Christopher Hitchens used to have a cast-iron rule when it came to hardline Christians and the condemnation of some very particular sins of the flesh. […] I am beginning to wonder whether a similar trend is not emerging with another group, specifically that variety of men whom the internet — with its unerring ability to get to the cruel point — has come to describe as the “creepy male feminist”.
It is a distinctly 2010s phenomenon: the sort of chap who likes to present himself as a great spokesperson for, and defender of women and overdoes it so much that you just know that something else is going on.
He will invariably go beyond the usual courtesies and head some way past the point of merely regarding women as his equal. Instead, the creepy male feminist pulls a number of simultaneous moves. These include (though are not limited to):
- Presenting the plight of women in our society as distinctly worse than it is.
- Suggesting that everybody knows this but that some people (especially men) are deliberately covering for that fact.
- Making the suggestion — sometimes insinuated, often explicit — that nothing and nobody is more willing to stand between women as a whole and such rampaging patriarchs than the male in question. Anyone still unfamiliar with the type might recognise it under another entry in the lexicon of modern ignominy: “White knight” (n).
And a trend can now be observed, which is that with unnerving regularity the type of man who presents himself as the foremost protector of the entire female sex is precisely the person who shortly thereafter is exposed as having tried to help himself in distinctly un-gentlemanly ways.
Douglas Murray in “Beware the creepy male feminist: ‘White knights’ like Robert De Niro often turn out to be less than chivalrous”, Unherd, 2019-11-15.
May 23, 2024
QotD: The “creepy male feminist”
May 22, 2024
QotD: Are western democracies moving uniformly in the direction of “surface democracy”?
Is there something deeper at work here? There’s a theory, popular among the sorts of people who staff the technocracy, that this is all a perfectly innocent outgrowth of modern states being more complex and demanding to run. The thinking goes that it was fine to leave the government in the hands of yeoman farmers and urban proles a century ago, when the government didn’t do very much, but today the technical details of governance are beyond any but the most specialized professionals, so we need to leave it all to them.
I think this explanation has something going for it, I admire the structure of its argument, but it also can’t be the whole story. For starters, it treats the scope and nature of the state’s responsibilities as a fixed law of nature. Another way to frame this objection is that you can easily take the story I just told and reverse the causality — the common people used to rule, and so they created a government simple enough for them to understand and command; whereas today unelected legions of technocrats rule, and so they’ve created a government that plays to their strengths. There’s no a priori reason to prefer one of these explanations over the other. There needs to be a higher principle, a superseding reason that results in selecting one compatible ruler-state dyad over another. I think there is such a principle, we just have to get darker and more cynical.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-03.
May 21, 2024
QotD: First Nations warfare in eastern North America
Fundamentally, Lee aims in the book to lay out a complete model for Native American warfare in eastern North America (so the East Coast, but also the Great Lakes region and the Appalachian Mountains), covering both the pre-European-contact system of warfare and also how that system changes as a result of contact. In presenting this model of a “cutting-off” way of war, Lee is explicitly looking to supplant the older scholarly model, called the “skulking way of war”, which he argues has been fatally overtaken by developments in history, archaeology and anthropology. As a description of a whole system of war, Lee discusses tactics, the movement of war parties, logistics and also the strategic aims of this kind of warfare. The book also details change within that model, with chapters covering the mechanisms by which European contact seems to have escalated the violence in an already violent system, the impact of European technologies and finally the way that European powers – particularly the English/British – created, maintained and used relationships with Native American nations (as compared, quite interestingly, to similar strategies of use and control in contemporary English/British occupied Ireland).
The overall model of the “cutting-off” way of war (named because it aimed to “cut off” individual enemy settlements, individuals or raiding parties by surprise or ambush; the phrase was used by contemporary English-language sources describing this form of warfare) is, I think, extremely useful. It is, among other things, one of the main mental models I had in mind when thinking about what I call the “First System” of war.1 Crucially it is not “unconventional” warfare: it has its own well-defined conventions which shape, promote or restrict the escalation of violence in the system. At its core, the “cutting-off” way is a system focused on using surprise, raids and ambushes to inflict damage on an enemy, often with the strategic goal of forcing that enemy group to move further away and thus vindicating a nation’s claim to disputed territory (generally hunting grounds) and their resources, though of course as with any warfare among humans, these basic descriptions become immensely more complicated in practice. Ambushes get spotted and become battles, while enmities that may have begun as territorial disputes (and continue to include those disputes) are also motivated by cycles of revenge strikes, internal politics, diplomatic decisions and so on.
The book itself is remarkably accessible and should pose few problems for the non-specialist reader. Lee establishes a helpful pattern of describing a given activity or interaction (say, raids or the logistics system to support them) by leading with a narrative of a single event (often woven from multiple sources), then following that with a description of the system that event exemplifies, which is turn buttressed with more historical examples. The advantage of those leading spots of narrative is that they serve to ground the more theoretical system in the concrete realia of the historical warfare itself, keeping the whole analysis firmly on the ground. At the same time, Lee has made a conscious decision to employ a fair bit of “modernizing” language: strategy, operations, tactics, logistics, ways, ends, means and so on, in order to de-exoticize Native American warfare. In this case, I think the approach is valuable in letting the reader see through differences in language and idiom to the hard calculations being made and perhaps most importantly to see the very human mix of rationalism and emotion motivating those calculations.
The book also comes with a number of maps, all of which are well-designed to be very readable on the page and a few diagrams. Some of these are just remarkably well chosen: an initial diagram of a pair of model Native American polities, with settlements occupying core zones with hunting-ground peripheries and a territorial dispute between them is in turn followed by maps of the distribution of actual Native American settlements, making the connection between the model and the actual pattern of settlement clear. Good use is also made of period-drawings and maps of fortified Native American settlements, in one case paired with the modern excavation plan. For a kind of warfare that is still more often the subject of popular myth-making than history, this book is extremely valuable and I hope it will find a wide readership.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday, September 29, 2023 (On Academic Hiring)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-09-29.
1. Itself an ultra-broad category with many exceptions and caveats.
May 20, 2024
QotD: “Selfless” public servants
Ideally, government in a democratic republic reflects the will of the people, or at least that of the majority. Citizens vote for candidates whom they believe will best promote the general welfare. Victorious candidates, after pledging to uphold the Constitution, go to state capitals or to Washington, D.C., to do The People’s business — to undertake all the good and worthy activities that citizens in their private capacities cannot perform.
Sure, every now and then crooks and demagogues win office, but these are not the norm. Our system of regular, aboveboard democratic elections ensures that officials who do not effectively carry out The People’s business are thrown from office and replaced by more reliable public servants.
Trouble is, it’s not true. It’s a sham. Despite being called “the Honorable”, the typical politician is certainly no more honorable than the typical dentist, auto mechanic, Wal-Mart regional manager or any other private citizen.
Despite being referred to as “public servants”, politicians serve, first and foremost, their own personal political ambitions and they do so by pandering to narrow special interest groups.
Don Boudreaux, “Base Closings”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 2005-03-18.
May 19, 2024
QotD: Taxation and theft
An analogy: your house and your neighbour’s house are both burgled. You lose a television. He loses a DVD player, microwave, his collection of Chomsky memorabilia (it’s an inner-city house), and a unique framed Leunig depicting Mr Curly’s pedophilia arrest. Would it be unfair if police were to return all of this fellow’s belongings, and you were only to get back your 24-inch Sony?
Tim Blair, “Simplistic right-wing greed justification attempted”, Road to Surfdom, 2005-05-12.
[H/T to Samizdata, both for the link and for their title on the post, which I’ve purloined.]
May 18, 2024
QotD: Academic research and the “phantom cite”
Happens all the time. There are a couple of reasons for this. Being as charitable as I possibly can, I’m going to call one “survivorship bias”. I’m sure you’ve seen this … Since, again, we’re being extremely charitable here, this isn’t actually a case of “just tell ’em what they want to hear”. I’ll illustrate from my own research experience. My dissertation asserts that General Ripper, commander of the 43rd Imaginary Infantry in Au Phuc Dup province, Republic of Vietnam, was convinced that the local provincial governor, Long Duc Dong, was a Communist infiltrator. Now, this is a 100% true fact, that Gen. Ripper believes Long Duc Dong is a Communist. Armies are awash in paperwork, and moreover Gen. Ripper was an obsessive letter-writer and diarist, so you can find hundreds if not thousands of citations stating it directly: “I, Gen. Ripper, believe that Long Duc Dong is a Communist”.
Which explains quite a bit about why Gen. Ripper made the decisions he did, which in turn is why this 100% indisputably true fact — that Gen. Ripper thought Long Duc Dong was a Communist — features so prominently in that study of the dynamics of command in the 43rd Imaginary Infantry.
The problem, though, is that some other historian comes along, looking at something very different — say, the effectiveness of anti-Communist propaganda in the IV Corps operational area — and comes across my dissertation. From this, he writes “So ineffective was the anti-Communist propaganda campaign that even the governor, Long Duc Dong, was strongly suspected of being a Communist infiltrator”. And from that, another historian, looking for the prevalence of pro-Communist sentiment, concludes that “despite the Americans’ best efforts, the extreme south of the RVN was so thoroughly indoctrinated that even the Governor, Long Duc Dong, was a Communist”.
Now, all of that is true except for the last bit. It is not, in fact, proven that Long Duc Dong was a Communist. Gen. Ripper sure thought he was. And Gen. Ripper continued to think so, even after the anti-Communist propaganda campaign, which means that the campaign indisputably failed in Long Duc Dong’s case — he carried on acting like enough of a commie to keep Gen. Ripper’s suspicions up. But thanks to the thicket of citations, it’s the last bit — the assertion that Long Duc Dong was, indisputably, a Communist — that has by far the most footnotes attached to it. Hell, the footnotes probably cite all the same things I did — the truckloads of letters and documents from Gen. Ripper saying “Damn that Long Duc Dong, he’s a Communist!!”
That’s because he lifted them straight from my dissertation, all impeccably footnoted — by which is meant, giving ME full credit — and do you see what I mean? None of the historians involved had any obvious axe to grind, no viewpoint to push. It’s just that everyone’s bibliography is a hundred pages long, and nobody has the time to read every page of every book in those hundred pages. Jones just skimmed Smith’s index, looking for names of commies. Smith did the same thing with my index, of course, in which he found “Dong, Long Duc, Communist sympathies of,” with dozens of page numbers referenced.
Severian, “‘Studies'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-22.
May 17, 2024
QotD: Canadian socialism
We are a nation of muddlers. Until we grow out of that I’m afraid the words “American-style” and “ideologically driven” will continue to frighten us away from seriously debating issues of public policy.
“Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2005-05-14.
May 16, 2024
QotD: Modern parenting in open-concept houses
But the real crime of most new construction isn’t the exterior details. It’s inside, and it’s walls. They’re missing.
Open floorplans are bad. They’re bad for entertaining and they’re bad for families. Sure, that photo looks great (if you’re allergic to color and texture) and the HGTV hosts love ’em, but imagine actually living in that room with children. Seriously, just try: how fast are the cushions coming off those couches? How fast are your neutrals drowned beneath colorful toys and backpacks? (Unless you’re inflicting the same sad beige color scheme on your children.) How much visual clutter can a room of that size accumulate, and how much help will a small child need just figuring out where to start tidying up?
How many times do you have to ask the monster truck vs. dinosaur battle by the fireplace to pipe down so you can talk to Daddy over here by the stove, for Pete’s sake?
There’s a school of American parenting that says every moment with your child should be spent intensively nurturing his or her precious individual development. At lunch, for instance, you should make eye contact with your ten-month-old and describe the texture and flavor of each food (perhaps in French!) while Baby carefully grinds it into her hair. Your child’s quiet drawing time will surely be enhanced by his mother hovering at his elbow: “Tell me about your picture, honey! Uh-huh, and how do we think the villagers feel about Gigantor devouring them? Gosh, you sure gave him some big teeth!” An open floorplan is a tremendous boon to this sort of parenting: your child is always visible, so you can always be engaged.
It is completely impossible to raise more than maybe two children this way.
I don’t know which way the causation goes — do parents who were already inclined to be a little more laid-back and hands-off find their lives have room for more kids, or does sheer number of children force you to alter your tactics? — but either way, small families and intensive parenting go together, and they live in an open-concept house with 1.64 children.
Walls and doors, on the other hand, are God’s greatest gift to large families. Of course it is wonderful to be together. It’s important to have spaces that will fit everyone. (We were very sad when it was no longer possible to pile everyone into a king-size bed, even with elbows.) But it’s just as important to be able to be apart: because your little brother is practicing piano while you’re trying to do algebra, or a blanket fort combines poorly with an elaborate board game, or just because LEGO spaceships are a noisy business and your mother is reading to your sisters. (Or, God forbid, reading a book herself.)
Because at the end of the day, houses are just the stage where life happens. This isn’t to say that the stage-dressing is irrelevant — there is real worth and value to surrounding ourselves with order and beauty, and understanding how your house or neighborhood got to be that way can illuminate new things about the world. But ultimately, what matters most is how you make it a home.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia Savage McAlester”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-12-05.
May 15, 2024
QotD: Recruiting an army in the Roman Republic
So, on the appointed day(s), Polybius tells us all Romans liable for service of military age assemble in Rome and are called up on the Capitoline Hill for selection. This was a point that raised a lot of skepticism from historians,1 mostly concerning the number of people involved, but those concerns have all pretty much been resolved. While there might have been something like 323,000 Roman citizen males in the third or second century, they’re not all liable for general conscription, which was restricted to the iuniores – Roman citizen men between the ages of 17 and 46, who numbered fewer, probably around 228,000; seniores in theory could be conscripted, but in practice only were in an emergency. In practice the number is probably lower still as unless things were truly dire, men in their late 30s or 40s with several years of service could be pretty confident they wouldn’t be called and might as well stay home and rely on a neighbor of family member to report back in the unlikely event they were called. That’s still, of course, too many to bring up on to the Capitoline or to sort through calling out names, but as Polybius notes they don’t all come up, they’re called up by tribe. The Roman tribes were one of Rome’s two systems of voting units (the other, of centuries, we’ll come to in just a moment) and there were 35 of them, four urban tribes for those living in the city and 31 rural tribes for those living outside the city.
So what is actually happening is that the consul sets the date for the dilectus, then assigns his military tribunes to their legions (this matters because the tribunes will then do a round-robin selection of recruits to ensure each legion is of equivalent equality), then calls up one tribe at a time, with each tribe having perhaps around 6-7,000 iunores in it. Conveniently, the Capitoline is plenty large enough for that number, with estimates of its holding capacity tending to be between 12,000 and 25,000 or so.2 And while Polybius makes it seem like all of this happens on one day, it probably didn’t. Livy notes of one dilectus in 169, conducted in haste, was completed in 11 days; presumably the process was normally longer (though that’s 11 days for all three steps, not just the first one, Livy 43.14.9-10).
Once each tribe is up on the Capitoline, recruits are selected in batches; Polybius says in batches of four, but this probably means in batches equal to the number of legions being enrolled, as Polybius’ entire schema assumes a normal year with four legions being enrolled. Now Polybius doesn’t clarify how selection here would work and here Livy comes in awfully handy because we can glean little details from various points in his narrative (the work of doing this is a big chunk of Pearson (2021), whose reconstruction I follow here because I think it is correct). We know that the censors compile a list not just of Roman senators but of all Roman citizen households, including self-reported wealth and the number of members in the household, updated every five years. That self-reported wealth is used to slot Romans into voting centuries, the other Roman voting unit, the comitia centuriata; those centuries correspond neatly to how Romans serve in the army, with the equites and five classes of pedites (infantry). Because of a quirk of the Roman system, the top slice of the top class of pedites also serve on horseback, and Polybius is conveniently explicit that the censors select and record this too.
So at dilectus time, the consuls, their military tribunes (and their state-supplied clerk, a scriba) have a list of every Roman citizen liable for conscription, with the century and tribe they belong to, the former telling you what kind of soldier they can afford to be when called and the latter what group they’ll be called in. And we know from other sources (Valerius Maximus 6.3.4) that names are being read out, rather than just, say, selecting men at sight out of a crowd. That actually makes a lot of sense as dilectus (“select”) may really be dis-lego, “read apart”, from lego (-ere, legi, lectum) “to read”.3 And that matters because the other thing the Romans clearly have a record of us who has served in the past. We know that because in an episode that is both quite famous but also really important for understanding this process, in 214 – after four of the most demanding years of military activity in Roman history, due to the Second Punic War – the Roman censors identified 2,000 Roman iuniores who had not served in the previous four years (or claimed and been granted an exemption), struck them from the census rolls (in effect, revoking their citizenship) and then packed them off to serve as infantry (regardless of their wealth) in Sicily.4
So what happens as each tribe comes up is that the tribunes can call out the names – in batches – of men with the least amount of service, of the particular wealth categories they are going to need to fill out the combat roles in the legion.5 The tribunes for each legion pick one recruit from each batch that comes up, going round-robin so every legion gets the same number of first-picks. Presumably once the necessary fellows are picked out of one tribe, that tribe is sent down the Capitoline and the next called up.
Once that is done the oath is administered. This oath is the sacramentum militare; we do not have its text in the Republic (we do have the text for the imperial period), but Polybius summarizes its content that soldiers swear to obey the orders of the consuls and to execute them as best they are able. The Romans, being practical, have one soldier swear the full oath and then every other soldier come up and say, “like that guy said” (I’m not even really joking, see Polyb. 6.21.3) to get everyone all sworn in. Of course such an oath is a religious matter and so understood to be quite binding.
Then the tribunes fix a day for all of the new recruits to present themselves again (without arms, Polybius specifies) and dismiss them. Strikingly, Polybius only says they are dismissed at this point – not, as later, dismissed to their homes. This makes me assume that the oath being described is administered tribe by tribe before the tribe is sent down (this also seems likely because fitting the last tribe and four legions worth of recruits on the Capitoline starts to get pretty tight, space-wise). Selecting with the various tribes might, after all, take a couple of days, so the tribunes might be telling the recruits of the first few tribes what day the entire legion will be assembled (that’ll be Phase II) after they’ve worked through all of the tribes. Meanwhile, once your tribe was called, you didn’t have to hang around in Rome any longer, if you weren’t selected you could go home, while the picked recruits might stick around in Rome waiting for Phase II.
That leads to the other logistical question for Phase I: the feasibility of having basically all of the iuniores in Rome for the process. Doubts about this have led to the suggestion that perhaps the dilectus in Rome was mirrored by smaller versions held in other areas of Roman territory in Italy (the ager Romanus) for Roman citizens out there. The problem with that assumption is that the text doesn’t support it. The Romans send out conscription officers (conquisitores) exactly twice that we know of, in 213 and 212 (Livy 23.32.19 and 25.5.5-9) and these are clearly exceptional responses to the failure of the dilectus in the darkest days of the Second Punic War (the latter is empowered to recruit under-age boys if they look strong enough to bear arms, for instance). But I also think it was probably unnecessary: this was a regular occurrence, so people would know to make arrangements for it and the city of Rome could prepare for the sudden influx of young men. This is, after all, also a city with regular “market days”, (the nundinae) which presumably would also cause the population to briefly swell, though not as much. And we’re doing this in an off-time in the agricultural calendar, so the farmhands can be spared.
Moreover, Rome isn’t that far away for most Romans. Strikingly, when the Romans do send out conquisitores, they split them with half working within 50 miles of Rome and half beyond that (Livy 25.5.5-9). The implication – that most of the recruits to be found are going to be within that 50 mile radius – is clear, and it makes a lot of sense given the layout of the ager Romanus. Certainly there were communities of Roman citizens farther out, but evidently not so many. Fifty miles down decent roads is a two-day walk; short enough that Roman iuniores could fill a sack with provisions, walk all the way to Rome, stay a few days for the first phase of the dilectus and walk all the way back home again at the end. We’re not told how communities farther afield might handle it, but they may well have trekked in too, or else perhaps sent a few young men with instructions to bring back a list of everyone who was called.
Meanwhile the other part of this phase is happening: the socii. Polybius reports that “at the same time the consuls send their orders to allied cities in Italy, which they with to contribute troops, stating the numbers required and the day and place at which the men selected must present themselves.”6 Livy gives us more clarity on how this would be done, providing in his description of the muster of 193 the neat detail that representatives of the communities of socii met with the consuls on the Capitoline (Livy 34.36.5). And that makes a ton of sense – this is happening at the same time as the selection, so that’s where the consuls are.
We also know the consuls have another document, the formula togatorum, which spells out the liability of each community of socii for recruits; we know less about this document than we might like. Polybius tells us that the socii were supposed to compile lists of men liable for recruitment (Polyb. 2.23-4) and an inscription of the Lex Agraria of 111 BC refers to, “the allies or members of the Latin name, from whom the Romans are accustomed to demand soldiers in the land of Italy ex formula togatorum“.7 That then supplies us with a name for the document. Finally, we know that in 177, some of the socii complained that many of the households in their territory had migrated into other communities but that they conscription obligations had not been changed (Livy 41.8), which tells us there was a formal system of obligations and it seems to have been written down in something called the formula togatorum, to which Polybius alludes.
What was written down? Really, we don’t know. It has been suggested that it might have been a sliding scale of obligations (“for every X number of Romans, recruit Y number of Paeligni”) or a standard total (“every year, recruit Y Paeligni”) or a maximum (“the total number of Paeligni we can demand is Y, plus one more guy whose job is to throw flags at things”.). In practice, it was clearly flexible,8 which makes me suspect it was perhaps a list of maximum capabilities from which the consuls could easily compute a fair enough distribution of service demands. A pure ratio doesn’t make much sense to me, because the socii come in their own units, which probably had normal sizes to them.
So, while the military tribunes are handling the recruitment of citizens into the legions, the consuls are right there, but probably focused on meeting with representatives of each community of the socii and telling them how many men Rome will need this year. Once told, those representatives are sent back to their communities, who handle recruitment on their own; Rome retains no conscription apparatus among the socii – no conscription offices, no records or census officials, nada. The consuls spell out how many troops they need and the rest of it was the socii‘s elected official’s problem.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How To Raise a Roman Army: The Dilectus“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-16.
1. Particularly in P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971).
2. Pearson (2021) compiles them; the issue is also discussed in Taylor (2020).
3. The philological argument here is Pearson (2021), 16-17. It is not air-tight because legere has a lot of meanings, including “to pick out” along with “to read”. That said, given that the verb of being recruited into the army is conscribere (“to write together, to conscript”), there really is a strong implication that this is a process with written records, which the rest of the evidence confirms. I think Pearson may or may not be right about the understood meaning of dilectus implying writing, but the process surely involved written records, as she argues.
4. A punishment post, this is also where the survivors of the Battle of Cannae were sent. Both groups remain stuck in Sicily until pulled into Scipio Africanus’ expedition to Africa in 205, so these fellows don’t get to go home and get their citizenship back until the conclusion of the war in 201.
5. In particular, we generally assume the lowest classes of Roman pedites probably could only afford to serve as light troops, the velites, while the wealthy equites had their own selection procedure for the cavalry done first. Of course, rich Romans not selected for the cavalry might serve as infantrymen if registered in the centuries of pedites which is presumably how Marcus Cato, son of the Censor, ends up in the infantry at Pydna (Plut. Aem. 21).
6. Polyb. 6.21.4. Paton’s trans.
7. Crawford, Roman Statutes (1996), 118 for the text of that inscription.
8. Something pointed out by L. de Ligt in his chapter in the Blackwell A Companion to the Roman Army (2007).
May 14, 2024
QotD: Sporting songs
Mi-illwall, Millwall
Millwa-all, Millwall, Millwall
Millwa-all, Millwall, Millwall
Mi-illwall, Millwall.
(Repeat until knife fight)Mark Steyn, “Hyperpower”, Daily Telegraph, 2002-06-22.
May 13, 2024
QotD: Of course, they could try just … acting
Of course, a happy medium exists, though we are increasingly unable to find it. We should not expect Ophelia to be played by a 90-year-old crone. We should add difficulties in the way of an audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief”, as Coleridge put it, by casting a tall man as short or a short man as tall.
The whole silly controversy reveals to what absurdities we have sunk, thanks to identity politics and a willful misunderstanding, for the sake of personal or group advantage, of what wrongful discrimination is. Storms in teacups can be revealing.
Theodore Dalrymple, “My Kingdom for Some Crutches”, New English Review, 2024-02-06.
May 12, 2024
QotD: What is Putin’s endgame in Ukraine?
That was the monarchist critique of representative government that hit closest to home: Foreign policy needs to be supple and responsive; it must be able to move quickly, to make big changes in narrow time windows. In a real crisis, you simply don’t have time to convene a Parliament to debate stuff. N.b. they were saying this in the late 18th century; it’s so much worse now. And another observation from that time that is even truer today: A “democratic” foreign policy can never be consistent. You simply can’t plan long-term when there’s partial to complete governmental overhaul every few years.
That the US managed to muddle through for as long as it did was really a combo of two things: time (as a function of distance), and a near-peer enemy.
Neither of those is integral to the system, and neither is within the system’s control. Until recently, American foreign policy had to take into account the fact that on-the-spot commanders would have to make decisions on their own recognizance. Even with phone communications, the man on the ground in the Fulda Gap has to make decisions basically without reference to Washington. It forced him to be conservative — in other words, it discouraged adventurism.
Same way with the near-peer enemy. The looming shadow of the USSR forced regular reality checks inside the US Apparat. A whole bunch of possibilities were foreclosed by default — our response to any given situation had to take the likely Soviet reaction into account. As with the time/distance factor, this forced a kind of conservatism that looked a lot like sclerosis, but at least it deterred adventurism.
The history of the later 20th century is the history of those constraints being removed. In Vietnam, for instance, you had LBJ and McNamara sitting in a room in the White House, personally directing airstrikes in near-realtime. If “news” reports are to be believed, Obama was on the horn with that SEAL team going after Bin Laden right up to the very moment the chopper landed. Knowing these things are technically possible is catnip to politicians — they already assume they’re omnicompetent, and so now they want to be “advising” the commanding general even as the battle rages.
And if that’s catnip, then the end of the USSR was catnip on steroids. Why not play fuck-fuck games everywhere, all at once? Who’s gonna stop us? China? They chose to pass. They saw what happened to the USSR when it locked itself into an ideological death spiral vis-a-vis the Struggle Against International Capitalism. American policymakers only understand Soviet-style bluff and bluster. The Chinese play the long game.
NOT because they’re Inscrutable Orientals, I hasten to add — they’re as Juggalicious as our Clowns, in their way — but because the generation currently in power came up hard, and so they are adults. That’s all. They are not spoiled, petulant children. The next generation of Chinese leadership — assuming we live to see it — will really be something, and not in a good way.
So, what does Putin want? I dunno, and I’m not sure he knows, because I’m not sure he can know. I’m sure his broadest goal is “to stop getting fucked with by idiots”, but how can that be achieved? There shall be no durable peace in this world until there is Regime Change in [Washington, DC], and I’m not talking about the other half of the Uniparty winning an election or two. I think Putin knows that, but what can he really do about it? I think he’s going to be forced to annex a fair amount of territory and set up a totally demilitarized buffer zone. It won’t work, but it’s the least-worst practical option.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2024-02-09.
May 11, 2024
QotD: Enough time to “get things done”
Ann Althouse, “Easter and the end of Spring Break”, Althouse, 2005-03-27.
May 10, 2024
QotD: The artificially induced public interest in women’s football
For example, quite recently there has been a concerted attempt to persuade the European public that women’s football (soccer) is interesting and exciting. The newspapers and online publications suddenly carry stories about it, with pictures, reports, profiles, and the like, whereas, shortly before, most people were only vaguely aware that women even played football.
No one can object to their doing so, of course, but the fact remains that they are not very good at it, at least not by comparison with men. They may be good — but with for women always appended. It is not the fault of women that they are not very good at football, any more than it is the fault of fish that they are illiterate, but the fact that everyone pretends not to notice it and dares not say it, at least in public, is surely a little sinister. A man of seventy may still play a good game of tennis, but it is always for his age: one wouldn’t expect him to win Wimbledon, nor would one expect excited, breathless reports on an over-seventies’ tennis tournament. The sudden interest in women’s football thus has a bogus feel about it, like the simulated enthusiasm of a crowd for the dictator in a communist state.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Propaganda & uglification”, New English Review, 2023-12-21.
May 9, 2024
QotD: Rome’s socii system
In any case, the Romans win the war and impose a peace treaty the terms of which, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus went thusly:1
Let there be peace between the Romans and all the Latin cities as long as the heavens and the earth shall remain where they are. Let them neither make war upon another themselves nor bring in foreign enemies nor grant a safe passage to those who shall make war upon either. Let them assist one another, when warred upon, with all their forces, and let each have an equal share of the spoils and booty taken in their common wars. Let suits relating to private contracts be determined within ten days, and in the nation where the contract was made. And let it not be permitted to add anything to, or take anything away from these treaties except by the consent both of the Romans and of all the Latins.
This is the origin point for Rome’s use of what I’ve termed the “Goku Model of Imperialism” – “I beat you, therefore we are friends”. Having soundly defeated – at least according to our sources – the Latins, Rome doesn’t annex or destroy them, nor does it impose tribute, but rather imposes a treaty of alliance on them (in practice I suspect we might want to understand that Rome’s position was not so dominant as our sources suggest, thus the relatively good terms the Latins get). The treaty sounds like an equal relationship, until one remembers that it is the entire Latin league – thirty or more communities – as one party and then just Rome as the other party.
I will still make no apologies for this visual gag.
Image modified by Bret Devereaux.Rome proceeds, in the century or so that follows, to use this alliance to defeat their other neighbors, both the nearest major Etruscan centers as well as the Aequi and Sabines who lived in the hills to the north-east of Rome and the Volsci who lived to the south of Latium. Roman relations with the Latins seem to fray in the early 300s, presumably because the greatest threat to their communities was increasingly not the Volsci, but Rome’s emerging regional power. That leads to a collapse of the Foedus Cassianum in 341 and another war between Rome and the Latin League. Once again our sources are much later, so we might be somewhat skeptical of the details they provide, but the upshot is that at the end the Romans won by 338.
Rome’s expansion into most areas follows a familiar pattern: Rome enters a region by concluding an alliance with some weaker power in a region and then rushing to the aid of that weaker power; in some cases this was a long-term relationship that had been around for some time (like the long Roman friendship with Etruscan Caere) and in some cases it was a very new and opportunistic friendship (as with Capua’s appeal to the Romans for aid in 343). In either case, Rome formed a treaty with the community it was “protecting” and then moved against its local enemies. Once defeated, it imposed treaties on them, too. Rome might also seize land in these wars from the defeated party (before it imposed that treaty); if these were far away, Rome might settle a colony on that land rather than annexing it into Rome’s core territory (the ager Romanus). These new communities – the Latin colonies – were created with treaty obligations towards Rome.
Note the change: what was initially an alliance between one party (Rome) and another party (the Latin League) has instead become an alliance system, a series of bilateral treaties between Rome and a slew of smaller communities. And they were smaller, because Rome often took land in these wars, so that by the third century, the Roman citizen body represented roughly 40% of the total, making Rome much bigger than any other allied community. This shift was probably gradual, rather than there being some dramatic policy change at any point. Rome accrued its Italian empire the same way it would accrue its Mediterranean one: as a result of a series of localized, ad hoc decisions which collectively added up to the result without ever being intended to constitute a single, unified policy.
The Romans called all of these allied communities and their people socii, “allies” – a bit of a euphemism, because these were no longer equal alliances. We’ll get into the terms in a moment, but it seems clear that by 338 that these “allies” are promising to have no foreign policy save for their alliance with Rome and to contribute soldiers to Roman armies. So Rome is in the driver’s seat determining where the alliance will go; Rome does not have to consult the allies when it goes to war and indeed does not do so. The socii cannot take Rome to war (but Rome will go to war immediately if a community of socii is attacked). This is no longer an equal arrangement, but it is useful for the Romans to pretend it is.
The next major series of Roman conflicts are with the Samnites. Rome is, according to Livy, at least, drawn into fighting the Samnites because of its suddenly concluded alliance with Capua and the Campanians (though Rome had been more loosely allied to the Samnites shortly before). In practice, the first two Samnite Wars (343-341, 326-304) were fought to determine control over Campania and the Bay of Naples, with Rome fighting to expand its influence there (by making those communities allies or protecting those who were) while the Samnites pushed back.
The Third Samnite War (298-290) becomes something rather different: a containment war. Rome’s growing power – through its “alliance” system – was clearly on a course to dominate the peninsula, so a large coalition of opponents, essentially every meaningful Italian power not already in Rome’s alliance system, banded together in a coalition to try to stop it (except for the Greeks). What started as another war between Rome and the Samnites soon pulled in the remaining independent Etruscan powers and then even a Gallic tribe (the Senones) in an effort to contain Rome. The Romans manage to pull out a victory (though it was a close run thing) and in the process managed to pull yet more communities into the growing alliance system. It seems – the sources here are confused – that the decade that followed, the Romans lock down much of Etruria as well.
The Greek cities in southern Italy now at last recognize their peril and call in Pyrrhus of Epirus to try to beat back Rome, leading to the Pyrrhic War (280-275). Pyrrhus wins some initial battles but – famously – at such cost that he is unable to win the war. Pyrrhus withdraws in 275 and Rome is then able over the next few years to mop up the Greek cities in Southern Italy, with the ringleader, Tarentum, falling to Rome in 272. Rome imposed treaties on them, too, pulling them into the alliance system. Thus, by 264 Rome’s alliance system covered essentially the whole of Italy South of the Po River. It had emerged as an ad hoc system and admittedly our sources don’t give us a good sense of how and when the terms of the alliance change; in many cases it seems our sources, writing much later, may not know. They have the foedus Cassianum, with its rather more equal terms, and knowledge of the system as it seems to have existed in the late third century and the dates and wars by which this or that community was voluntarily or forcibly integrated, but not the details of by what terms and so on.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Addenda: The Socii“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-10-20.
1. trans. Earnest Clay (1940).
