Another New York Central president who rode The Century in preference to the fine business car No. 1 which was at his disposal was F.E. Williamson. […] he took pleasure in the same amenities of luxury travel as he shared with other Century regulars: cocktails in the club car, a breath of fresh air on the open observation platform that survived into his regime, The Century Dinner and a long night’s sleep as the train rolled tranquilly under the stars.
Once encountered on the observation platform by the author as The Century rocketed through the Indiana countryside to overtake and pass a long merchandise train doing a mere sixty on the adjacent track […]
“Look at those high cars roll”, he exclaimed, as we passed the head end of the swiftly moving freight. “There’s nothing so beautiful in the world as a money making train going places fast on a spring evening!”
Lucius Beebe, 20th Century, 1962.
July 9, 2025
QotD: “Look at those high cars roll”
July 8, 2025
QotD: Sixty years of intelligence service operations going sideways
There’s also another version of the Historian’s Fallacy in play with Intelligence work:
The historian’s fallacy is an informal fallacy that occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision. It is not to be confused with presentism, a similar but distinct mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas (such as moral standards) are projected into the past. The idea was first articulated by British literary critic Matthew Arnold in 1880 and later named and defined by American historian David Hackett Fischer in 1970.
Things that seem obvious in retrospect weren’t at the time. That’s the “formal” Historian’s Fallacy, if you like. But there’s another one, that we could call the “Narrative Fallacy” or the “Assumed Rationality Fallacy” or something (I stink at titles). Historians are, or at least should be, acutely sensitive to the danger of seeing patterns that aren’t really there (in a very real sense, “conspiracy theorists” e.g. McGowan are just Historians manqué. Coincidences are coincidental, and without training and practice and — crucially — an experienced hand to smack you upside the head for going farther than the available sources allow, it’s easy to run wild with them. So-and-So knew Joe Blow … yes, but that does not automatically mean that So-and-So conspired with Joe Blow).
Compounding it further: It’s indeed rational to assume rationality on your enemies’ part, so some catastrophic intelligence “failures” have come because analysts were unwilling to acknowledge that the enemy was, in fact, making a mistake. It’s a bit pricey, but I highly recommend James Wirtz’s The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (here’s a preview page of a review at JSTOR, which points to a trade journal, American Intelligence Journal. Wirtz is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School; I bet his book rattled a lot of cages that needed rattling). Breaking it out a bit further, and these categories are mine, not Wirtz’s:
In the case of Tet, there was top-level structural “failure” that hardly deserves the term “failure” — the NVA’s intelligence boys were no fools; they were bright guys doing their damnedest to put one over on the American intelligence crew, and they had some success at it. That’s only “failure” in the sense that in binary system, a win for them is a loss for you — you “failed” to win the game against a highly skilled, highly motivated opponent. The Americans didn’t fail to recognize that The Enemy Gets a Vote; they just didn’t realize how he’d voted.
But there was what I’ll call “Narrative” failure, and that’s all on the Americans. They seem to have decided that the North Vietnamese were not only losing the war, but knew themselves to be losing the war. So what the North Vietnamese saw as merely “the next phase of the plan”, the Americans saw as “increasing desperation”. Which led to other Narrative Failures. I might be misremembering the details, so check me on this, but I believe that the Americans were correct despite themselves about the attack on the big Marine base at Khe Sanh — it was indeed a diversion. But the Americans somehow concluded that it was a diversionary attack, specifically a “spoiling attack”, on something the NVA shouldn’t have known about in the first place — a top secret operation called “Muscle Shoals” (in Wiki under Operation Igloo White).
In reality, the Khe Sanh attack was a diversion against the main Tet operation, and it worked so well that it took a week or more, IIRC, for Westmoreland to come around. He insisted on interpreting the Tet “uprising” as yet a further diversion — a diversion in support of what he assumed was the main NVA operation, the attack on Khe Sanh!
Those are Narrative Failures. Twitter didn’t exist then, but we could nowadays profitably call them “Twitter Failures”. Whatcha gonna believe, your own lying eyes or the blue checkmarks in the Pocket Moloch?
All of which was aided and abetted by the third kind of failure, that “Assumed Rationality” failure. One CIA analyst, Joseph Hovey, not only predicted the Tet Offensive, but got large parts of it exactly right. But Hovey had a hard time believing his own analysis, because its central assumption was that the North Vietnamese were, in fact, making a mistake. The North Vietnamese did not, in fact, have the forces in place to do what they wanted to do. They were suffering a catastrophic Narrative Failure of their own, one endemic (it seems reasonable to say) to Communist regimes — since political officers are highly encouraged to submit exaggerated reports of unit strength and morale (and often lethally discouraged from reporting the opposite), the NVA thought they had far more, and far better prepared, forces than they actually did.
In an Alanis-level irony, US military intelligence had a better idea of the NVA’s strength than the boys in Hanoi did. (They confirmed this, in fact, when they nabbed a high-level NVA defector, who only “rallied” because the formation he was sent south to lead didn’t actually exist!). When faced with the possible conclusion that the Enemy is about to make a big mistake, it’s only rational to assume that something else is going on. Hovey knew that, of course, and that’s one of the main reasons his analysis went nowhere — being a conscientious professional, he noted at the outset that his analysis was premised on the NVA setting up to make a big mistake, which seemed extremely unlikely.
Given all that, if I had to guess, I’d bet that the KGB had a similar record, if the truth is ever known, because they had similar problems. They had a different, more systematic kind of Narrative Failure, I’d imagine — “Marxism-Leninism” vs. “bow-tied Ivy Leaguers running around cosplaying Lawrence of Indochina” — but it probably all washed out in the end. It’d be extremely interesting to hear about the Vietnam War from the KGB’s side …
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-04-15.
July 7, 2025
QotD: The mythological “perfect market” and “perfect competition”
The narrative that is constructed and logically follows from this model is that observed deviations from perfect competition in the marketplace are indicative of imperfections, also known as “market failures”, associated with the existence of monopoly power, pervasive externalities, the provision of public goods, and macroeconomic instability. According to this narrative, government intervention is the deus ex machina that saves the market from its own “imperfections” through regulations, taxes, subsides, and other public policy measures. Why? To use a quote from Frank Knight often used by James Buchanan, “to call a situation hopeless is to call it ideal”. The narrative that is constructed is one in which, outside the conditions of the ideal of perfect competition, there is no hope but for government intervention to save the market from itself. Anyone who has taken an economics course is well aware of what I’ve stated thus far, and therefore this should not be surprising.
But what is the implicit meaning of the word “imperfect” that is baked into the narrative, which is constructed into the model of perfect competition? What is implied when we postulate that markets are “imperfect” in comparison to the benchmark of perfect competition is that markets are flawed, non-ideal, or otherwise sub-optimal, and therefore in need of correction through government intervention. Who could dispute the logic of this narrative?
However, if we simply reinterpret our understanding of the word “imperfect”, not only will it reframe the narrative being told about the marketplace, but also the public policy implications that flow from this narrative. If we analyze the etymology of the word imperfect, breaking it down from its Latin origins, you will learn that “im” expresses the negation, “per” comes from the Latin word meaning “thoroughly” and “fect” comes from the Latin verb “facere“, meaning “to do”. Thus, rather than saying that something, or some state of affairs, is flawed, suboptimal, or non-ideal, another way to interpret the meaning of “imperfect” is an act or process that is not thoroughly done, or incomplete. In fact, from a quick perusal of the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, you will find a similar definition of the word imperfect: “constituting a verb tense used to designate a continuing state or an incomplete action” (emphasis added).
Rather than regarding the market as a flawed or sub-optimal state of affairs, a better understanding of an “imperfect market” reveals that the market is a process of continuous tendency towards perfection, or completion, where are all the gains from trade are exhausted and all plans between buyers and sellers are perfectly coordinated. As Ludwig von Mises states in his magnum opus, Human Action, the “market process is the adjustment of the individual actions of the various members of the market society to the requirements of mutual cooperation” (1949 [2007]: 258).
Thus, markets will always be imperfect, but that is precisely why markets exist in the first place! Markets never conform to the “ideal” of perfect competition, but this is completely irrelevant, since under such state of affairs, markets are unnecessary and redundant, since all resources are already perfectly allocated to their most valued uses. Market processes exist precisely because to generate the information necessary to better coordinate the plans and purposes of individuals in a peaceful and productive manner. The entrepreneurial lure for profit and the discipline of loss is what guides such imperfect processes in a tendency towards the creation of more complete information between buyers and sellers.
Rosolino Candela, “Are Markets Imperfect? Of Course, But That’s The Point!”, Econlib.org, 2020-05-18.
July 6, 2025
QotD: After the Bronze Age Collapse
But what surprised me most about After 1177 B.C. is how short this era was. In some places, anyway.
We have a vague picture of what happens after a civilizational collapse, but it’s been disproportionately influenced by two particularly dramatic examples: sub-Roman Britain and the Greek Dark Ages. This was perfectly sensible coming from the Anglo historians and archaeologists who have dominated the public conception of the field — after all, the only thing more interesting than the history of your own island is that of the classical world you’ve been studying since you got your first Latin grammar at age six — but it turns out that neither of these are the general rule. Foggy, faraway Britain, so reliant on imported goods and troops, was far more seriously impacted by the withdrawal of Rome than was most of the Empire and saw a longer and more significant reduction in cultural complexity, standards of living, average stature, and of course population. (Imagine what would happen to a Mars colony if the connections to the home planet stopped working.)
Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeans suffered an even more striking decline. As Austrian archaeologist Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy summarizes:
The impressive palatial structures were not rebuilt, and very little of the representational arts and crafts of the palaces seems to have survived. The complex forms of political, social, and economic organization fell into oblivion. Palaces, kings, and royal families became matter for Greek myths. The art of writing was lost for centuries. In short, Greek civilization was reduced to the level of a prehistoric society.
The Greeks of the classical era had little conception that the Mycenaeans had even existed, let alone that they were their own ancestors: they retained a vague mythological tradition of past kings, but they attributed the few surviving Mycenaean structures to the work of cyclopes. In fact, the disconnect between the civilization of the Late Bronze Age and the later classical world was so great that until Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, it was an open question whether the people responsible for the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus were even Greeks at all. (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes: Linear B turns out to be a syllabic script for the most ancient attested form of Greek. It features a number of uniquely Greek words and deity names even in the limited surviving corpus. More recently, ancient DNA has confirmed the linguistic evidence: the classical Greeks were the descendants of the Mycenaeans.)1
But the more you look at the archaeological record, the more you can pick out signs of cultural continuity. Agricultural practices don’t seem to have changed much, nor did Mycenaean pottery styles, and the names and attributes of the gods preserved in Linear B are close if not identical to their forms as codified in Homer and Hesiod. Even the cyclopean architecture continued to provide shelter: the Mycenaean palace at Pylos was almost completely destroyed in the Collapse, but the few rooms that survived intact show signs of having been inhabited by squatters over the next century or two.
Homer too is chock full of details that turn out to be distant memories of the Mycenaean world, somehow preserved in the oral tradition until writing was reintroduced to Greece.2 For instance, he describes a kind of boar’s tusk helmet that, by his time, no one had worn for centuries, but which archaeologists have since regularly discovered in Mycenaean shaft graves throughout the Aegean. But my favorite example, which is of course linguistic, is the word for “king”: Homer describes Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others with the word anax, which is recognizably the Linear B word 𐀷𐀙𐀏, wa-na-ka, used in the Bronze Age to describe the supreme rulers of the Mycenaean palatial societies. (The w sound was lost with the tragic death of the digamma.) By the classical era, however, anax had fallen out of use in preference for basileus (Linear B 𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄, qa-si-re-u), which in the Mycenaean period had referred to a much lower-level chieftain.
This all paints an evocative picture of a post-apocalyptic world. You can imagine it transplanted to an American context, with the scattered survivors of some great cataclysm huddled around fires built in the corners of a crumbling Lincoln Memorial. You can picture them passing on stories of the great men of the past with their tall tube-shaped hats and the shiny black stones they carried in their pockets. And by the time this remnant rebuilt, they might well have forgotten the word “President” except as an archaism; after centuries of as a small-scale society, “Mayor” might become so deeply engrained as the highest title that two thousand years later they would still use it to refer to their emperor.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.
1. It’s slightly more complicated than that, because of course it is; see here for more detail from Razib Khan.
2. A reasonable ballpark guess is that the poems traditionally attributed to Homer were composed in something like their current forms around 750 BC and written down for the first time shortly before 525 BC, although like the dating of Beowulf there’s a great deal of argument.
July 5, 2025
QotD: Roman provinces under the Republic
While the Romans mostly improvise this system for just a handful of provinces – most of the basic patterns of Roman provincial governance develop in just the first four provinces1 – that system becomes the customary way Roman magistrates [consuls and praetors]and promagistrates [proconsuls and propraetors] handled the overseas provinces they were assigned to. Consequently, it was replicated over and over again through Rome’s steadily expanding empire. By the time the Republic collapses into the Empire, Rome will have not four provinces but fourteen; by the end of the reign of Augustus, as the Roman Empire largely took the borders it would mostly hold for the next four centuries, there were just under thirty provinces. Yet the way Rome will govern these provinces largely continued to hold to model established in the Republic, at least through to the Severan Dynasty (193-225 AD), if not further.
As a result, the improvised system the Romans developed for those first four provinces would end up being how the vast majority of people in the Roman empire would experience Roman governance.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Addenda: The Provinces”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-11-03.
1. Sicily, Corsica et Sardinia, Nearer Spain and Further Spain, gained in the period from 241 to 197 and Rome’s only provinces until the addition of Macedonia in 147.
July 4, 2025
QotD: US-Canadian conflict before Confederation
The Aroostook War (1838–1839) drew no blood. The conflict concerned the Maine-New Brunswick border and was resolved amicably by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. A quarter of a century later the Fenian Raids (1866–1871) saw the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood make multiple non-state sanctioned attacks in British North America in an effort to sway Britain to withdraw forces from Ireland.
The other far more consequential military struggles between the two North American friends and neighbours occurred first in the late eighteenth century, and second in the early nineteenth century. During the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), which saw limited involvement of areas north of the 49th parallel, British North America thwarted a particularly serious invasion by the Americans in 1775 known as The Battle of Quebec.
It was fought during a snowstorm on December 31, 1775 (one of few battles fought in such miserable conditions during the revolutionary war). The American intention was to conscript the British colony, which today forms the province of Quebec (and also included parts of Ontario) into their struggle against the British. The Patriots of the Thirteen Colonies had earlier that year begun rebelling against British taxation and governance. They surmised that the French-speaking Quebec settlers, disaffected with the imposition of British rule as it was laid out in the 1763 Treaty of Paris (which ended the Seven Years War), would join the American cause. A significant miscalculation, to say the least.
The battle was fought on two fronts against a British garrison of 1800 soldiers led by British commander, Governor Guy Carleton. The combined total of American troops was only 1200. The first front was commanded by Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, who led his troops in an attack of the Lower Town from the south. The second assault occurred from the north and was led by Colonel Benedict Arnold (who would later become an infamous American traitor).
Montgomery and several officers were killed instantly on their initial advance. This sparked a retreat amongst his remaining soldiers. Arnold had slightly more luck. His army penetrated northern defences but were stymied in the narrow streets of Quebec. During fighting Arnold was wounded, after which he handed the command to Daniel Morgan. After hours of fighting, Morgan and his men were forced to surrender. The Americans lost the battle decisively ensuring Quebec would remain a loyalist stronghold.
The second of the two significant conflicts involving British North America and the Thirteen American Colonies was the infamous War of 1812 – a more well-known period of antagonism between proto-Canada and her American neighbours.
Here is a topline summary with some extra history concerning the U.S.-Canada border (the world’s longest undefended border), from Terry Glavin:
The War of 1812 — which the Americans still pretend they won — was officially concluded with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. Then came the Rush-Bagot Pact of 1817 and the Convention of 1818, which set the border at the 49th parallel.1
The War of 1812 took place during Britain’s struggle against Napoleonic France. The two most famous Canadian battles from this tragic conflict were the Battle of Queenston Heights and the burning of York (now Toronto) – British troops would even the score of the latter by burning Washington D.C.
The war was unpopular. Like today, there were too many bonds between the Americans and proto-Canadians. But also like today, with Canada and the United States once again bickering over trade and various political interests, the disagreements were accompanied by a reluctance to engage in hostilities.
From Pierre Burton’s War of 1812:
At the outset, it was a gentleman’s war. Officers on opposing sides met for parlays under flags of truce, offered hospitality, exchanged cordialities, murmured the hopes that hostilities would quickly end.2
No matter what time period we are examining, we can never forget that Britons, Canadians and Americans are all first cousins. Yes we disagree from time to time, sometimes we even fight. But always over some unfortunate political dispute, and never for each other’s annihilation.
In 1812, for a variety of reasons, the Americans, especially a minority of hawkish elites in Washington, felt they had no other choice but to invade the north. Some of them felt it would be easy. An aggravating factor concerned Britain’s support of Indian tribes in the north west, at a time when the Americans were aggressively expanding into that region. But also, during their imperial contest with France, the British were impressing sailors in the American navy (forcing them to join British forces), because they considered them traitors of the British crown. Further, they blocked key trade ports under Napoleon’s control, disrupting trade between America and France.
Isn’t it curious how trade so often appears as the rift in Canadian-American relations? Further examples include: the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 which allowed for free trade of natural resources between the American and British colonies. However, the Americans abrogated that treaty in 1866 partly out of frustration at perceived British support of the confederacy after the Civil War. A post-confederation trade war with the Americans ensued after Canada’s first Prime Minister John A. MacDonald adopted the National Policy in 1879, which imposed high tariffs to protect Canadian industry. Triggering the Americans to respond with tariffs of their own.
James Pew, “Canadians and our ties to Americans”, Woke Watch Canada, 2025-03-30.
1. Because of the day that’s in it – by Terry Glavin
2. Pierre Berton’s War of 1812.
July 3, 2025
QotD: Why Marxists turned away from space exploration and colonization
What caused this turnaround?
To understand this, it’s helpful that to notice that spaceflight is not the only technology about which Marxist attitudes have done a 180. Nuclear power is another. More generally, where Marxists used to be pro-growth and celebrate industrialization and material progress, they’re now loudly for degrowth and renunciation.
But the history of western Marxism is more interesting than that. Western Marxists flipped to strident anti-futurism in the late 1960s and early 1970s while futurist propaganda in the Communist bloc did not end until its post-1989 collapse.
That 20-year-long disjunct was particularly strong about nuclear power, with the Soviets providing ideological support and funding to the foundation of European Green parties and the US’s anti-nuclear-power movement at the same time as they were pouring resources into nuclearizing their own power grid.
And that’s your clue. Domestic Marxism favored making power cheap and abundant, while their Western proxies pushed to keep it expensive and scarce and preached degrowth rather than expansion. Futurism vs. anti-futurism: why?
We don’t need to theorize about this. Yuri Bezmenov, a former gear in the Soviet propaganda machine, told us the answer starting in the early 1980s. Fewer people listened than should have.
Bezmenov explained that unlike Marxism in the Sino-Soviet bloc, Western Marxism was a mind virus, a memetic weapon designed to weaken and degrade its host societies from within, softening them up for totalitarianism and an eventual Soviet takeover. The West was to be denied power, both in a literal and figurative sense.
Ever wonder why today’s Marxists are so quick to make alliances with radical religious Islamists? This shouldn’t happen. According to Marxist theory, Islamism is a regression to an earlier stage of the dialectic than capitalism, and today’s Marxists ought to fear and hate it as a counter-ideology more than capitalism. But they don’t, because to them Islam is a tool to be used for nihilistic ends.
That nihilism is the actual purpose of Western Marxism and all its offshoots, including “woke”. One sign of this is how fervently it embraces the sexual mutilation of children.
The Soviets are gone but their program is still running autonomously in the brains of people who were infected by their Cold-War-era proxies and the successors of those proxies. And that program is nihilism all the way down.
Yuri Bezmenov should have been heeded. There is no simpler theory that fits the observed facts.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-14.
July 2, 2025
QotD: The bane of socialism — boredom
Most “bad” dogs aren’t actually bad. They’re not misbehaving because they’re willful, or mean, or whatever. They’re just bored out of their fucking skulls, because the kind of bugman who gets a dog these days has no idea that you actually have to play with it, and pet it, and interact with it, in much the same way you have to interact with a young human. Given a dog’s limited intellect, the only thing it can think of to do to alleviate its boredom is chew on things, or dig in the yard, or piss on the rug, or, if all else fails, chew its own fur off.
Being slightly more complex critters, humans have more options, but bore a human enough — overfill his material needs, so that he’s stuffed to somnolence, but take his sense of purpose away — and you’ll see the exact same dog behaviors. Why do you think they shove all that metal shit in their faces? And no, I am absolutely not joking. Why all the huge, gaudy, gross tattoos? The constant changes of hair color and style?
Have you ever asked them?
Again, I’m 100% not joking. I know most of y’all avoid SJWs like the plague, and that’s a smart move, can’t blame you for it, but if you do, you’ll just have to trust me: I was in academia for a long time, so I was around not just SJWs, but bleeding-edge lunatic SJWs, and I asked them about it. One must be discreet about this, of course — hey, I’m thinking of getting a roll of toilet paper tattooed on my bicep, to remind me that We’re In This Together, what do you think? — but it’s fairly easy to do. And every time, they’d spin me some elaborate tale of how deep and meaningful it all is.
No, really. By some mental process I can’t begin to reproduce, getting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face tattooed on your calf is, to them, striking a blow at ambient civilization. That is the literal truth of their motivation. It’s the same reason the dog digs in the backyard, or pisses on the rug, or chews its own fur off: That’s the only agency it has, the only purpose it can find.
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
July 1, 2025
QotD: Canadian measuring “systems”
We measure weather and room temperature in Celsius, but we still bake in Fahrenheit. Your weight is in pounds, but your car’s weight is in kilograms. You drink alcohol by the ounce, but soda by the millilitre. The phenomenon was summed up in an imaginary dialogue by Canadian comedian Janel Comeau. Scene: An American, a European and a Canadian. The American says “I use miles and pounds”. The European says “I use kilometres and kilograms”. The Canadian takes an assortment of global measuring systems, crushes them into a powder, and snorts them like cocaine before declaring, “I’m 5’3, I weigh 150lbs, horses weigh 1000kgs, I need a cup of flour and 1L of milk”.
And none of this is an accident. Canada’s bizarre system of half-imperial, half-metric represents the truce lines of a culture war battle whose scale and ferocity is all but forgotten today. There were people in the 1970s who wanted to purge this country of any memory of the imperial system. Feet, inches and gallons were a relic of a backwards, colonial age, and the future belonged to rationalist, scientific metrication. A small army of bureaucrats armed with meter sticks and one-litre jugs were dispatched to spread the metrication gospel. And if you didn’t comply with the new metric zeitgeist, you could face severe consequences. For example, if you were a gas station continuing to sell gas by the gallon instead of by the litre, you could be fined.
But this grand plan to reprogram the Canadian psyche was thwarted, and thwarted forever. And when you buy beef by the pound or do your carpentry with inches and feet, you are the unwitting legacy of a populist, anti-government protest movement that hated the metric system and went all-out to stop it. We’re talking protests. Lawsuits. Civil disobedience. This story will literally feature a group of pissed-off Conservative MPs opening a “freedom” gas station to defy federal mandates to sell gasoline by the litre.
Tristin Hopper The metric schism | Canada Did What?”, National Post, 2025-03-11.
June 30, 2025
QotD: Britons and their NHS
I have to run a gamut of procedures to do so and face a receptionist who treats me as a fraud trying to get something to which I am not entitled, and I have no practitioner whom I can call my doctor. The NHS has crowded out private competition, and the nearest private doctor is 25 miles away. Suffice it to say that, if I want to see a doctor, it is easier, quicker and more pleasant for me to go to France than to the health centre about 300 yards from my house in England.
I cannot in all honesty say, however, that my health has suffered in any measurable way as a result of this unpleasantness, because my health is good and I am not a doctor-botherer. But it does reveal something about Britain that is not true in France: in our dealings with the NHS, we are a nation of paupers who must accept what we are given by grace and favour of the system. It may be good or it may be bad, but we have to accept it.
Furthermore, under the NHS doctors themselves are becoming ever less members of a liberal profession and ever more executors of orders from on high, with little leeway to consider whether these orders are good or bad in the case of the individual case before them.
This is a problem in all systems in which a third party pays for patients’ treatment, but it is particularly acute in a highly-centralised and dirigiste system such as the NHS, in which uniformity is the goal, even if it be uniformity of error. And increasingly, it creates an atmosphere of technical, managerial and ethical conformity.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.
June 29, 2025
QotD: People in the past believed their own religion
It is an old mistake – Polybius makes it of the Romans, writing in c. 150 BC. Polybius notes that Roman religion was “distinctly superior” for maintaining the cohesion of the Roman state, but that “they (= the ruling class) have adopted this course for the sake of the common people” (Plb. 6.56.6-8), by which he means for the sake of the “fickle multitude” which must be “held in invisible terrors and pageantry”. Polybius, I should note, immediately contradicts himself – one benefit of this religion, he says, is that Roman magistrates (read: elite Senators) do not steal from the public treasury even when they are not watched, which would seem to imply that even many very elite Romans believed their own religion (also, irony alert: those famously incorruptible Romans …). Poor men, after all, are not elected to watch the treasury.
Fortunately, Polybius is not our only source on Roman culture, so it is possible to say – and I want to be clear here – Polybius is wrong (on this point at least). Roman elites took their religion very seriously. There are exceptions, of course – Julius Caesar was an Epicurean philosophically, although this does not seem to have altogether disrupted his performance of the duties of Rome’s highest priesthood (he was Pontifex Maximus). Nevertheless, such philosophically minded men were generally regarded with scorn by even the Roman elites (Cicero heaps such scorn on Cato in the Pro Murena in what were clearly intended as friendly “ribbing” before a mostly elite audience), who nevertheless greatly valued religious character (in contrast, Cicero is quick to accuse his hated enemy Catiline of irreligion before the Senate). Roman leaders vowed temples and sacrifices in duress, and built and gave them in victory. Lavish dedications to the gods from all levels of Roman society confirm the overall picture: the Romans believed their religion. Yes, even the elite Romans (there is, I should note, some complicated in that elites tended to separate what they viewed as religion from common “superstition”, but that’s a topic for another day.) And, if anything, the evidence for elite “buy-in” to Medieval religion is far more voluminous.
Yet none of the main characters of Game of Thrones, apart from perhaps Catelyn Stark, is devoted to their region’s traditional religion in any private sense. I cannot recall at any point any character protesting an action on account of religion – no marches held up by high holy days (a regular occurrence in ancient and medieval literature), no groups, individuals or places religiously exempt from violence. The Faith has certain rules about sexuality, but they’re rules that are not only flouted privately by individuals in the show, but also quite publicly by the last ruling dynasty for centuries.
Moreover, none of the ruling characters seem to have any religious functions – or if they do, they simply ignore them most of the time. Keep in mind, these people believe that their gods – be it the Seven or the Old Gods – are powerful divine beings who are directly and immediately interested in the world and who act on that interest. Keeping such beings happy is vitally important – it is not an afterthought. No society, so far as I can tell, has ever believed there is enough gold or enough armies to save you if you have enraged the gods. There is simply no off-setting an angry divinity (and before the smart guy asks, “what about a favorable divinity?” the Greeks had an answer for that – go read Euripides’ Hippolytus. It ends badly for the mortals).
The lack of religious duties or functions for characters who are kings is particularly surprising. Kingship has three core roles in almost all human cultures where the institution appears: kings are 1) chief judge, 2) chief general, and 3) chief priest. That third role appears more or less prominently in almost all societies. In ancient Egypt and (at times) in Mesopotamia, kings were held to literally be either earthly incarnations of major gods or minor gods in their own right. Roman Emperors held the office of Pontifex Maximus, and took over as the chief priest of the state, before becoming gods on their deaths. The Chinese emperor was the “Son of Heaven” and was tasked with maintaining the right relationship with the divine (the “mandate of heaven”). The emperors of Japan are purported to be direct descendants of the goddess Amaterasu (and they have a family tree to back it up).
The relationship between medieval kings and the Church was more complicated, because of the existence of a clear religious head (the Pope) outside of secular authority, but medieval kingship retained a strong sense of religious purpose. Coronation rituals often involved the clergy and were essentially religious rituals, because kingly power was still thought to be bestowed by God. Kings, in turn, had a special role in keeping their kingdom in right relationship with the divine, both through just rule (which included protecting the Church) and through the performance of religious rituals. Those rituals, of course, worked both ways: both believed to be religious efficacious (as in they helped bring about God’s good favor), but also valuable tools of building royal legitimacy (hat tip to my colleague Elizabeth Hassler’s excellent dissertation on the topic of holy kingship). In some places (England and France most notably), kings were thought holy enough to be able to heal certain diseases miraculously by touch – a king who couldn’t was clearly insufficiently pious.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.
June 28, 2025
QotD: Shakespeare – game designer
Consider the case of Hamlet. The title character wanders from scene to scene in a dark castle, encountering ghosts, villains, etc. But nothing gets resolved as he tries to level up — although eleven people are killed along the way. The play starts again the next night, with similar results.
Ted Gioia, “More Entries from My Private Journal”, The Honest Broker, 2025-03-25.
June 27, 2025
QotD: The dangers of “doing too much principal component analysis”
[…]
By the way, the fact that models are beautiful in a highly specific way, and that there exist women who are similarly beautiful but condemned to be “civilians”, is a good reminder of the dangers of doing too much principal component analysis.2 In so many areas of life, we are obsessed with collapsing intrinsically high-dimensional phenomena onto a single uni-dimensional axis. You see this a lot with the status games that leftists play around privilege and oppression — I feel like a rational leftist would say that a disabled white lesbian and a wealthy scion of Haitian oligarchs are just incomparable, each more privileged than the other in some senses and less in other senses. But no, instead there’s an insistence that we find an absolute total ordering of oppression across all identity categories, a single hierarchy that allows us to compare any two individuals and produce a mathematical answer as to which one is more deserving of DEI grants. My hunch is a lot of the internal tensions and bickering within American leftism are actually produced by this insistence, which makes sense because it’s totally zero sum.
But the disease of trying to pin everything to a single number is hardly confined to the left. You see it on the right in the obsession with IQ, as if a single number could capture the breathtaking range of variation of cognitive capabilities across all humanity. I mean for goodness sake, Intel learned the hard way that this doesn’t even work for computers, and human brains are much weirder and more complicated than microprocessors. But the even dumber version of this is the 1-10 scale of female beauty. There’s something so sublime about seeing a beautiful human being, because so much of it is either bound up in subtle interrelationships between different features (this is why plastic surgery often makes people uglier — there’s no such thing as a “perfect nose”, and if you pick one out of a catalog you’ll probably end up with one that doesn’t fit your face), or it’s irretrievably evanescent — a fleeting glance, or the way her hair falls across her face just so, gone the moment after it happens. Taking something so ineffable and putting it on a 1-10 scale only makes sense as a form of psychological warfare. And I get it, amongst the young people relations between the sexes have degenerated to the point of more or less open warfare, but come on, this is pornbrained nonsense.
Speaking of both the DEI olympics and the classification of female beauty, some parts of this book are really charmingly naive, and I snickered a bit at Mears’s mystification at why all of the models are white and blonde. The really funny part is that she says something like: “I expected this legacy of white supremacy to be in retreat given that so many of the big spenders in clubs these days are from Asia and the Middle East”. Is she really not aware that men of other races have an even stronger aesthetic preference for white women than white men do?3
John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.
1. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.
2. Not the only danger of too much principal component analysis!
3. Gabriel: Kimberly Hoang did an ethnography as a bar girl in several Vietnam bars. At the bar that catered to Vietnamese elites, the other bar girls made her lighten her skin with cosmetics and wear a black minidress, with the target look being tall, pale, and slender K-pop idol. When she moved to another bar catering to white sex tourists, the other bar girls told her to wear bronzer and a slutty version of traditional Asian dress with the target look being exoticized sexiness. See: Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. University of California Press.
June 26, 2025
QotD: Credentialism versus meritocracy
Harvard’s motto is “Veritas” — truth — but it ought to be “ludificationes pertinet“, which the internet informs me is how you say “delusions of competence” in Latin. I meant it when I said that the “Ministry of Talent”, as these jerkoffs unironically called themselves, actually had some serious brainpower and real accomplishments … but the Peter Principle is also true, and though they had some real brains and actual accomplishments, neither their brains nor their accomplishments at Harvard translated to anything out in the real world, any more than some Late Republic social climber’s “experience” as curule aedile translated to anything real in their world.
Just as the Roman Senate had no idea how to deal with a Julius Caesar, then, despite it all, so no American “leader” had any idea how to deal with a guy like Ho Chi Minh, even though he, like Caesar, had always been perfectly open and forthright about what he was doing and why. It never occurred to “the best and brightest” to even ask the question “What does Ho Chi Minh want?”, because after all, Ho Chi Minh wasn’t a Harvard man.
And all this was 60 years ago. These days, the AINO cursus honorum is so widespread that every kid who manages to fill out a college app has a resume that would give McGeorge Bundy an erection lasting more than four hours. You’ll have to trust me on this, I guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Flyover State — which is respectable but rinky-dink; the kind of outfit where you see their team losing a late December bowl game and you think “Gosh, I guess that state has a third college in it” — had several hundred student organizations …
… all of which seem to exist for no other reason than to have “officers”, to which these little social climbers can be “elected”, the better to pad their law, med, and grad school apps. By the end of my career, probably 3/4 of the students who ever sent me an email had an auto-signature on it, and that auto-signature was longer than my entire CV. President of this, Vice-Treasurer of that, Assistant Grand Poobah (junior grade) of the other thing. Grandpa Simpson was a piker compared to these kids:
I’m an Elk, a Mason, a Communist. I’m the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance for some reason. Ah, here it is. The Stonecutters!
Instead of giving potential movers and shakers some practical experience, our modern cursus honorum casts the widest possible net for sociopathy. McGeorge Bundy is your absolute best case scenario. He wasn’t actively evil; he was just a goofy egghead who thought he was way smarter and more accomplished than he actually was, because he’d never been in a position to find out otherwise. (An anecdote that tells you everything you need to know, courtesy of Wikipedia: “When applying to Yale, Bundy wrote on the entrance exam ‘This question is silly. If I were giving the test, this is the question I would ask, and this is my answer.’ Despite this, he was still admitted to Yale as he was awarded a perfect score on his entrance exam”).
Think about that the next time you go to the doctor. Even if your MD — or, much more likely these days, PA — isn’t a prize graduate of Bollywood Upstairs Medical College, xzhey most likely spent xzheyr college years as an Elk, a Mason, a Communist …
Your worst case scenario is, of course, another Caesar. A fake and gay one, it goes without saying — this being Clown World — but a fake and gay Caesar can still do tremendous damage, because they’re the worst of both worlds: Bundy-level goofs, and angry ethnic sociopaths with huge chips on their shoulders. These are the kids who have been “team leads” doing “original research” since about age 12. Not only have they never failed, they’ve never been exposed to the merest hint of the possibility of failure. All their “success” is theirs by right. They have Caesar’s vaulting ambition, his utter disregard for tradition, his absolute cutthroat ruthlessness … and none of his experience, to say nothing of his competence.
Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.
June 25, 2025
QotD: Marie Antoinette and the “Diamond Necklace” scandal
The origins of the affair stretched back to Louis XV, who wished to lavish on his mistress, Madame du Barry, a splendid diamond necklace containing 647 stones and weighing 2,800 carats (worth roughly $15 million today). But Louis XV died before the sale of the necklace was concluded. And when young Louis XVI took the throne, the Paris jewelers Boehmer and Bassenge hoped the new king would purchase the same necklace for his own queen, Marie Antoinette. However, she refused to accept a piece of jewelry that had been created for the previous king’s mistress.
Meanwhile, a socially ambitious minor aristocrat named Jeanne de la Motte was plotting to get her hands on the necklace. Married to the Comte de la Motte, she was also the mistress of Cardinal de Rohan, former French ambassador to Marie Antoinette’s native Austria. Madame de la Motte managed to convince Cardinal de Rohan not only that Marie Antoinette wished to possess the necklace, but that she was acting on the Queen’s behalf. He could ingratiate himself at court, she insisted, by obtaining it. Cardinal Rohan foolishly purchased the necklace on credit, under the naive belief that he’d be repaid by Marie Antoinette. The scam concluded with Madame de la Motte stealing the necklace from the cardinal and, using her husband’s louche connections, selling it in pieces through fences in England.
This tawdry business was closer to comic opera than an affair of state. But when the fraud was discovered, the scandal gripped Parisian society. Louis XVI was so infuriated that he had Cardinal de Rohan arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille, which only heightened public interest. Marie Antoinette was already being caricatured in pamphlets as a depraved nymphomaniac. It was now open season.
In some caricatures, she appeared as a wild beast, a tiger feeding on the French nation. In others, she was depicted as an ostrich, a French wordplay with her home country Autriche, for Austria, which reads like autruche for ostrich. Even worse, she was depicted in pornographic postures, legs open and genitals gaping, cuckolding her obese husband with a succession of lovers, including lesbian trysts. Allusions to her sexual appetites suggested a carnal relationship with Satan. Robespierre’s publication Le Journal des hommes libres described her as “more bloodthirsty than Jezebel, more conniving than Agrippina”. The pamphlets blamed Marie Antoinette for all the nation’s misfortunes, including economic recession. She was so hated by the French public that there were serious concerns for her physical safety.
[…]
Cardinal de Rohan, meanwhile, was tried for his role in the Diamond Necklace affair. Astonishingly, he was acquitted. The scheming Madame de la Motte met a different fate. She was found guilty of theft and sentenced to be whipped and branded on the shoulder with the letter V for voleuse (thief). She was also incarcerated in the Salpêtrière prison in Paris, but escaped to London. In 1789, she published a book, Mémoires justificatifs, a scathing tell-all memoir about Marie Antoinette. It was a good year to attack the French monarchy, for the revolution was just getting going. Madame de la Motte was never returned to France to face justice. Exiled in London, she died in 1791 after falling from a window, apparently fleeing debt collectors. She was buried in St. Mary’s Churchyard in south London.
Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.
