the digging was done at night when enemy artillery couldn’t accurately fire at the work parties); there were typically three parallels, the first two providing protection to the digging works and the third parallel, dug into the glacis, providing the firing position directly into the structure of the fort. Once the cannon were emplaced, the attacker might again report that he was prepared to begin firing but if the defenders would just surrender, we could all skip that nasty business. If not, the attacker’s cannon – now secured in their own trace italienne-style firing positions – would start working on the enemy fortifications in a gunnery duel (since the defender’s guns are firing back). Progress here would mean both demolishing ravelins and other outworks which shielded the main curtain wall, as well as storming assaults on various outworks to take them and deny them to the enemy (Americans may note effectively all of these steps in the Siege of Yorktown (1781), albeit on fast-forward since this was a siege of a fairly small town defended merely by field fortifications rather than a large trace italienne fortress complex). The final option to surrender came once the curtain wall had been breached (there was little use in trying to “rush” the breach since it would take days to produce so everyone knew where the final fight would be). The defender then had the terrible choice of either surrendering or risking the terrible slaughter that would follow if the breach was forced (as it was very likely to be).
This whole process could take a really long time and it involved a lot of digging, but it was almost mechanistic in its push towards success. In a sense, those demands forced European states to develop the sort of state capacity that had been the norm under Rome or in China in order to run this new version of the “big army” siege playbook which demanded such tremendous amounts of work. As I’ve noted elsewhere, sieges of these sorts against large trace italienne complexes could last a long time; Parker (Military Revolution, 13) notes the siege of Breda in 1624 lasted nine months and was fairly short while the siege at Ostend in Flanders in 1601 lasted three years and was fairly long, to give a sense of the range.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part IV: French Guns and Italian Lines”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-17.
October 2, 2026
QotD: Ketchup, US vs British
American tomato ketchup is unapologetically sweet – basically a tomato-flavored sugar delivery system that goes perfectly with everything from french fries to scrambled eggs (yes, we do that). It’s thick, rich, and designed to be squeezed with abandon.
British tomato ketchup, I discovered, has more of an edge. Less sweet, more vinegar-forward, with a thinner consistency that actually enhances rather than masks the food it touches.
Heinz may have started in America, but the British version tastes like its more sophisticated cousin who studied abroad and came back with refined tastes.
The real revelation? Many Brits find American tomato ketchup cloyingly sweet, while I initially found British tomato ketchup disappointingly tart. It took a few months of adjustment before I appreciated the more nuanced British approach – though I still secretly prefer the American version on certain foods.
Turns out it’s not just my imagination. American Heinz uses high fructose corn syrup while the British version uses regular sugar, which explains why my taste buds were a bit confused.
Marianne Jennings, “Beyond Ketchup & Ranch Dressing”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-05-25.
October 1, 2026
QotD: The “auction of the empire” – Didius Julianus buys the highest office for himself
The elite unit of imperial bodyguards known as the Praetorian Guard arranged for an army officer named Pertinax to succeed Commodus as Emperor. We know that money played a role; Pertinax offered a tidy sum of 12,000 sestertii each to the guardsmen, but it was done in the more typical way (quietly and behind the scenes). After 87 days in which Pertinax attempted to clean house of Praetorian corruption, the dissatisfied Guard stabbed and beheaded the would-be reformer. That set the stage for an act so brazen in its scope that the next emperor would be remembered primarily for that, and for not much more.
Knowing the Praetorian Guard could be bought, two men appeared at its headquarters and presented themselves as rival claimants for the Roman throne. One was Titus Flavius Sulpicianus, who was the father-in-law of the deceased Pertinax. The other was 60-year-old Didius Julianus, who had distinguished himself in both politics and the military. In his Chronicle of the Roman Emperors, historian Chris Scarre notes,
No attempt was made to hide the nature of the negotiations: the Praetorians stationed heralds on the walls to announce that the position of emperor was up for sale … The bidding went on for some time, but eventually the soldiers’ choice fell on Didius Julianus. He not only bid the higher price, but also warned them that if they elected Sulpicianus they might expect revenge at his hands for the murder of Pertinax.
This notorious “Auction of the Empire”, as Edward Gibbon would call it centuries later, was described by another historian who was alive and writing as it happened, Cassius Dio (155-235 A.D.). In his 80-volume history of Rome, he described the scandalous episode this way:
So when he [Didius Julianus] heard of the death of Pertinax, he hastily made his way to the imperial throne. Then ensued a most disgraceful business and one unworthy of Rome. For, just as if it had been in some market or auction-room, both the city and its entire empire were auctioned off. The sellers were the ones who had slain their previous emperor, and the would-be buyers were Sulpicianus and Didius Julianus, who vied to outbid each other … They gradually raised their bids up to 20,000 sestertii for each soldier. Some of the soldiers would carry word to Julianus, “Sulpicianus offers so much; how much more do you make it?” And to Sulpicianus in turn, “Julianus promises so much; how much more do you raise him?” Sulpicianus would have won the day, being prefect of the city and also the first to name the figure 20,000, had not Julianus raised his bid by a whole 5,000 at one time, shouting the sum out in a loud voice and indicating the amount with his fingers.
Sold! One gigantic empire and the top position in it — for a mere 25,000 sestertii per guardsman, or approximately the value at the time of ten horses.
Upon assuming the mantle of Emperor, Didius Julianus devalued the currency by reducing the precious metal content of Roman coinage. But not even that measure made the price he offered affordable to him. He never fully coughed up what he promised. After 66 days in power, he met the same fate as his predecessor — assassination at the hands of disgruntled Praetorians.
“But what evil have I done?” he is said to have cried with his last words. “Whom have I killed?”
Before the year was over, three other men would attempt to claim the title of Emperor until one man emerged as the unquestioned ruler — Severus.
The Year of the Five Emperors was drenched in power lust, scandal and blood. For the Empire, it was mostly downhill from there. When it fell to foreign invasion in 476, many Romans welcomed the invaders because they figured they couldn’t be worse than their own rulers.
And, sadly, they were probably right.
Lawrence W. Reed, “Didius Julianus: The Roman Emperor Who Bought the Imperial Throne – and Paid With His Life”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2021-08-11.
September 30, 2026
QotD: “Have you ever been surprised to learn that someone was a Leftist?”
It never happens, right? Like vegans and Harvard alums, you never have to wonder if someone is an SJW — they’ll tell you, right off the bat. Usually they don’t even have to tell you; the hair and the tats and the fishing tackle in the face do that. Like putting the “Bernie 2024” sticker on the bumper of the Prius or the Subaru Outback, actually declaring yourself an SJW is overkill. So much so that it’s a cliché — of all the budding shitlords I mentored in my years in academia, none of them “came out” to me because of anything I said or did. It was all the stuff I didn’t say or do — I didn’t spend half of each class period ranting and raving about The Current Thing, which was so unusual that they figured I must be on the other side.
The Left, I think it’s fair to say, enjoys total freedom here in AINO. Total liberty, too, and that’s a distinction we should probably make at some point, but for right now let’s hold fire on that. Whichever one you want to use, though, it’s obvious that the Left have it, with pretty much zero restraint. Nothing is too weird or gross or obnoxious that the Left won’t champion it.
But even more than that, all the traditional restraints on behavior — what we should probably call decorum — have been systematically destroyed, and that’s the heart of what I want to talk about. Since we’re discussing the Left here, let’s use one of their favorite terms: Privilege. I think we can take it as read that there has never been a more privileged person, in any sense of the word “privilege,” in all of human history, than Karen (or her JV version, the Basic College Girl). And what battleaxes they are! Constantly lecturing everyone else about their privilege while plowing through every social situation like a tsunami. Like the Clintons, Karen triumphs because you just can’t believe anyone has the sheer brass-balled audacity to pull the antisocial shit they do.
Have you no shame, madam? At last, have you no shame?
Severian, “On Liberty”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-12.
September 29, 2026
QotD: Origins of modern Wicca
One thing that we can be confident that Wicca does not draw upon, however, is a goddess religion that survived the introduction of first the Indo-European *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr in the Bronze Age, and then the Semitic Jesus Christ in late antiquity, before being mostly suppressed in the “burning times” of the early modern era.1 Neo-pagans are not the (great-great-great …) granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn in the 16th and 17th centuries; rather, they are the granddaughters of upper class romantics whose religious innovations in the early to mid-20th century are best characterized as “creative synthesis”.
Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon tells the story of the precursors, invention, and development of Wicca. Much of that history can be encapsulated in the mythic genealogy of “Black Annis”, an occasional pagan deity. There was a real medieval anchoress named Agnes Scott who served the church near Leicester and is buried at Swithland Church. She was venerated locally as a Christian saint, but following the Protestant Reformation was reconceptualized as an ogress. Then the 20th century crank archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge interpreted Black Annis as pagan survivalism of the “crone” aspect of the great mother goddess and a corruption of the Celtic goddess Anu. Finally, some modern neo-pagan communities were inspired by Lethbridge’s work to adopt veneration of Black Annis into their liturgy. As Hutton notes, “The gentle and pious Agnes seems therefore to have been turned first into a local saint, then into a local demon, next into a Celtic goddess, and finally into a witch goddess; and all the while her bones have rested in apparent peace at Swithland”.
The changing reputation of Agnes/Annis/Anu reflects a few processes that are common throughout much of the intellectual roots of neo-paganism. You start with the idiosyncratic cruftiness of medieval Catholicism, then Protestants derogate the cult of the saints, feast days, etc. as idolatrous — indeed, practically pagan. Fast forward to 1900, give or take a few decades, and an intellectual with dubious expertise projects pagan survivalism onto historical or ethnographic data. And then finally neo-pagans use the folklorist’s imagined version of the past as inspiration for a “revived” myth and liturgy.
Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST REVIEW: The Triumph of the Moon, by Ronald Hutton”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-01.
- The one aspect of this myth that might be true is a pre-Indo-European goddess religion. The idea that Stone Age female figurines like the Venus of Willendorf represent a goddess religion is plausible but unprovable, given that the figures predate writing by about 26,000 years and so we have no literary evidence to contextualize the archaeology. But even saying that the Neolithic goddess cult was possible but not settled fact, as archaeologist Peter Ucko did in the 1960s, was enough to upset Murray, who “sent Ucko a furious letter, informing him that he had no right to speak about the goddess, because he was, first, far too young, and, second, a man”. While there might have been widespread neolithic European goddess worship, all other aspects of the “Murray thesis” — the idea that witches executed circa the Protestant Reformation were practicing a pre-Christian goddess religion — are demonstrably false. Hutton notes the falsity of the Murray thesis incidentally in Triumph of the Moon and argues against it at length in his later book, The Witch.
September 28, 2026
QotD: “This is revealed preferences with an erection”
As far back as we have records, and into the present day, anywhere that women are sold as pleasure slaves blonde blue-eyed girls with big racks have been the most in demand.
Our most extensive documentation on this is from the Ottoman Empire. Their slave-takers raided as far north as the west coast of Ireland and even Iceland because a handful of Sidneys could fund years-long expeditions — ships, weapons, provisions, hundreds of men — from the price they fetched on the auction block. And net a healthy profit, too.
But the pattern is everywhere — cross cultural, cross-racial. Evolutionary biologists think they know why: chicks who look like le Sweeney are radiating signals of youth and immune-system effectiveness and general reproductive fitness. Blonde hair fades with age, clear skin doesn’t hide blemishes that reveal vulnerability to infection, and I hope nobody reading this needs any education about breast-to-waist-to-hip ratios. If you do, ask an AI for an explainer.
I don’t know that anybody’s explained the allure of blue eyes satisfactorily yet. We know they’re a huge win in the sexual selection game, because of the rapidity with which they propagated. A single point mutation, probably less than 10,000 years ago in Europe, spread like wildfire despite the fact that lack of melanin granules in the iris is recessive.
There’s not much that can reveal the instinctive desires of men more clearly than what they’re willing to pay to own women who light up their limbic systems. This is revealed preferences with an erection.
It’s not just yesterday, either. Every few years somebody busts a semi-covert slave market in some shithole like Mauritania or Afghanistan and it’s the same old story. The highest value merchandise is always blonde white girls, usually trafficked from Eastern Europe.
So, yes, when old-school racists ranted about darkies lusting for the flower of white womanhood, they were not wrong. Because, well, basically everybody lusts for the flower of white womanhood. It seems to be wired in.
ESR, Twitter, 2025-07-30.
September 27, 2026
QotD: “Friction” in military actions
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
