Among the oddments that sometimes appear in opinion polls are questions like, “Would you accept a lower standard of living in exchange for” … whatever policy is currently on offer. That policy might range from a climate-change shutdown of all carbon-based energy production, to reduced levels of immigration and foreign trade.
In principle, I approve this recognition of policy trade-offs, and every acknowledgement that, in the red-pilled world beyond political phantasy, “you can’t have your diamond-studded hand-sculptured fondant wedding cake, and eat it, too”. Or in the more modest, Yorkshire form of this important cliché: “You can’t have the penny and the bun”.
Any concession towards what I remember as reality is welcome at the present day, to me. As a non-economist, however, I regret that the trade-offs are only expressed in money. They apply also, and frequently instead, to things the modern world doesn’t count, because they are intangibles.
David Warren, “On juvenile delinquency”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-05-22.
June 24, 2025
QotD: Trade-offs
June 23, 2025
QotD: Recruiting and organization under the “Marian reforms”
Sallust reports that Marius, “after he saw that the spirits of the plebs were aroused, he swiftly loaded ships with supplies, pay, weapons and other requirements; with them he ordered Aulus Manlius, his legate, to set out. Meanwhile himself he enrolled soldiers, not according to the mos maiorum [‘the customs of the ancestors’] from the census classes, but making use of whoever wished to go, mostly the capite censi [‘those counted by heads’ = the propertyless poor or proletarii]” (Sall. Iug. 86.1-2, trans mine). Plutarch repeats this report, that Marius violated custom by enrolling men who didn’t meet the property qualification for military service (Plut. Mar. 9.1).
There are a few oddities here to start, though. First, Sallust quickly notes that this resulted in Marius having an army rather larger than what the Senate had actually authorized (Sall. Iug. 86.4) and that’s actually quite a neat detail that may explain part of what’s going on here because this has, in a way, happened before. In 134, Scipio Aemilianus was elected consul for the second time (illegally, again) with a mandate to end the frustrating Roman war against the Celtiberian stronghold of Numantia in Spain. The Senate, however, denied Scipio authorization to raise fresh troops, to which Scipio responded by enlisting some 4,000 volunteers to replenish his legion; Appian says this was done with the consent of the Senate, but Plutarch’s brief note on it sure implies Scipio Aemilianus is end-running around Senatorial efforts to stifle him (App. Hisp. 84; Plut. Mor. 201A-B). And this too was hardly the first time for this sort of end-run; Scipio Africanus (what is it with Scipiones!?) back in 205 agitated for his invasion of Africa to end the Second Punic War and was given the province of Sicily with authorization to go to Africa if he thought it necessary, but the Senate registered its displeasure by refusing to let him levy troops, at which point – wait for it – Scipio took volunteers, equipping and financing his force through the socii and even building a fleet that way (Liv. 28.45.9-12).
In short, the Senate sometimes tried to trim the sails of generals it was displeased with – and Marius reportedly had gotten elected on a campaign platform of “to hell with the Senate” (Sall. Iug. 84.1) – by limiting the size of their armies or refusing to allow them to conduct a levy. And since 205 (a century before Marius), popular generals had occasionally juked this effort by the Senate by instead calling for volunteers, which the Senate could not stop. Marius is not doing something new in taking volunteers to supplement an army through the levy.
He also doesn’t keep doing it. After Marius wins in Africa with his volunteer-supplemented army (the bulk of which of course were still recruited through the dilectus under Metellus), he returns to Italy to take over the war against the Cimbri and Teutones but he doesn’t keep up the volunteer force, instead taking command of his predecessor Rutilius Rufus’ normally levied army (Front. Strat. 4.2.2). In practice, Marius probably took volunteers in part for that first army because the Senate was diverting available levy manpower towards the early phases of the Cimbric War (or at least that was a convenient excuse to kneecap him) – a series of costly military disasters for Rome which likely soaked up much of the manpower the Senate was willing to raise. Once Marius has access to that “primary” stream of manpower generated through the dilectus, he uses it and seems to stop using volunteers.
But what of recruiting the capite censi? Well, that isn’t quite new either, although it surely wasn’t typical. For one, it wasn’t that the poor absolutely never served; Polybius notes that the capite censi served in the fleet (Polyb. 6.19.2). But we also see non-assidui (assidui being the term for those wealthy enough to be liable for normal conscription) in a range of other emergencies. Livy reports in 329 a “crowd of sellularii [men who work sedentary trades, literally, ‘stoolsmen’], a type least suited for military service, were called into the army” (Livy 8.20.4), though the historicity of this report is questionable given the early date. In 296, Etruscan entrance into the Third Samnite War causes a draft of “not only the freeborn or the iuniores took the oath, but cohorts were made of seniores and centuries of freedmen” (Livy 10.21.4). Gellius (16.10.1) quotes Ennius reporting the proletarii were pulled into the armies in 280, presumably in response to Pyrrhus’ victory at Heraclea. And during the Second Punic War the Romans pulled out all of the stops, recruiting debtors and men convicted of capital crimes (Livy 23.14.3), enrolling slaves into the army (called the volones; you free them first and then draft them, Livy 27.38 and 28.10, Val. Max. 7.6.1) and as noted above, taking volunteers more generally.
As an aside, if you are wondering why the Romans seem in some of these to skip recruiting freeborn capite censi and go straight to freedmen and enslaved people, I think there are two answers here for this period. First, many of the available freeborn poor are probably already in service in the fleet. Second, there probably aren’t that many of them. Recall our chart of Roman social classes – the capite censi in the third century is quite small, almost certainly outnumbered by enslaved persons in Italy. But the population of Italy was rising over the third and especially second century and without adding new farmland, those new freeborn Romans may have swelled the ranks of the capite censi, leading to a much larger propertyless class by the late second century or the first century.1 Consequently, there may have been a lot more capite censi worth recruiting by Marius’ day, when Rome no longer needed to keep a large navy at sea (not facing any naval powers in its wars) and the number of capite censi having risen.
Finally, Marius does not mark the end of the Roman dilectus! Evidently Roman conscription persisted at least to the end of the Roman civil wars, as Suetonius reports Augustus (perhaps when he was still Octavian) inflicting the traditional penalty of being sold into slavery for draft-dodging on a Roman eques who cut the fingers off of his two sons to make them ineligible for military service (Suet. Aug. 24.1). Indeed we have attestations of the dilectus in 55, 52, 50, 49, AD 6 and AD 9.2 Even once the army is fairly clearly primarily a volunteer force, at least notionally the ability to hold a levy when necessary to fill the ranks remained “on the books” and Trajan (r. 98-117 AD) holds at least one levy because he punishes a father for the same reason Augustus had done (Dig. 49.16.4.12). So the traditional dilectus remained a thing Roman leaders could do well into the empire. In practice it seems safe to assume the system by the mid-first century is substantially ad hoc, as the census straight up doesn’t happen from 69 BC to 28 BC, which would make it hard to actually enforce the property requirements. But the process doesn’t stop in 107 and there’s no reason to suppose from 107 to 69, with the census being regularly conducted, that most annual levies were not conducted along traditional property lines.3
So the most we might say is that a one-time crisis expedient in earlier periods slowly becomes a standard way to supplement legions and then the standard way to recruit them, with the old normal method of the dilectus instead becoming the unusual way to supplement in a crisis. It’s unclear exactly when that shift-over point happens, but it sure isn’t in the career of Gaius Marius, who sits clearly in the “volunteers as a crisis response” side of the issue.
And what of the notion that Gaius Marius introduced both citizenship as a reward for service as a regular bonus and also that he instituted the paying of soldiers at the completion of a campaign to render them loyal? Well on the latter point, the Romans had been distributing spoils to the soldiers at the end of a campaign as a lump-sum payment since the beginning. This is exceedingly well reflected in Livy’s accounting of the years from 201 to 167 (where we have a nice continuous burst of Livy), see for instance Livy ::deep breath:: 30.45, 31.20, 33.23, 33.37, 34.46, 34.52, 36.40, 37.59, 39.5, 39.7, 40.34, 40.43, 40.59, 41.7, 41.13, 45.40, 45.43.4 And the idea that Roman victories might seize land which would then be settled as Roman coloniae, creating new land for Roman settlers was also not new (Wikipedia has a convenient list of Roman coloniae). So Marius is simply promising to do a thing Roman commanders regularly did, essentially saying, “serve with me, because I’m going to win and victory will make us rich”. Which is exactly the reason volunteers rushed to serve with Scipio Africanus and Scipio Aemilianus: they anticipated a lucrative victory for such well-regarded commanders.
And by now you may well be asking, “but wait, then when does the system change?” Because after all, I said that by the early empire, we can pretty clearly see an army primarily composed of professional, long-service volunteers who receive substantial retirement bonuses and are permanently stationed on the frontiers. Who is responsible for that? And in response, I give you, this guy.
It’s Augustus. It was always Augustus. Or at least I should say that is my view, given the evidence. Older scholarship – I think here of Keppie (1984) in particular – tended to assume that because most of the big changes happened with Marius (but we’ve seen they don’t) that Octavian/Augustus probably made only minimal changes to the military system he inherited from Julius Caesar. I don’t think that’s correct. I think if we look at the evidence in more detail it becomes clear that Augustus is the “break” (though not a clean break by any means) and that in fact we need to start regarding Augustus as a military reformer of some significant scale rather than merely the codifier of a Caesarian military system (though he probably does that too).
Augustus, after all, institutes regular bonuses for discharge, establishing a treasury funded by a regular tax to meet the expense rather than simply promising that he would win a lot and so soldiers would get rich off of their share of the booty (Res Gestae 17). And it’s not hard to see the problem he’s responding to – the massive military buildup of the Roman civil wars had left Octavian, as the victor, with the red-hot potato of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were promised the spoils of victory, including large numbers of men who didn’t win but who, if not settled down somehow would disrupt the state (RG 3). Earlier in the civil wars, Octavian had used proscriptions and land confiscations to solve this problem but as emperor, he needed a permanent solution, thus the establishment of the aerarium militare and its discharge bonuses (praemia). Before that, you simply had generals promising to feast their soldiers off of the property of the vanquished; the civil wars had only changed that in that the vanquished were now Romans. It also establishes a standard length of service, creating that professional, long-service army.
There’s a related issue which is the fate of the citizen equites and the velites. Caesar’s armies in Gaul seem to have neither, so the assumption was that the shift to recruiting proletarii meant that these wealth-based distinctions (the richest Romans serve as equites, the poorest as velites) dropped away, leaving a uniform heavy infantry legion. And in a schematic it makes sense: both roles are absorbed by the auxilia and indeed Caesar makes use of a lot of Gallic cavalry auxiliaries. But as François Gauthier recently pointed out,5 it’s not all clear that the velites really did vanish in the late-second/early-first century. Cicero still refers to to them writing in the 40s (Cic. Fam. 9.20; Brut., 271) and their apparent absence in Caesar’s writing may well just be an accident of Caesar’s avoidance of technical language. Caesar doesn’t generally talk about hastati or triarii much either; he prefers milites (“soldiers”). Likewise, it’s clear the citizen cavalry – the equites – survived Marius; as Jeremiah McCall notes, we have good evidence for citizen equites at least as late as the 90s BC and suggests the citizen cavalry probably vanished in the 80s as a result of the Social War and Sulla‘s Civil War.6 It surely did not happen in 107 or 104.
Meanwhile the auxilia as a mature part of the Roman army really only emerge under Augustus, and not even right at the beginning of his reign either. Roman armies needed cavalry and light infantry to function, so once again we may not be looking at a clean break but rather a period of transition as a result of some generals preference for (non-Italian) allied or auxiliary cavalry and light infantry and the formalization of that system not in 107 with Marius but again in 27 with Augustus.
Marius is also sometimes credited with the idea of extending citizenship to non-citizens who served, which is a catastrophic misreading of one episode in his career. For one, this gets read as meaning that Marius extended citizenship to all of the Italians in his army or that he made it standard to do so. Note for instance this line pulled from Wikipedia:
Finally, Marius granted citizens of the Italian allies (Etruria, Picenum, etc.) full Roman citizenship if they fought for Rome and completed a period of service in the Roman army.
[Dated] 6/25/2023, specified in the hope this page changes to be less wrong.
And that’s very much not right either. We have evidence for only a handful of citizenship extensions by Marius. In particular, of his army he extended citizenship to just two cohorts (c. 1,000 men) from Camerinum (Plut. Mor. 202D, Cic. Pro Balbo 46.). I can only assume this gets misunderstood because some writers don’t know their unit sizes, but Marius had 32,000 men in his army at Vercellae (101 BC), probably something like half of which were socii. These two cohorts were a comparatively tiny fraction. Marius also seems to have selected a very small number of his other socii veterans for citizenship (Cic. Pro Balbo 48), but there was no blanket grant of citizenship. Of course there wasn’t, this issue remained substantially unsolved until the Social War (91-87BC); if Roman levies had been calmly minting new citizens out of thousands of Italians through the 90s, there would hardly have been a cause for the Social War.
Instead, citizenship as a reward for service is an artifact of the imperial period and the auxilia. The Roman use of non-Roman, non-socii troops to supplement their armies was not new, but it emerged as a formalized, permanent part of the Roman army not during the civil wars – where such units where both ad hoc but also not nearly so numerous – but under the reign of Augustus, coming to form about half of the army by the end of his reign (Tac. Ann. 4.5; on the emergence of the auxilia, see I. Haynes, Blood of the Provinces (2013)). Indeed, as Haynes notes (op. cit. 49), it is actually only under Tiberius (r. 14-37) that we get direct evidence of citizenship grants to auxilia and the practice even then seems at least somewhat irregular (though it comes to be regularized).
In short that, the notion that Gaius Marius instituted the pattern of granting citizenship to serving non-citizens on discharge is simply wrong; that’s not in our sources. That doesn’t become consistent until Tiberius well over a century later. Gaius Marius did recruit volunteer capite censi into his army once but didn’t make a habit of it and as such isn’t a major reformer so much as a key step in a slow process of change which reaches its decisive point probably under Augustus, more than half a century after Gaius Marius died. He wasn’t the first to do either thing, whatever our sources say.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-30.
1. For more on the dynamics of this, see N. Rosenstein, Rome at War (2004), as this is part of his central argument.
2. For textual references, see Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971), 636-7.
3. We do not know how that process would have accounted for the massive expansion of the Roman citizen class due to the Social War. But evidently it did!
4. These were happily already compiled by Brunt, op. cit., 394.
5. “Did velites Really Disappear in the Late Roman Republic?” Historia 70 (2021).
6. J.B. McCall, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic (2002), 100-113..
June 22, 2025
QotD: “Autism stolen valor”
The very concept that anyone would ever claim to be autistic as a status move would have seemed incomprehensibly bizarre to me when I was growing up.
I get it, though. In the intervening decades, somehow a lot of people have developed the notion that anybody above the middle range of IQ must be autistic-spectrum.
It’s not true. I’ve met enough autists, brights and super-brights to know differently. I’ve read a fair bit of the literature on psychometrics and MBD syndromes. And I’ve been a guest for faculty tea at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is very illuminating if you’re even a little bit observant about people.
Here’s what I think I know:
Many autists are seriously damaged and non-functional, to the point where they need to be institutionalized or have semi-institutional special care. Few people outside the mental-health profession know this. The “autists” we encounter in daily life are a selected high-functioning group.
HFAs (high functioning autists) have one advantage over average-IQ neurotypicals: they can really concentrate on things that aren’t social-status games or sexual maneuvers.
Average-IQ neurotypicals can only just barely manage that, so it’s difficult for them to compete with HFAs in fields where you have to be able to concentrate for long periods in order to do decent work.
Like, say, writing software. The upper reaches of software engineering are stiff with HFAs. This has become well known.
This doesn’t mean your typical HFA is actually brighter than a median average-IQ neurotypical. In fact, if you put a whole bunch of HFAs through a psychometric battery you’ll find their average IQ is lower than for neurotypicals, not higher.
HFA is actually a drag on general intelligence that HFAs overcome by being obsessive — grinding really hard on intelligent-people stuff.
The result is that HFAs as a population excel over average-IQ neurotypicals, compete fairly evenly with bright neurotypicals, but top out lower than super-bright neurotypicals do.
This is hard to notice because there are so few super-brights that many people never meet one at all. Very few people have observed enough super-brights to make valid generalizations about them. And of the few people who have a large enough observational sample, still fewer are themselves bright enough to comprehend what they see.
But I have been to faculty tea at the IAS. (I had been an invited speaker that day.)
Most of my friends and peers are people in the tippy-top end of the HFA cohort. Top 1% software engineers and people like that. So at the IAS, people-watching a bunch of Nobel laureates and people bright enough to work with Nobel laureates day-to-day, my jaw dropped open.
Because compared to who I usually hang out with, these people are mostly *normal*. Neurotypical. As near as I can tell, the people in the crowd showing HFA tells are the slow ones.
Imagine if you can being so natively intelligent that even though your brain is constantly trying to distract you into playing monkey socio-sexual status games, you can still think rings around 99.9% of the people in the world.
That’s what actual super-brights are like. They’re not brain-damaged. They’re not obsessive or compulsive or neurotic. They don’t have sensory disabilities. And they leave high-functioning autists in their dust.
Because I know this, I find the concept of people faking being autists amusing. They think they’re positioning themselves as the superior, smartest people. They are hilariously wrong.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-27.
June 21, 2025
QotD: The camera lies, but the photographer doesn’t always realize it
Tom Paine, “Where we are and what we see”, The Last Ditch, 2020-05-20.
June 20, 2025
QotD: The innate appeal of socialism
And the material side of Socialism is technically feasible. Obviously so, and indeed it was obvious by 1865. Consider what the Union Army had to do to keep one million men in the field, simultaneously, spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles. This was not without its problems, of course — soldiers finally receiving their back pay spurred a minor economic boom in 1865-6 — but it was not just possible, but an everyday occurrence, for hundreds of thousands of men, dispersed over a huge geographic area, to receive their entire subsistence from the government. Clothes, shoes, food — the stuff Riis’s “street Arabs” would’ve killed for — all at public expense, delivered with clockwork efficiency.
If Socialism were just that, then indeed we could’ve “built Socialism”, as the Bolsheviks would have it, by the end of the 19th century. And cheaply, too — by the late 1880s, the US Treasury’s massive surplus was a major campaign issue for both parties. The “Yankee Leviathan“, as political historian Richard Bensel put it, was as close to actual Fascism as has ever been put into practice (alas, the term hadn’t been invented yet), and it was just aces at delivering the material goods. (It’s Alanis-level ironic that the Confederacy was even more actual capital-F Fascistic than the Union, given the whole “states’ rights” thing, but that’s what happens in totaler Krieg — win first, sort the theory out later).
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
June 19, 2025
QotD: Peer review and the replication crisis
Well, about that.
The replication crisis has been festering throughout the academic community for the better part of a decade, now. It turns out that a huge part of the scientific literature simply can’t be reproduced. In many cases the works in question are high-impact papers, the sort of work that careers are based on, that lead to million-dollar grants being handed out to laboratories across the world. Indeed, it seems that the most-cited works are also the least likely to be reproduced (there’s a running joke that if something was published in Nature or Science, you know it’s probably wrong). Awkward.
The scientific community has completely failed to draw the obvious conclusion from the replication crisis, which is that peer review doesn’t work at all. Indeed, it may well play a causal role in the replication crisis.
The replication crisis, I should emphasize, is probably not mostly due to deliberate fraud, although there’s certainly some of that. There was a recent scandal involving the connection of amyloid plaques to Alzheimer’s disease which seems to have been entirely fraudulent, and which led to many millions – perhaps billions – of dollars in biomedical research programs being pissed away, to say nothing of the uncountable number of wasted man-hours. There have been many other such scandals, in almost every field you can name, and God alone knows how many are still buried like undiscovered time bombs in the foundations of various sub-fields. Most scientists, however, are not deliberately, consciously deceptive. They try to be honest. But the different models, assumptions, and methods they adopt can lead to wildly divergent results, even when analyzing the same data and testing the same hypothesis. Beyond that, they can also be sloppy. And the sloppiness, compounded across interlinked citation chains in the knowledge network, builds up.
Scientists know quite well that just because something has received the imprimatur of publication in a peer-reviewed journal with a high impact factor doesn’t mean that it’s correct. But while they know this intellectually, it’s very difficult to avoid the operating assumption that if something has passed peer review it’s probably mostly okay, and they’re not inclined to spend valuable time checking everything themselves. After all, they need to publish their own papers – in order to finish their PhD, get that faculty position, or get that next grant – and papers that are just trying to reproduce the results of other papers, that aren’t doing something novel, aren’t very interesting on their own, hence unlikely to be published. So instead of checking carefully yourself, you assume a work is probably reliable, and you use it as an element of your own work, maybe in a small way – taking a number from a table to populate an empty field in your dataset – or maybe in an important way, as a key supporting measurement or fundamental theoretical interpretative framework.
But some of those papers, despite having been peer reviewed, will be wrong, in small ways and large, and those erroneous results will propagate through your own results, possibly leading to your own paper being irretrievably flawed. But then your paper passes peer review, and gets used as the basis for subsequent work. Over time the entire scientific literature comes to resemble a house of cards.
Peer review gives scientists – and the lay public – a false sense of security regarding the soundness of scientific results. It also imposes an additional, and quite unnecessary, barrier to publication. It frequently takes months for a paper to work its way through the review process. A year or more is not unheard of, particularly if a paper is rejected, and the authors must start the whole process anew at a different journal, submitting their work as a grindstone for whatever rusty old axe the new referee is looking to sharpen. Far from ensuring errors are corrected, peer review slows down the error correction process. A bad paper can persist in the literature – being cited by other scientists – for some time, for years, before the refutation finally makes it to print … at which point some (not all) will consider the original paper debunked, and stop citing it (others, not being aware of the debunking, will continue to cite it). But what if the refutation is itself tendentious? The original authors may wish to reply, but their refutation of the refutation must now go through the peer review process as well, and on and on it interminably drags …
As to what is happening behind the scenes, no one – not the public, not other scientists – has any idea. The correspondence between referees and authors is rarely published along with the paper. Whether the review was meticulous or sloppy, whether the referee’s critiques warranted or absurd, is entirely opaque.
In essence, the peer review process slows down the publication duty cycle, thereby slowing down scientific debate, while taking much of that debate behind closed doors, where its quality cannot be evaluated by anyone but the participants.
John Carter, “DIEing Academic Research Budgets”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2025-03-17.
June 18, 2025
QotD: The “doctrine of media untruth”
Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth”.
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Doctrine of Media Untruth”, American Greatness, 2020-05-24.
June 17, 2025
QotD: What is a “tank”?
And we should stop to note that as with any question of definition, this one too is language-sensitive. The exact confines of a term vary from one language to another; kampfpanzer, for instance is not necessarily an exact synonym for “tank”.
In any event, the basic demands of early tanks were dictated by the realities of the Western Front: a tank needed to be able to resist small arms fire (particularly machine guns), deliver direct supporting fire itself, it needed to be able to move on the muddy, artillery-flattened ground and it needed to be able to cross a trench. This last requirement – the need to be able to both climb a parapet (usually c. 4ft) and then cross over an 8ft wide trench – was significant in the design of early tanks.
Those factors in turn dictated a lot of the design of early tanks. The armor demands of resisting small arms fire meant that the vehicle would be heavy (and indeed, as soon as tanks appeared amongst Allied troops, their German opponents began introducing more powerful bullets, like the K bullet and later the 13.2mm anti-tank round fired from the Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr). And here is the first advantage of tracks. The weight of a vehicle is distributed along all of the area of contact it has with the ground; with tires that area is limited to the bottom of the tire so the total area of ground contact is fairly low, which is fine for most vehicles.
But tanks are heavy. Really heavy. Even something like the Renault FT could mass around 7 tons and by later standards that would be classified as a tankette (a “mini-tank” as it were); by WWII, medium tanks often clocked in around 30 tons. If you put a vehicle like that on tires, you are going to create a LOT of pressure on those small points of contact. That might still be OK if you are just going to drive on roads and other firm surfaces which can take the pressure. But remember: tanks were designed for the Western Front, which looks like this.
Fortunately for the landship committee, this wasn’t a new problem: farming tractors were also heavy and also had to operate in churned up (in this case, plowed) soft soil; the heaviest of these vehicles had much the same problem and the solution was continuous tracks or “treads”. When kept properly tensioned – tune in, by the by, to Nicholas “The Chieftain” Moran’s YouTube for more than you ever want to know about track tension – the track distributes the weight of the tank across the entire section of the track touching the ground, which reduces the ground pressure at any given point, allowing a big heavy tank to roll over terrain where even a much lighter wheeled vehicle would get stuck.
This is one of those points where the functionality of a tank (what a tank does) has such a strong influence on design that the design implications of the functionality become part of the definition: a tank has to be heavily armored and has to be able to move off-road and as a result has to be tracked, not wheeled. One might be able to imagine some sort of exotic technology that might make it possible to do all of the things a tank does without tracks, but we don’t have that yet.
The other factor was fire. I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the significant background factors of WWI is that a lot of the belligerents misjudged the kind of artillery they’d need for a general European war. Not to get too deep into the weeds here, but most of the belligerents expected a relatively rapid war of maneuver and so thought that light, direct-fire artillery like the famed French ’75 (the Matériel de 75mm Mle 1897) would be the most useful. Those guns could be moved quickly and could deliver a lot of quick firepower on static or moving formations of enemy infantry in support of friendly infantry.
The problem is that in the conditions of trench warfare, those guns – as they were configured, at least – were far less useful. They were, first off, much shorter in range which meant they had to be brought dangerously far forward to do their direct fire role – often so far forward they could be engaged by enemy rifles and machine guns. This was compounded by the fact that direct fire at range was ineffective against trench works (which are dug down into the earth). But at the same time, the value of rapid firing (because these lighter guns could fire a lot faster than the heavy, indirect fire artillery) direct fire artillery remained high, if only you could get it to the fight.
This was also a problem a tank could solve: as a mobile, armored platform it could move a rapid-firing direct fire gun forward without immediately being knocked out by enemy small arms to support the infantry. There is, I should note, early complexity on this point, with both “male” (heavy direct fire cannon focused) and “female” (machine gun focused) tanks in WWI though in the end “hermaphrodite” designs with both capabilities (but much more focus on the main cannon) triumph, so that’s what we’ll focus on.
And that gets us the fundamental role structure for tanks: enough armor to resist enemy small arms (but with the understanding that some weapons will always be effective against the tank), enough mobility to cross the churned up battlefield and some direct fire capability to support the infantry crossing it at the same time.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: When is a ‘Tank’ Not a Tank?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-05-06.
June 16, 2025
QotD: Evading the censor
As we crept closer, mischief would smear across his lips. He’d bide his time. “Now, Jack,” I’d plead. “Remember what your mother said …”
We’d land in the supermarket. Jack would survey the crowds. At the top of his lungs, he’d bellow: “Boobies! Boo-BEES! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Fat — FAT boobies!” With a visceral joy on his face, he’d fold over and repeat the lung-puncturing cycle, laughing himself into a pram-splayed stupor.
For the first time, Jack indulged the timeless power inherent in saying a few forbidden words and basking in the illicit result. Freud, for all of his faults, called this joy “evading the censor”. Of course, Jack hadn’t read much Freud by then. All he knew was that saying what he was forbidden to say was, in fact, uproariously funny.
No doubt, modern scolds would pen a 5,000-word buzzword soup condemning Jack’s internalised misogyny, his unconscious patriarchal programming or some such modern voodoo. They’d miss the point: saying what one is forbidden to say is — and always will be — funny.
Christopher Gage, “No Laughing Matter”, Oxford Sour, 2025-03-14.
June 15, 2025
QotD: Four stages of revolutions
Professor Chirot writes extremely well and is never less than clear. He uses no jargon and he has a gift for condensing complex historical events into a short compass without resort to procrustean simplification. I would imagine that he is an excellent teacher.
He does not claim to have found a universal law of history that applies at all times and in all places, but he says that large-scale revolutions in the modern world have had a tendency to go through four discernible stages. First, an outmoded governing power refuses to accept that change is necessary and consequently refuses to make the necessary concessions to save itself. This leads to overthrow by relatively moderate leaders who would once have accepted compromise but see that change can only come about by revolution. Second, there is a counter-revolutionary reaction by those who do not accept their loss of power and who provoke a civil war or call for foreign intervention, or both. As a result, much more radical revolutionary leaders come to the fore and defend the revolution by increasing repression of enemies or supposed enemies. Third, the radical leaders, because they hold extreme views and are imbued with unrealistic notions of the complete redemption of mankind from all its earthly ills, impose experimentation on the population which is economically and socially disastrous. Fourth, in the case of its evident failure, the revolutionary regime loses its ideological ardour, and settles down to a kind of routine and less violent authoritarianism accompanied by large-scale corruption and cronyism.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Longing for Revolution”, Law & Liberty, 2020-05-13.
June 14, 2025
QotD: University students or NPCs?
A few semesters on, and that no longer applied. Sure, sure, they were still teenagers, and still pulled typical teenager capers … but a new set of behaviors crept in. I can’t describe them exactly, in detail, but the overall impression was: here’s someone doing a pretty good impersonation of a teenager. Most every kid goes through the faux-sophisticate stage, usually somewhere around age 12, and this kinda looked like that — young kids pretending to be a lot older — but it also looked a lot like the opposite end of the spectrum. Not quite “hello, fellow teens!” — not yet — but there was something like that going on, too. It was weird, but I figured it was mostly in my head — I’ve always been a grouchy old man, but now I was actually chronologically old enough to let my freak flag fly, so I assumed that’s what I was doing. They’re not changing, I am …
Fast forward a few more semesters, and nope, it’s definitely them. The kids at the tail end of my career still looked like bargain basement Rich Littles, doing impersonations of teenagers, but their act was terrible. Remember a few years back, when Facebook or Twitter or whoever tried to make an AI chat bot, and it immediately turned super racist? Not that these kids were racists — they were the furthest thing from that — but they all seemed to have a small stock of crowdsourced responses. And that’s ALL they had, so no matter what the situation, they’d shoehorn it in to one of their canned affects, because that’s all they had.
By the very end, interacting with them was like playing one of those old text-adventure games from the very dawn of the personal computer, like Zork. They’d respond to commands, but only the right commands, in the exact word order. No deviations allowed, and of course their responses were equally programmed.
Severian, “Terminators”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-04.
June 13, 2025
QotD: The Subaru BRAT
If you know this truck, you also know why it’s no longer available.
Such fun things are no longer allowed.
They are not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe! “Moms” are “concerned”!
But in 1977, the Safety Cult — which ended such fun things — was still a backwater aberration, like dancing with rattlesnakes — and most people still esteemed fun over fear. There were roofless Broncos and K5 Blazers — and cars with beds.
You could buy all kinds of different stuff back when America was still a fairly free country — and the Subaru BRAT was as different as it got.
BRAT — all caps — was short for Bi-Drive Recreational All-Terrain Transporter. It was superficially similar to other small import pickups of the ’70s, such as the Datsun 620 and similar models from Toyota (SR5), Mazda (B210), and Chevy (via Isuzu) Luv.
But unlike them, it was a four seater — with two of the four in the bed, facing the other way. The seats were made of all-weather plastic and far from the most comfortable — but the view was spectacular. Watching the world recede as you progressed is another one of many freedoms denied today in the name of “safety”.
Subaru wasn’t “unconcerned” about “safety”. Grab handles — to keep passengers from bouncing out of the bed — were included. Though holding onto them made it harder to reach for a cold one in the cooler. That was another fun thing people did in pickups back in the day — before the Safety Cult put the kibosh on that, too.
The seats were actually a dodge — of a federal fatwa known as the “chicken tax”, which was a retaliatory tariff of 25 percent applied to import-brand pickups manufactured outside the United States as tit-for-tat for tariffs applied by foreign countries to American chicken exported outside the United States.
The “chicken tax” hit trucks with just two seats — at the time almost exclusively the small import models, which didn’t offer the extended and crew cab configurations that are commonplace today.
By adding the extra seats in the bed, BRAT qualified as a passenger vehicle rather than a “light truck”, and thus Subaru evaded the chicken tax on a happy technicality — and was also able to sell the BRAT for less than two-seater rivals that had the cost of the tax folded into their MSRP.
Eric Peters, “Doomed: Subaru BRAT (1977-87)”, The American Spectator, 2020-04-26.
June 12, 2025
QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte, arch-meritocrat
Jane: But Napoleon was a meritocrat, in the strictest and most literal sense. He made himself emperor through sheer excellence, and the men he elevated were the same. I mean, let’s look at his first set of marshals: Augereau is the son of a fruit-seller, Ney’s father was a cooper, Masséna’s father was a shopkeeper, and Bessières’ was a doctor (in an era when that was a lot less prestigious than it is today). Bernadotte starts out the son of a provincial prosecutor and ends up king of Sweden. Only Davout had an aristocratic background. Obviously this was sort of inevitable, because the previous elite had been literally decapitated and a new one had to come from somewhere. Maybe it’s just what happens when you have a particularly profound disruption: people end up in power because they’re better than anyone else at making war to get the power in the first place. Just like you can’t follow the lineage of any European aristocrat back farther than the Germanic conquerors of the early Middle Ages. (The Psmiths, as is well attested, trace descent from the Viking Psmiðr who came to Normandy with Rollo in the 8th century.) But I think it’s more than that. Napoleon set up all kinds of meritocratic institutions outside the military: he had his competitive examination lycées, he was constantly promoting the talented young auditeurs he ran across in the Conseil … (Can you tell I liked the civil administration chapters better than the battle chapters? #thetwogenders)
So what is the difference between Napoleonic meritocracy and our present sort? I think the real difference is that in his case there was someone doing the choosing. This is important for a couple of reasons: first, because it takes a certain amount of talent to recognize excellence. You can get away with being a Salieri, but you need to have something. I think we’ve all seen institutions whose HR departments were so packed with drones that they couldn’t have recognized a genius if one fell into their laps, let alone wanted to work for them. And it’s way, way harder to keep around an institution full of competent intelligent people with correctly aligned incentives than it is to just … be good at identifying talent, personally. Second, a person exercising judgment can take a way more holistic view than any standardized metric. This is what college admissions claims to be trying to do when they’re not just using it as an excuse to keep out Asians. But a well-functioning meritocracy — or an emperor picking his men — should be searching for excellence. Studying hard and doing well on a test not only fails to reliably indicate excellence, it actually encourages and cultivates habits of mind that undermine excellence.
But the biggest reason this is important, I think, brings us back to Napoleon again, and might be the key to what you described as the strange inconsistency between his loving concern for his men and his willingness to send them to a hideous death. Because I don’t actually think it’s an inconsistency at all! And it has to do with mission. What’s the deal with our current meritocratic system? “We want to have the smartest people in power”. Okay but why? “So they can be effective”. Effective at what?
No one ever had to ask Napoleon “effective at what”.
He was willing to throw himself, and his closest friends, and the meanest infantryman whose boots he nevertheless obsessed over, into some of the most hellish experiences yet devised by men1 in service of something greater. And you can be snide and say the something greater was “Napoleon”, and that’s sort of true, but to him and to France “Napoleon” had come to stand for law and knowledge and liberty and order and greatness itself. Napoleon’s meritocracy worked because it had a telos. Our meritocracy is the idiot fluting of a blind inhuman blob.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.
1. Another book recommendation! The Face of Battle.
June 11, 2025
QotD: “Pike and Shot” in the early gunpowder era
Instead, pike and shot were combined into a single unit. The “standard” form of this was the tercio, the Spanish organizational form of pike and shot and one which was imitated by many others. In the early 16th century, the standard organization of a tercio – at least notionally, as these units were almost never at full strength – was 2,400 pikemen and 600 arquebusiers. In battle, the tercio itself was the maneuver unit, moving as a single formation (albeit with changing shape); they were often deployed in threes (thus the name “tercio” meaning “a third”) with two positioned forward and the third behind and between, allowing them to support each other. The normal arrangement for a tercio was a “bastioned square” with a “sleeve of shot”: the pikes formed a square at the center, which was surrounded by a thin “sleeve” of muskets, then at each corner of the sleeve there was an additional, smaller square of shot. Placing those secondary squares (the “bastions” – named after the fortification element) on the corner allowed each one a wide potential range of fire and would mean that any enemy approaching the square would be under fire at minimum from one side of the sleeve and two of the bastions.
That said, if drilled properly, the formation could respond dynamically to changing conditions. Shot might be thrown forward to provide volley-fire if there was no imminent threat of an enemy advance, or it might be moved back to shelter behind the square if there was. If cavalry approached, the square might be hollowed and the shot brought inside to protect it from being overrun by cavalry. In the 1600s, against other pike-and-shot formations, it became more common to arrange the formation linearly, with the pike square in the center with a thin sleeve of shot while most of the shot was deployed in two large blocks to its right and left, firing in “countermarch” (each man firing and moving to the rear to reload) in order to bring the full potential firepower of the formation to bear.
Indeed it is worth expanding on that point: volley fire. The great limitation for firearms (and to a lesser extent crossbows) was the combination of frontage and reloading time: the limited frontage of a unit restricted how many men could shoot at once (but too wide a unit was vulnerable and hard to control) and long reload times meant long gaps between shots. The solution was synchronized volley fire allowing part of a unit to be reloading while another part fired. In China, this seems to have been first used with crossbows, but in Europe it really only catches on with muskets – we see early experiments with volley fire in the late 1500s, with the version that “catches on” being proposed by William Louis of Nassau-Dillenburg (1560-1620) to Maurice of Nassau (1567-1625) in 1594; the “countermarch” as it came to be known ends up associated with Maurice. Initially, the formation was six ranks deep but as reloading speed and drill improved, it could be made thinner without a break in firing, eventually leading to 18th century fire-by-rank drills with three ranks (though by this time these were opposed by drills where the first three ranks – the front kneeling, the back slightly offset – would all fire at once but with different sections of the line firing at different times (“fire-by-platoon”)).
Coming back to Total War, the irony is that while the basic components of pike-and-shot warfare exist in both Empire: Total War and for the Empire faction in Total War: Warhammer, in both games it isn’t really possible to actually do pike-and-shot warfare. Even if an army combines pikes and muskets, the unit sizes make the kind of fine maneuvers required of a pike-and-shot formation impossible and while it is possible to have missile units automatically retreat from contact, it is not possible to have them pointedly retreat into a pike unit (even though in Empire, it was possible to form hollow squares, a formation developed for this very purpose).
Indeed if anything the Total War series has been moving away from the gameplay elements which would be necessary to make representing this kind of synchronized discipline and careful formation fighting possible. While earlier Total War games experimented with synchronized discipline in the form of volley-fire drills (e.g. fire by rank), that feature was essentially abandoned after Total War: Shogun 2‘s Fall of the Samurai DLC in 2012. Instead of firing by rank, musket units in Total War: Warhammer are just permitted to fire through other members of their unit to allow all of the soldiers in a formation – regardless of depth or width – to fire (they cannot fire through other friendly units, however). That’s actually a striking and frustrating simplification: volley fire drills and indeed everything about subsequent linear firearm warfare was focused on efficient ways to allow more men to be actively firing at once; that complexity is simply abandoned in the current generation of Total War games.
Bret Devereaux, “Collection: Total War‘s Missing Infantry-Type”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-04-01.
June 10, 2025
QotD: From Witan to Magna Carta
After a few hundred years of trial and error, and given a king who really was wicked and stupid, too, they, the barons as they were then known, went to war with their king and bent him to their will by forcing him to agree to a great charter of their rights. There was a bit of ringing language about no free man being taken except after a trial by a jury of his peers, but, basically, in very typically English fashion, the rights about which the great charter was most concerned were property rights because the barons had learned, over the centuries that only by controlling the pursestrings could they really control the king.
A few hundred years later, one of liberalism’s and democracy’s greatest voices told us that we have three absolutely fundamental, natural rights: to life, to liberty and to property. These rights were not and still are not unlimited. There were and are ways to lawfully and properly deprive a person of his property and his liberty and, in some countries, even his life.
A few centuries after John Locke another philosopher wanted to do away with the right to property: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, Karl Marx wrote, and many, far too many, believed. The only real problem with Marx’s notion is that it requires that humans are perfect … and most of us know how rare that is. Here in Canada, especially since the early years of the 20th century, we have had far too much Marx and far too little Locke.
Ted Campbell, “Democracy is in peril”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2020-06-12.
