In that context [clear Soviet superiority of conventional forces in Europe], the fact that it had been the United States which had been the first to successfully develop nuclear weapons (and use them in anger, a decision which remains hotly debated to this day) must have seemed like an act of divine providence, as it enabled the western allies to retain a form of military parity with the USSR (and thus deterrence) while still demobilizing. US airbases in Europe put much of the Soviet Union in range of American bombers which could carry nuclear weapons, which served to “balance” the conventional disparity. It’s important to keep in mind also that nuclear weapons emerged in the context where “strategic” urban bombing had been extensively normalized during the Second World War; the idea that the next major war would include the destruction of cities from the air wasn’t quite as shocking to them as it was to us – indeed, it was assumed. Consequently, planners in the US military went about planning how they would use nuclear weapons on the battlefield (and beyond it) should a war with a non-nuclear Soviet Union occur.
At the same time, US strategists (particularly associated with the RAND Corporation) were beginning to puzzle out the long term strategic implications of nuclear weapons. In 1946, Bernard Brodie published The Absolute Weapon which set out the basic outlines of deterrence theory; he did this, to be clear, three years before the USSR successfully tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949 (far earlier than anyone expected because the USSR had spies in the Manhattan Project). Brodie is thus predicting what the strategic situation will be like when the USSR developed nuclear weapons; his predictions proved startlingly accurate, in the event.
Brodie’s argument proceeds as a series of propositions (paraphrased):
- The power of a nuclear bomb is such that any city can be destroyed by less than ten bombs.
- No adequate defense against the bomb exists and the possibilities of such are very unlikely.
- Nuclear weapons will motivate the development of newer, longer range and harder to stop delivery systems.
- Superiority in the air is not going to be enough to stop sufficient nuclear weapons getting through.
- Superiority in nuclear arms also cannot guarantee meaningful strategic superiority. It does not matter that you had more bombs if all of your cities are rubble.
- Within five to ten years (of 1946), other powers will have nuclear weapons. [This happened in just three years.]
All of which, in the following years were shown to be true. Consequently, Brodie notes that while nuclear weapons are “the apotheosis of aggressive instruments”, any attacker who used them would fear retaliation with their enemy’s nuclear weapons which would in turn also be so destructive such that “no victory, even if guaranteed in advance – which it never is – would be worth the price”. Crucially, it is not the fact of retaliation, but the fear of it, which matters and “the threat of retaliation does not have to be 100 per cent certain; it is sufficient if there is a good chance of it, or if there is a belief that there is a good chance of it. The prediction is more important than the fact.” [emphasis mine]
This does not “make war impossible” by any means, but rather turns strategy towards focusing on making sure that nuclear weapons are not used, by making it clear to any potential aggressor that nuclear weapons would be used against them. And that leads to Brodie’s final, key conclusion:
Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind. The writer in making that statement is not for the moment concerned about who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used. Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.
To sum that up, because both the United States and its key enemies will have nuclear weapons and because their destructive power is effectively absolute (so high as to make any “victory” meaningless) and because there is no effective defense against such weapons, consequently the only rational response is to avoid the use of nuclear weapons and the only way to do that is to be able to credibly threaten to retaliate with nuclear weapons in the event of war (since if you cannot so retaliate, your opponent could use their nuclear weapons without fear).
That thinking actually took a while to take hold in actual American policy and instead during the 1940s and 1950s, the United States focused resources on bomber fleets with the assumption that they would match Soviet superiority in conventional arms in Europe with American nuclear superiority, striking military and industrial targets (“precision attacks with an area weapon”, a notion that is as preposterous as it feels) to immediately cripple the USSR in the event of war, or else aim to “win” a “limited” nuclear exchange.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.
February 16, 2026
QotD: How nuclear weapons were viewed right after WW2
February 15, 2026
QotD: The love of long-distance train travel
Of course, the accursed cell phone and the even more accursed smartphone have penetrated the seclusion. And alas, there are no more dining cars, a delight now almost completely abolished by spiteful managements, and available mainly on ridiculous super-luxury trains such as the pastiche Orient Express. Yet no restaurant meal I have ever had, including the pressed duck at the old Tour D’Argent in Paris (before it became a museum where you could eat the exhibits), has surpassed the breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners I have eaten in trains.
I think of the wonderful bacon and eggs, accompanied by soda bread, on the cross-border Belfast-to-Dublin flyer in Ireland; the vast plates of pork and dumplings accompanied by Pilsener beer on the somnolent Zapadny Express from Nuremberg to Prague; the fresh pancakes and maple syrup at breakfast on the California Limited, with antelopes fleeing from the train somewhere between Dodge City and Albuquerque; the first sip of tea from the samovar, served in a glass in an ornate silver holder, on the Red Star night sleeper from Moscow to Leningrad; the first glass of wine on a sunny September evening as the Rome Express, an hour out of Paris, clattered southward past the faintly minatory cathedral tower at Sens. Then there were the toasted teacakes near Grantham on the southbound Flying Scotsman, and the superb galley-cooked steak on the upper deck of the Chicago-bound Capitol Limited, as it climbed westward through the evening into the forests beyond Harper’s Ferry and up the Potomac valley.
Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.
February 14, 2026
QotD: Canada and its military – a history of neglect
Canada’s military was not always a punchline. At the end of World War II Canada had the world’s third-largest navy, complete with our own aircraft carrier, and over a million men under arms. Since then military spending has steadily declined, from a high of around 7% of GDP in the early 50s to around 1% today, where it’s hovered since the end of the Cold War.
Canada is protected to its east and west by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, both of which are patrolled by the powerful navy of the friendly superpower to the south, the only country with which Canada shares a land border, which we have long bragged is the longest undefended frontier in the world. Our only other neighbouring country is Russia, and while Russia is a decidedly unfriendly superpower, in practice Canada’s populated south is separated from the Russian Federation by thousands of kilometres of howling arctic wastes which provide an even better natural defence than the oceans.
Cozy and secure in our continental cocoon, Canada has allowed its military to atrophy into a vestigial appendage akin to the stubby wings of flightless birds on isolated Pacific islands, useful only for emotive displays. So far as the Liberal Party is concerned, “emotive display” is, indeed, the only real purpose of the military. Ever since Lester B. Pearson1 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the concept of “peacekeeping” to de-escalate the Suez Crisis (thereby helping to drive the final nail into the coffin of the British Empire), the Canadian military’s primary purpose has been to conduct third-world relief missions. Peacekeeping carries no particular benefit to Canada, but it is of great benefit to politicians, who get to preen in front of the camera as important humanitarian statesmen. The purpose of the Canadian military isn’t to win wars, to defend the country, or to conquer distant lands: it’s to make Liberal Party politicians feel good about themselves.
When the CAF fails to live up to its making-liberals-feel-good mission, Canada’s liberal establishment reacts like a frustrated child taking out her vindictive cruelty by throwing her dolls against the wall. The Somalia Affair is probably the best example of this dynamic. The Canadian Airborne Regiment, an elite commando unit whose core competencies were jumping out of airplanes to break things and kill people, was deployed in Somalia with the contradictory goal of keeping a non-existent peace, a mission to which they were singularly ill-suited. Somalis being Somalis, the Airborne base was immediately subjected to continuous infiltration and theft. A handful of the violent lunatics in the regiment reacted by capturing thieves and torturing them to death, which they had the poor sense to document with photographic evidence; later, photographs emerged of one of the airborne troopers wearing a moustache man t-shirt while raising his arm at a prohibited angle, which wasn’t criminal exactly but was very bad PR. Instead of punishing the guilty troops individually, for instance with field courts martial followed by summary hanging, the Liberal Party flew into a rage and disbanded the regiment for having committed the unforgivable sin of making them look bad. This dragged on in the media for years, sullying the honour of not only the Airborne Regiment but of the entire military. The Somalia affair unfolded over thirty years ago, but the liberal establishment holds it over the heads of the CAF to this day.
In addition to providing politicians with regular hits of the pleasantly addictive buzz of telescopic philanthropy, peacekeeping also has the great advantage of being cheap. Not only does peacekeeping not require all that many troops, you don’t even need tanks, fighter jets, destroyers, or aircraft carriers to distribute aid packages to refugees. Therefore the Canadian military essentially does not have these things. The CAF has a grand total of 112 forty-six-year-old Leopard II main battle tanks (of which roughly half are down for maintenance at any given time), a whole 138 forty-two-year-old CF-18 Hornet fighter jets (of which 89 are operational), twelve Halifax class frigates (of which about half are in drydock at any given time), an intimidating four Victoria class diesel-electric submarines (which are forty-five years old, and all but one of which is out of commission), and zero bombers, zero attack helicopters, zero destroyers, zero troop transports, zero battleships, and zero aircraft carriers. The pathetic size of the Royal Canadian Navy is particularly embarrassing given that Canada has the longest coastline in the world, at 243,042 kilometres, essentially all of which Ottawa expects Washington to defend on its behalf. Airlift capacity is so limited that the CAF essentially cannot deploy overseas without allied logistical assistance.
By contrast with its decrepit armaments, the CAF has 145 generals: it has more generals than it does tanks. This top-heavy general staff is only about a third the size of the US military’s, despite the American military being 20x larger by personnel and 32x larger by budget.
From the perspective of the Laurentian elite, a weak military is actually a political advantage. If Canada effectively does not have the ability to project military force, Ottawa can simply plead lack of capacity when America asks for assistance. It enables Canada to duck out of involvement in America’s various imperial wars, letting Washington shoulder the burden of the Pax Americana while chirping from the sidelines about how the big bad bible-thumbing American bully is so mean, and how peaceful, ethical, liberal, humanitarian Canada is so nice because Canada spends its money on healthcare instead of bombs. It isn’t a morally superior position, of course: it’s simply shameless dependence and shameful parasitism.
John Carter, “The Canadian Political Class is Ideologically Incapable of Rebuilding the Military”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2025-11-13.
- The man who, as prime minister, replaced the red ensign’s ethnic heraldry with the maple leaf’s corporate logo.
February 13, 2026
QotD: The Democrats re-focus on the youth vote
Which is why I’m tempted to write it off. After all, Obama was just a Bill Clinton for The New Generation. Who was just a JFK for The New Generation. Who — we forget this — was just FDR for The New Generation. Most of the idiot Boomers who voted for Bill Clinton as “the New JFK” barely remembered JFK. Nor did JFK himself win “the youth vote” by all that much — or at all — because “the youth vote” wasn’t a thing back then. For one thing, the voting age was still 21. I’m in History, not math, but even I can do Historian math, and 1960 – 21 = 1939. Most of JFK’s voters had clear memories of The Depression; even his youngest voters remembered the tail end of WWII. JFK sounded like an East Coast patrician, just like FDR did, and as opposed to that young parvenu from California, Richard Nixon.
That’s just a wee bit different from “the Youth Vote” Bill Clinton appealed to. To say nothing of the later freaks.
I’m tempted to write it off, but I’m not going to. For one thing, Obama, Clinton … they all won, and look at the incalculable damage they did. More importantly, I want to return to an issue we tabled earlier: The fact that there’s no “middle age” cohort in the Donk Party. They really are the Volkssturm — kids and oldsters. Or, if you prefer, they’re the Bolsheviks — having shot all their “technical intelligentsia” during The Revolution, they have to go out there and reinvent everything. All their accumulated experience is gone, so their rookies don’t just make rookie mistakes, they make the kind of mistakes that anyone with the tiniest shred of experience could see coming.
You know, those “hmmmm, I wonder what this big red button does?” types of mistakes.
You see it in the business world. Z Man, may he rest in peace, used to talk about this all the time. The Boomers were retiring, the kids were just so epically clueless, and all the thousands of workarounds and jimmy-rigged stuff that makes any operation go were seizing up, for lack of maintenance. And even the smart, ambitious kids were having a hell of a time getting up to speed, because they were looking for a Policies and Procedures manual that simply doesn’t exist. There’s no Official Manual for jimmy-rigged workarounds.
Say what you will about the Boomers, they’re competent. They might well be the last competent generation …
… maybe the older, smarter half of Gen X, but a) there were never that many of us, and b) in politics, as in so much else, the Groovy Fossils just would. NOT. leave, and so the competent among Gen X had to go do their own thing, if they ever wanted a chance to move up. This leaves your big Legacy Systems — you know, like the Apparat — in one hell of a bind. The Groovy Fossils don’t want to leave, but eventually they have to — 90 may be the new 30, but dead is dead. And they’re the only ones who know how to operate the Legacy Systems, because there are two, three “generations” of people who, if they had anything on the ball, had to go their own way.
Those who stayed had no choice, and all they know how to do is push buttons and fill in blanks. Look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Anyone 50 or older looks at her with horror, because we’ve all had to deal with that kind of kid. That’s the kind of person who has filled up every layer of the Apparat below Top Management. If they had anything at all on the ball, they’d be somewhere else … but they don’t, so now they’re all in Senior Management, because somebody’s got to do it, and they were better at pushing buttons and filling in blanks than anyone else who was available at the time.
But note that I’ve just been talking about candidates, politicians. The VOTERS are like that, too. See what I mean? That’s why it’s so dangerous … and very likely to succeed.
Severian, “Groovy, Baby!!”, Founding Questions, 2025-11-10.
February 12, 2026
QotD: Books for children written for “the narrative” instead of for children
C.S. Lewis, the master of escapist fiction, was prophetic in warning against such noxious paternalism from authors. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”, he wrote. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Let’s hope Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has been tapped up to direct the next year’s Chronicles of Narnia series, is taking note.
In the meantime, we have the books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published 75 years ago today. When I read this to my son, it transfixed him in a way that all those morally improving Disney and Pixar movies could not — and in a way that I recognised too from my own childhood. The Narnia books are weird and archaic and they are far from comforting. But they leave unanswerable questions and imaginative territory to roam for a lifetime.
What would compel a child to climb into a claustrophobic wardrobe, full of moth-eaten coats and spiders, as apt a symbol as any for the human psyche? C.S. Lewis knew all too well. There are real and terrible things to escape from. And the land of magic, mystery and hope that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy arrived in would soon reveal that it too was blighted. By facing up to this, conquering its climate of terror, the child would become an adult. If they didn’t pass into the dark and through it, they would remain infantilised.
This partly explains the backlash against Lewis. Two years ago, it was reported that the Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track.
For his part, Lewis lambasted “those who do not wish children to be frightened […] Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” He knew of the existence of shadows from early in life. There is a spine-chilling passage in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which he recalls waking up one night with toothache when he was 10. He called out his mother’s name and she did not come. She was dying in another room. His father was never the same and sent Lewis off to a boarding school run by a deranged sadist. “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”
As a result, Lewis developed a fear and mistrust of the adult world in those years — and it was well-placed. Scarcely more than a boy, Lewis was sent to the trenches. He was seriously injured in the Battle of Arras (he would have shrapnel, from a shell that obliterated a colleague, embedded permanently in his body) and, like Tolkien, he watched many of his friends die. “One cannot help wondering why,” he wrote to his father.
Darran Anderson, “Save Narnia from the woke witch”, UnHerd, 2025-10-15.
Update, 13 February: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
February 11, 2026
QotD: Delusional takes – “There are no white people in the Bible”
Oh boy, I get to post more Damned Facts that will offend people who richly deserve to be offended.
There were lots of white people in the Bible. And you don’t need to get into any definitional questions about the genetics of ancient Judea, either.
Greeks and Romans were white — that is, pale-skinned Caucasians. We know this from art, from sequenced genomes, and from contemporary descriptions of what they looked like. Herodotus described the Pontic Greeks as being blonde and blue-eyed.
Here’s the really Damned Fact: brownness in Mediterranean European populations was a late development. Post-Classical. Caused by …
… the Islamic invasions, post 722 CE. Resulted in Europeans of the Mediterranean coast becoming admixed (to put it very, very diplomatically) with Arabs and Africans. That’s why there’s a really noticeable gradient in Italy between lighter-skinned Northerners and darker-skinned Southerners; it’s all about how long various regions were under Islamic domination.
The question that usually comes up is, was Jesus himself “white”?
It’s possible. We can’t go by the artistic evidence, because Byzantine art deliberately confused Jesus with stylized depictions of the Emperor in his glory (there’s a really famous example of this in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople). And those Greek emperors may well have been depicted as a bit blonder and more blue-eyed than they actually were, because that was considered beautiful. Dashboard Jesus is a late polyp of this tradition.
But until we find actual genetic material we’re not going to know. Imperial-run Palestine was a swirling cauldron of different ethnic groups, and the genetic boundaries didn’t necessarily match up neatly with the religious ones. Knowing that his parents were part of the Jewish people doesn’t necessarily help much.
The two most likely cases are that Jesus looked like a current-day city Arab, or he looked like a Philistine — that is, Greek with some local admixture; a lot of coastal Lebanese still look like that today. But full-bore pasty-skinned Euro can’t be ruled out.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-10.
February 10, 2026
QotD: The (historical) walls of Jericho
The problem standing between that attacking army and access was, of course, walls (though as we will see, walls rarely stand alone as part of a defensive system). Even very early Neolithic settlements often show concerns for defense and signs of fortification. The oldest set of city walls belong to one of the oldest excavated cities (which should tell us how short the interval between the development of large population centers and the need to fortify those population centers was), Jericho in the West Bank. The site was inhabited beginning around 10,000 BC and the initial phase of construction on what appears to be a city wall reinforced with a defensive tower was c. 8000 BC. It is striking just how substantial the fortifications are, given how early they were constructed: initially the wall was a 3.6m stone perimeter wall, supported by a 8.5m tall tower, all in stone. That setup was eventually reinforced with a defensive ditch dug 2.7m deep and 8.2m wide cutting through the bedrock (that is a ditch even Roel Konijnendijk could be proud of!), by which point the main wall was enhanced to be some 1.5-2m thick and anywhere from 3.7-5.2m high. That is a serious wall and unlikely the first defensive system protecting the site; chances are there were older fortifications, perhaps in perishable materials, which do not survive. Simply put, no one starts by building a 4m by 2m stone wall reinforced by a massive stone tower and a huge ditch through the bedrock; clearly city walls [were] something people had already been thinking about for some time.
I want to stress just how deep into the past a site like Jericho is. At 8000 BC, Jericho’s wall and tower pre-date the earliest writing anywhere (the Kish tablet, c. 3200 BC) by c. 4,800 years. The tower of Jericho was more ancient to the Great Pyramid of Giza (c. 2600 BC), than the Great Pyramid is to us. In short, the problem of walled cities – and taking walled cities – was a very old problem, one which predated writing by thousands of years. By the time the arrival of writing allows us to see even a little more clearly, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Levant are already filled with walled cities, often with stunningly impressive stone or brick walls. Gilgamesh (r. 2900-2700 BC) brags about the walls of Uruk in the Epic of Gilgamesh (composed c. 2100) as enclosing more than three square miles and being made of superior baked bricks (rather than inferior mudbrick); there is evidence to suggest, by the by, that the historical Gilgamesh (or Bilgames) did build Uruk’s walls and that they would have lived up to the poem’s billing. Meanwhile, in Egypt, we have artwork like the Towns Palette, which appears to commemorate the successful sieges of a number of walled towns
So a would-be agrarian conqueror in Egypt, Mesopotamia or the Levant, from well before the Bronze Age would have already had to contest with the problem of how to seize fortified towns. Of course depictions like these make it difficult to reconstruct siege tactics (the animals on the Towns Palette likely represent armies, rather than a strategy of “use a giant bird as a siege weapon”), so we’re going to jump ahead to the (Neo)Assyrian Empire (911-609 BC; note that we are jumping ahead thousands of years).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-29.
February 9, 2026
QotD: The pre-modern versus the modern concept of “self”
In contrast, most modern societies believe in a self that is “buffered”. In this view there are a few limited, low-bandwidth ways that the external world can act on one’s innate nature, for instance via drugs or other body chemistry, and even these are often seen as revealing or disclosing previously hidden innate characteristics of one’s personality rather than as imposing something alien. Taylor argues quite convincingly that these two ways of viewing the self — porous vs. buffered — inexorably produce two different ways of viewing society and the world: premodern and modern. For example: if selves are porous, then we need to be extremely vigilant against the invasion or violation of our minds by hostile spirits, and we must be suspicious of what we want, because it might not really be what we want, but rather what something else wants through us. Conversely, if selves are buffered then our desires are just part of who we are, and in order to be true to ourselves, we need to explore them and act upon them.
It may have been reasonable to believe in a buffered self back in the days before the internet, but recent developments have made it clear that (as in so many things) the primitive superstitions were actually correct, and the enlightened modern view was just a lamer and dumber kind of superstition.1 Science fiction has long been fascinated with stories of infohazards — images or jokes or snippets of cognition that act like a Gödel sentence for the human mind and leave people braindead or mind-controlled. But such things long since slipped the shackles of fiction — we now have internet creepypasta that induces girls to become murderers and a genre of pornography that turns boys into girls.2 The noösphere is a vast ocean, and its abyssal depths teem with lifeforms and thoughtforms that seek to possess you and live out their blasphemous unlife through your mortal husk.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.
- Or maybe society is already correcting itself on this point. Many like to make fun of the “fragility” and “snowflake” nature of Gen Z, and I’ve argued before that these critics miss the point that they’re actually being “flexed on” (in the parlance of our times) because loudly asserting an exaggerated harm is a power move (think: upper class women in an honor culture claiming to feel threatened, and how that’s actually itself a threat).
But here’s a different take on it: maybe “trauma” as it’s popularly conceptualized is actually modernity groping its way back to a porous understanding of the self! We no longer believe in spirits or curses, but our psyches are self-evidently susceptible to immaterial external influence, so we create a new concept that aligns empirical psychic porosity with the dominant metaphysical and ideological currents.
- I had a long debate with myself on whether to include either of those links. Do I really want to expose more people to an infohazard? Ultimately I decided to do it because this stuff is already so widespread. In both cases I’ve linked to a page that links to the subject matter in question rather than linking directly, so you have one more chance to bail out.
February 8, 2026
QotD: Life of Brian in modern day Europe
– “The raping?”
“What?”
– “The raping”
“Oh yeah yeah. They do rape an awful lot that’s true yes.”
– “And the welfare costs”
– “Oh yes the welfare costs, Rich. The unemployment benefits alone.”
“Ok, I will grant you the raping, and the welfare costs, are two bad things mass immigration have done for us.”
– “And the terrorism”
“Oh yeah obviously the terrorism. I mean the terrorism goes without saying. But apart from the raping, the welfare costs, and the terrorism …”
– “Violent crime”
– “Honor killings”
– “Car bombings”
“Yeah, you are all right, fair enough.”
– “Burqas”
– [nodding among the group] “Yeah, that is something we’d really not miss if the immigrants left.”
– “Political support for bad economic policies.”
– “And it’s less safe to walk in the streets at night now, Rich.”
Ok, but apart from the raping, the welfare costs, the terrorism, the violent crime, the honor killings, the car bombings, the burqas, political support for bad economic policies and the unsafe streets, what bad has mass immigration ever done for us?
Jonatan Pallesen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-06.
February 7, 2026
QotD: Stress in the post-lockdown world
Note that by “mentally tough” I don’t mean “carrying on like the Marlboro Man”, necessarily. Anonymous Conservative has a similar theory, that he relates to amygdala development, and maybe it’s that. I certainly saw a lot of incidents that look like what he calls “amygdala hijacks” back in my teaching days — kids would melt down and go catatonic, over the most inconsequential things. They’d never been faced with “failure” before, so not acing a silly little unit quiz hit them like the end of the world.
Just as I’d bet the cumulative retail price of all the shit we’ve sent to Ukraine that the triple-masked, lockdowns-forever covidiots are now getting floored by the kind of minor sniffles they’d have shrugged off three years ago — because they’ve maybe perma-fucked their immune systems, and that’s before all the side effects of the not-vaxx — so kids who have never been exposed to grief, frustration, and failure get floored by tiny bumps in the road. It’s total systemic shock, and I’m not joking — I’d bet long money that they actually break out in hives, get weird rashes, and so on, because the kind of stress chemicals that can turn a tough, healthy young soldier into a shell shock case will do all kinds of damage to someone totally unprepared.
I guess this is the tl;dr — I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on tv, but I’m betting that those stress chemicals play an important role in ordinary cognition; they’re necessary for proper brain function. But they’re tough; your brain needs exercise in order to be able to handle those chemicals efficiently. If you don’t get it, your brain gets “fat”, in the same way your body gets fat if you load it up with too much of a good thing. And it’s recursive — those stress chemicals get stored in fat, too. So just as obesity is comorbid for just about everything — seriously, being fat is the absolute worst thing for your general health, bar none — so having a “fat brain” by not getting enough “exercise” totally destroys your ability to keep your head, to think clearly and logically.
Severian, “Quick Thoughts”, Founding Questions, 2022-04-28.
February 6, 2026
QotD: FEMA
FEMA, in fact, is an illegal organization. It’s mentioned nowhere in the Constitution (which lists the lawful powers of the government in Article I, Section 8), nor did anybody ever vote about it, neither you nor I, nor even the Congress. It was created out of thin air by Presidential fiat, and given unprecedented power to override, at gunpoint, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law in general.
Since the San Francisco earthquake, I have been paying attention. In all that time, I have never heard anybody, civilian or local official, who had anything to say about FEMA that didn’t make it seem like a combination of the Nazi Gestapo and the Black Death. Apparently there is no situation so tragic and overwhelming that they can’t make it even worse. FEMA has an unanswerable power of life and death over entire communities and there is nothing to protect those communities — or anything else that is uniquely American — from its foul dictatorial grasp.
L. Neil Smith, “Good Mornin’ America, How Are Ya?”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-04.
February 5, 2026
QotD: The medicalization of unhappiness
Theodore Dalrymple, interviewed by James Glazov in “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It”, FrontPage, 2005-08-31.
February 4, 2026
QotD: The impact of quasi-official monotheism on the Roman Empire
That is part of the context where we should understand Constantine (r. 306-337). Constantine is famous for declaring the toleration of Christianity in the empire and being the first emperor to convert to Christianity (only on on his death-bed). What is less well known is that, having selected Christianity as his favored religion, Constantine – seeking unity again – promptly set out to unify his new favored religion, by force if necessary. A schism had arose as a consequence of Diocletian’s persecution and – now that Christianity was in the good graces of the emperor – both sides sought Constantine’s aid in suppressing the other in what became known as the Donatism controversy, as the side which was eventually branded heretical supported a Christian bishop named Donatus. Constantine, after failing to get the two groups to agree settled on persecuting one of them (the Donatists) out of existence (which didn’t work either).
It is in that context that later Christian emperors’ efforts to unify the empire behind Christianity (leading to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380) ought to be understood – as the culmination of, by that point, more than a century of on-again, off-again efforts by emperors to try to strengthen the empire by enforcing religious unity. By the end of the fourth century, the Christian empire was persecuting pagans and Jews, not even a full century after it had been persecuting Christians.
These efforts to violently enforce unity through homogeneity had the exact opposite effect. Efforts to persecute Arian Christians (who rejected the Nicene Creed) created further divisions in the empire; they also made it even more difficult to incorporate the newly arriving Germanic peoples, who had mostly converted to the “wrong” (Arian) Christianity. Meanwhile, in the fifth century, the church in the East splintered further, leading to the “Nestorian” (the term is contested) churches of Syria and the Coptic Church in Egypt on the “outs” with the official (Eastern) Roman Church and thus also facing persecution after the Council of Ephesus in 431. The resentment created by the policy of persecution in the East seems to have played a fairly significant role in limiting the amount of local popular resistance faced by the Muslim armies of the Rashidun Caliphate during the conquests of Syria, the Levant and Egypt in the 630s, since in many cases Christian communities viewed as “heretical” by Constantinople could actually expect potentially better treatment under Muslim rule. Needless to say, this both made the Muslim conquests of those regions easier but also go some distance to explaining why Roman/Byzantine reconquest was such a non-starter. Efforts to enforce unity in the empire had, perhaps paradoxically, made it more fragile rather than more resilient.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
February 3, 2026
QotD: Are men funnier than women and if so, why?
critter @BecomingCritter
genuinely why are men funnier than women? do you have a theory?I didn’t have a theory of this until you ask the question. Now I do.
A lot of ethologists who have studied differences in behavior between men and women have noted that men have much better-developed methods for resolving physical conflict and threats short of lethal violence.
To put it a different way, women in conflict basically have two settings: either peaceful or unhinged screamingly vicious. Men have more intermediate gradations, and rituals about how they move among them.
Men having better developed senses of humor might best be seen as part of their instincts for social de-escalation.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-01.
February 2, 2026
QotD: Moral relativism
The Sri Lankan’s words echo in my mind every day, “Why do we want to bother with this? We all know you Americans will do everything”. With the exception of handful of Western countries, most of the world would appear inhabited by the sort of Eloi-type creatures depicted in that old sci-fi flick based on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, passively watching as flood waters or Morlocks drag their fellows away.
Begging the pardon of the cultural relativists, but might we not be allowed to raise — ever so gently, of course — the possibility that these differing reactions to human suffering, show Western civilization as the best we have on the planet? Maybe, just maybe Western civilization is morally superior.
The Diplomad, “Death in Nasty Places: Who Cares?”, The Diplomad, January 10, 2005.
