Quotulatiousness

January 16, 2026

QotD: Another unintended consequence of conscription

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

From 1948 to 1963 (which is when the very last left the forces) Britain had National Service. Two years in the forces and damn near everyone was in the Army. It’s the only period of peacetime conscription we’ve ever had. It was also the only period of near universal conscription we’ve ever had. Public schoolboys generally became officers, a portion of grammar school lads too. Everyone else got to be a private.

The big social revolution started in the mid-1960s and had really taken root by 1980. I don’t mean drugs and shagging around I mean a proper social revolution. The British working classes no longer took what they were being told by the poshoes as being true. Questions, as we might put it, were being asked.

My theory, backed up by reality and all the obvious facts of the case, is that as all young men had spent two years being run by the poshoes up front and directly therefore no one believed the poshoes any more. Actual experience, see?

National Service led to the downfall of the posh classes. Simply because direct exposure to said posh was always going to do that.

This is not just a jeu d’esprit. I really do insist that Britain’s social revolution was driven by conscription. Being told to jump by some chinless 6 months out of Eton is going to do that.

Tim Worstall, “National Service Led To The Uppity Proles Of the 1960s”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2025-10-14.

Update, 17 January: 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.

January 15, 2026

QotD: Process knowledge

Filed under: Asia, Books, Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Dan Wang, in his wonderful essay on how technology grows, describes process knowledge as the sine qua non of industrial capitalism, more fundamental than the machines and factories that everybody sees:

    The tools and IP held by these firms are easy to observe. I think that the process knowledge they possess is even more important. The process knowledge can also be referred to as technical and industrial expertise; in the case of semiconductors, that includes knowledge of how to store wafers, how to enter a clean room, how much electric current should be used at different stages of the fab process, and countless other things. This kind of knowledge is won by experience. Anyone with detailed instructions but no experience actually fabricating chips is likely to make a mess.

    I believe that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess. I see the creation of new tools and IP as certifications that we’ve accumulated process knowledge. Instead of seeing tools and IP as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I’d like to view them as milestones in the training of better scientists, engineers, and technicians.

    The accumulated process knowledge plus capital allows the semiconductor companies to continue to produce ever-more sophisticated chips. […] It’s not just about the tools, which any sufficiently-capitalized firm can buy; or the blueprints, which are hard to follow without experience of what went into codifying them.

Process knowledge lives in people, grows when people interact with other people, and spreads around when skilled individuals relocate between cities or companies. But this also means it can wither and die, can be lost forever, either when old workers shuffle off to the Big Open Plan Office in the Sky, or when an ecosystem no longer has the energy or complexity to sustain a critical mass of skilled workers in a particular vocation. Some East Asian societies have gone to extreme lengths to retain process knowledge, for instance by deliberately demolishing and rebuilding a temple every 20 years.

In fact this is far from the most extreme thing East Asian societies have done to retain the process knowledge that lives within their workers! There are some components of an ecosystem, whether natural or technological, that are especially important keystone species. In the technological case, these species can be unprofitable at the current scale of an ecosystem, or inefficient, or they might not make economic sense until one or more of their customers exist, but those customers might not be able to exist until the keystone species does. Venture capital is very practiced at solving this kind of Catch-22, but in the East Asian economic boom it was national governments that actively sheltered keystone industries until they could get their footing, thus making entire ecosystems possible. A wonderful book about this is Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, but if you can’t read it, read Byrne Hobart’s thorough review instead.

Process knowledge is so powerful, the ecosystem it enables so vital, it can break the assumptions of Ricardo’s theory of trade. Steve Keen has a perceptive essay about how the naive Ricardian analysis treats all capital stock as fungible and neglects the existence of specialized machinery and infrastructure. But naive defenders1 of trade liberalization often make an exactly analogous error with respect to the other factor of production — labor. Workers are not an undifferentiated lump, they are people with skills, connections, and expertise locked up in their heads. When a high-skill industry moves offshore, the community of experts around it begins to break up, which can cripple adjacent industries, stymie insights and breakthroughs, and make it almost impossible to bring that industry back.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.

  1. Like all coastal-Americans, I am generally in favor of trade liberalization, but I’m consummate and sophisticated about it, unlike Noah Smith.

January 14, 2026

QotD: Bill Clinton, proto-PUA

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Slick Willie was a pudgy marching band dork who learned some Game. The 1990s were the worst decade in human history for a lot of reasons, and I typically say “because that’s when the Jonesers really came into their own”, but that’s not accurate. It’s when the AWFL — that’s “affluent White female liberal”, and it’s redundant at least 2x, but I didn’t coin it — realized that she ruled the Evil Empire. We called them “soccer moms” back then, “Karen” now, but the concept is the same (though the former weren’t quite as obnoxious, it was a difference of degree, not kind).

Most men I knew, even most Boomer and Generation Jones men, were put off by Bill Clinton. We all instinctively knew he was a weasel, even if we couldn’t quite articulate why. But oh how the soccer moms loved him! He was the pudgy marching band dork they’d actually settled for, carrying on like the Alpha Chad they still knew, in their secret hearts, they were hot enough to snag. What appeared to men (and what actually was) narcissism and braggadocio, looked like caddish swagger to soccer moms. But in actual fact he was just a nerd who’d learned Game ahead of its time, and that’s how he governed …

[Funny how none of the “Game” gurus recognized this. I guess I can’t blame them, since I just now realized it myself, but then again I don’t pimp myself out as some kind of Master Pickup Artist. Instead of aping Tom Cruise and Daniel Craig and those guys, the “Game” crowd should’ve been studying Bill Clinton. That’s what Game can do for you, boys, and yeah, I know you’ve got your sights set a little higher than Monica, but for pete’s sake, the man was President of the United States. He cigar-banged the entire electorate. That’s some serious Game].

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-04-08.

NR: In case “PUA” has fallen sufficiently out of current use — as it probably deserves — here’s a useful overview of the Pick Up Artist jargon by Kim du Toit from 2017.

Update, 15 January: 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.

January 13, 2026

QotD: The potential tyranny of the state

Filed under: Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The state in practice, as we have seen, is capable of tyranny and oppression and brutality on a scale which would be impossible for a private person, and from which all except the most debased private persons would shrink. The power of the state is vastly greater than the power of the mightiest private owners of property; and men will commit cruelties and atrocities in the name of the state which they would be too ashamed to commit in their private capacity. We must be chary, therefore, of assuming that we shall cure any misuse of the power inherent in the private ownership of property by concentrating all ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange in the state.

Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.

January 12, 2026

QotD: The death of satire

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The English comedian, Harry Enfield, made a return to the BBC between 2007 and 2012. Compared to his more observation-based comedy in the early ’90s, there was clearly a more reactionary turn in his 2000s work. Targets included a multitude of establishment celebrities and pompous television presenters, Eastern European immigrants, the band U2, and, most brutally of all, upper-middle-class liberals.

Enfield was doing what all court jesters should do: delivering uncomfortable truths to those in power. The jester’s often painful or embarrassing jibes can be taken in good faith and acted upon, ignored, or worse. The idea is to convey what everyone outside the court is thinking and how the ordinary person perceives those with power and influence. While Enfield’s work of this era certainly merits a more focused analysis, here I’d like to zoom in on one sketch based on a favourite Enfield target, the show Dragons’ Den.

Enfield excoriates the ludicrously pompous panel of wealthy, high-status business owners and their seeming right to supreme arrogance justified simply by their wealth. In one skit, Enfield and Paul Whitehouse arrive to pitch an idea as bumbling English entrepreneurs trying to get the “Dragons” to invest in their concept called “I can’t believe it’s not custard”. The Dragons, also played by Enfield and Whitehouse, sneer and spit venom at the Englishmen and their stupid idea, swiftly sending them away with no investment whatsoever.

The two white men later return, adorned in black-face and Jamaican accents with a pitch called “Me kyan believe it nat custard” and the Dragons fall at their feet, showering them with money. They then begin to compete with each other in sycophantically grovelling, fearful that the least enthusiastic of them will be deemed racist.

The sketch hits like a thunderbolt because Enfield holds up a mirror to a particular class of people, saying, “This is what you are!” We, as the common folk, take great delight in this lampooning because we know it to be a painful, somewhat grotesque truth. In an ocean of noise, it is a clear, bright signal that something is not right.

It is both a commentary on multiculturalism and a critique of those with power and influence. Yet, for some reason, this sketch lands harder than, say, a Spitting Image sketch in the 1980s targeting Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. There is a sense that an agreed-upon lie is being teased out into the glare of daylight and unceremoniously prodded and kicked about. The morality of the pretentious Dragons is a sham, and as such, their status is deflated before us.

Enfield revealed, in that single clip, the inherent fragility of the managerial classes dedicated to propagating via “virtue signalling” the values of the multicultural state. The millionaires of the Dragons’ Den panel adopt the attitudes and worldview of brutal free-market meritocrats, with the only subject of interest to them being whether or not a product or service is worthy of investment. Enfield implied that this worldview was a lie, a charade, and that they were no more outside of the central multicultural metanarrative than a Guardian journalist. The Dragons’ Den panel, and therefore neoliberalism, was not an alternative or competitor, but rather subordinate to the politically correct dogma of the age.

From the perspective of Britain’s liberal elite, Enfield committed a multitude of sins against them and their values, which probably explains why, after his show was shuffled off to BBC 2 to die, they never allowed themselves to be confronted with such lampooning ever again. The external frame from which people can gaze back into the general narrative would be kept permanently locked out.

Yet, this also marked a transition from a Blairite neoliberalism, in which the justification for mass immigration was to infuse British society with fresh energy and dynamism, into a more stagnant form wherein the upholding of the multicultural order became its own justification.

Morgoth, “How Multiculturalism Consumes Everything”, Morgoth’s Review, 2025-10-04.

January 11, 2026

QotD: The limits of foreign policy realism

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Longtime readers will remember that we’ve actually already talked about “realism” as a school of international relations study before, in the context of our discussion of Europa Universalis. But let’s briefly start out with what we mean when we say IR realism (properly “neo-realism” in its modern form): this is not simply being “realistic” about international politics. “Realism” is amazing branding, but “realists” are not simply claiming that they are observing reality – they have a broader claim about how reality works.

Instead realism is the view that international politics is fundamentally structured by the fact that states seek to maximize their power, act more or less rationally to do so, and are unrestrained by customs or international law. Thus the classic Thucydidean formulation in its most simple terms, “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must”,1 with the additional proviso that, this being the case, all states seek to be as strong as possible.

If you accept those premises, you can chart a fairly consistent analytical vision of interstate activity basically from first principles, describing all sorts of behavior – balancing, coercion, hegemony and so on – that ought to occur in such systems and which does occur in the real world. Naturally, theory being what it is, neo-realist theory (which is what we call the modern post-1979 version of this thinking) is split into its own sub-schools based on exactly how they imagine this all works out, with defensive realism (“states aim to survive”) and offensive realism (“states aim to maximize power”), but we needn’t get into the details.

So when someone says they are a “foreign policy realist”, assuming they know what they’re talking about, they’re not saying they have a realistic vision of international politics, but that they instead believe that the actions of states are governed mostly by the pursuit of power and security, which they pursue mostly rationally, without moral, customary or legal constraint. This is, I must stress, not the only theory of the case (and we’ll get into some limits in a second).

The first problem with IR Realists is that they run into a contradiction between realism as an analytical tool and realism as a set of normative behaviors. Put another way, IR realism runs the risk of conflating “states generally act this way”, with “states should generally act this way”. You can see that specific contradiction manifested grotesquely in John Mearsheimer’s career as of late, where his principle argument is that because a realist perspective suggests that Russia would attack Ukraine that Russia was right to do so and therefore, somehow, the United States should not contest this (despite it being in the United States’ power-maximizing interest to do so). Note the jump from the analytical statement (“Russia was always likely to do this”) to the normative statement (“Russia carries no guilt, this is NATO’s fault, we should not stop this”). The former, of course, can always be true without the latter being necessary.

I should note, this sort of “normative smuggling” in realism is not remotely new: it is exactly how the very first instances of realist political thought are framed. The first expressions of IR realism are in Thucydides, where the Athenians – first at Corinth and then at Melos – make realist arguments expressly to get other states to do something, namely to acquiesce to Athenian Empire. The arguments in both cases are explicitly normative, that Athens did not act “contrary to the common practice of mankind” (expressed in realist dog-eat-dog terms) and so in the first case shouldn’t be punished with war by Sparta and in the latter case, that the Melians should submit to Athenian rule. In both cases, the Athenians are smuggling in a normative statement about what a state should do (in the former case, seemingly against interest!) into a description of what states supposedly always do.

I should note that one of my persistent complaints against international relations study in political science in general is that political scientists often read Thucydides very shallowly, dipping in for the theory and out for the rest. But Thucydides’ reader would not have missed that it is always the Athenians who make the realist arguments and they lost both the arguments [AND] the war. When Thucydides has the Melians caution that the Athenians’ “realist” ruthlessness would mean “your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon”2 the ancient Greek reader knows they are right, in a way that it often seems to me political science students seem to miss.

And there’s a logical contradiction inherent in this sort of normative smuggling, which is that the smuggling is even necessary at all. After all, if states are mostly rational and largely pursue their own interests, loudly insisting that they should do so seems a bit pointless, doesn’t it? Using realism as a way to describe the world or to predict the actions of other states is consistent with the logical system, but using it to persuade other states – or your own state – seems to defeat the purpose. If you believe realism is true, your state and every other is going to act to maximize its power, regardless of what you do or say. If they can do otherwise than there must be some significant space for institutions, customs, morals, norms or simple mistakes and suddenly the air-tight logical framework of realism begins to break down.

That latter vision gives rise to constructivism (“international relations are shaped by ideology and culture”) and IR liberalism (“international relations are also shaped by institutions, which can bend the system away from the endless conflict realism anticipates”). The great irony of realism is that to think that having more realists in power would cause a country to behave in a more realist way is inconsistent with neo-Realism which would suggest countries ought to behave in realist ways even in the absence of realist theory or thinkers.

In practice – and this is the punchline – in my experience most “realists”, intentionally or not, use realism as a cover for strong ideological convictions, typically convictions which are uncomfortable to utter in the highly educated spaces that foreign policy chatter tends to happen. Sometimes those convictions are fairly benign – it is not an accident that there’s a vocal subset of IR-realists with ties to the CATO Institute, for instance. They’re libertarians who think the foreign policy adventures that often flew under the banner of constructivist or liberal internationalist label – that’s where you’d find “spreading democracy will make the world more peaceful” – were really expensive and they really dislike taxes. But “we should just spend a lot less on foreign policy” is a tough sell in the foreign policy space; realism can provide a more intellectually sophisticated gloss to the idea. Sometimes those convictions are less benign; one can’t help but notice the realist pretensions of some figures in the orbit of the current administration have a whiff of authoritarianism or ethnocentrism in them, since a realist framework can be used to drain imperial exploitation and butchery of its moral component, rendering it “just states maximizing their power – and better to be exploiter than exploited”.

One question I find useful to ask of any foreign policy framework, but especially of self-claimed realist frameworks is, “what compromise, what tradeoff does this demand of you?” Strategy, after all, is the art of priorities and that means accepting some things you want are lower priority; in the case of realism which holds that states seek to maximize power, it may mean assigning a high priority to things you do not want the state to do at all but which maximize its power. A realism deserving of the name, in applied practice would be endlessly caveated: “I hate, this but …” “I don’t like this, but …” “I would want to do this, but …” If a neo-realist analysis leads only to comfortable conclusions that someone and their priorities were right everywhere all along, it is simply ideology, wearing realism as a mask. And that is, to be frank, the most common form, as far as I can tell.

That isn’t to say there is nothing to neo-realism or foreign policy realists. I think as an analytical and predict tool, realism is quite valuable. States very often do behave in the way realist theory would suggest they ought, they just don’t always do so and it turns out norms and expectations matter a lot. Not the least of which because, as we’ve noted before, the economic model on which realist and neo-realist thinking was predicted basically no longer exists. To return to the current Ukraine War: is Putin really behaving rationally in a power-maximizing mode by putting his army to the torch capturing burned out Ukrainian farmland one centimeter at a time and no faster? It sure seems like Russian power has been reduced rather than enhanced by this move, even though realists will insist that Russia’s effort to dominate states near it is rational power-maximizing under offensive realism.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday, June 27, 2025 (On the Limits of Realism)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-27.

  1. Thuc. 5.89.
  2. Thuc. 5.90.

January 10, 2026

QotD: The United Nations

Filed under: Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Were serious reform of the UN accomplished, it would be turned from an ineffective anti-American and anti-Western organization, into an effective anti-American and anti-Western organization. That is absolutely inevitable from the membership structure, with its voting blocs. So, better a UN that continues in a state of abject dysfunction, than one that can be more efficiently evil.

David Warren, “The nuts, & Bolton”, Ottawa Citizen, 2005-09-17.

January 9, 2026

QotD: “My goal is to get paid for having fun”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My critics consider me a pulp hack, but I’ve proven I can do the deep, dark, and serious better than they can. I’ve demonstrated that I can hop into whatever genre I feel like and do well there. But mostly I just like to have fun and entertain my fans.

True multi genre authors are rare. I’ve done really well in a bunch of different genres because I’m good at recognizing what people enjoy about those, and then giving them what they want, with my own spin on it. I can tweak it, but I shouldn’t break it.

“What if your childhood heroes are really losers and here’s a new girl boss? OOOOH SO EDGY.” That kind of shit bores me.

Far too many authors are pretentious shit heads who climb up their own ass thinking they need to “subvert” expectations, but they’re really not brilliant enough to pull that off. They’re just crapping on the stuff that made people like those genres to begin with. They’re not nearly as clever as they think they are.

Me? I’m happy to be a pulp hack. If I’m writing epic fantasy, I’m going to do the big, deep, thematic, emotional, stuff (and Saga of the Forgotten Warrior rocks) and if I’m doing progression fantasy then it’s going to be fun and adventure and scrappy nobodies trying to make it in the world and becoming heroes along the way. American Paladin is a dark and gritty vigilante story (with monsters in it). And Monster Hunter is urban fantasy soaked in testosterone and gun oil (that’s next for 2026). I’ve done sci-fi. I’ve done horror. I’ve done comedy. I’ve done thrillers. Hell, I’ve done stuff like Hard Magic where good luck pinning down what the hell genre that is … alternate history, hard boiled, pulp noir, super heroes? Hell if I know.

My goal is to get paid for having fun. 😀

Larry Correia, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-10-08.

January 8, 2026

QotD: Canned food and the early days of the Raj

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Consider the history of canned food. It has obvious military applications — Napoleon famously quipped that an army marches on its stomach, and as canning was largely invented in France, he made some effort to issue food to his troops (as opposed to local procurement and / or “living off the land”). He didn’t quite get there, but the resultant revolution in logistics was as important to the conduct of war, in its way, as just about anything else. If you don’t know how armies are provisioned, you’re likely to miss something when you talk about wars.

You might even miss something culturally. For instance, there’s an entire sub-subdiscipline called “Food and Foodways”, and it’s not as silly as it sounds. Canned food was an important part of British cultural life in the Raj, for instance. File it under “Women Ruin Everything” — once it got safe enough for ladies to have a reasonable chance of surviving East of Suez, the awesome freewheeling decadence of the “White Mughals” period was replaced by dour, dowdy Victorian bullshit. Every summer the “fishing fleet” pulled into Calcutta harbor, disembarking scads of ugly British girls with a Bible in one hand and a can of spotted dick in the other, determined to snag the highest-ranking ICS man they could and, in the process, turn India into another boring suburb of Edinburgh. Anglo-Indian cookbooks are full of recipes for horrid British glop straight out of cans, and if you routinely got really, really sick from eating spoiled stuff, well, hard cheese, old chap! Heaven forbid you eat the delicious, nutritious, climate-optimized cuisine that was literally right there …

If you want to argue that the Indian Army fought so many border wars just to get away from sour, hectoring memsahibs and their godawful tinned slop, I’m not going to stop you.

Anyway, the point is, IF you are conversant enough with the relevant technical stuff, it occurs to me that you can get a snapshot of embedded cultural assumptions by looking at a period’s characteristic or representative technology.

Severian, “Assumption Artifacts”, Founding Questions, 2024-04-30.

January 7, 2026

QotD: Refuting “Limitarianism”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The visible edge of economic populism — the slogans, the soundbites — often conceals an intellectual iceberg beneath: ideas inherited from defunct economists, or sometimes living ones. One such idea with deep roots is limitarianism: the belief that there should be a cap on personal wealth.

Thomas Piketty defines it as “the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate”. Its most articulate modern advocate is Ingrid Robeyns, whose recent book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, calls for a global wealth cap, which she suggests could be set around $10 million per person.

But limitarianism rests on an old intellectual error. An error common not only on the Left but even among some classical liberals too: the mistaken division between “production” and “distribution”. The assumption is that production happens through economic forces and that distribution is purely political, so policymakers can reshape who gets what without damaging how much is created.

This assumption leads to the view of the economy as a fixed pie. If one person has a large slice, others must go hungry. As Percy Shelley put it in Queen Mab (1813), “The rich have become rich by the toil of the poor … they increase in wealth by the misery of the workers”. While that may describe life under socialism, it misunderstands how wealth is generated in a capitalist system.

In capitalism, you can grow rich by making the pie bigger: creating products, companies, jobs and innovations that benefit not only yourself, but millions of others. This insight was first observed by French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and later expanded by economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Tarde noted how luxuries eventually become necessities. His example was forks and spoons, once the preserve of the wealthy, now found in every home.

For our generation, consider childbirth. Queen Anne had 17 pregnancies, yet none of her children survived to adulthood. Today, even the poorest families in developed countries can expect their children to live. This transformation wasn’t delivered by committees or redistribution. It was driven by the freedom of innovators to experiment, often starting with products only the wealthy could afford.

As Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty:

    What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually be available to many.

Mani Basharzad, “What Zohran Mamdani Doesn’t Understand about Wealth”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2025-09-30.

January 6, 2026

QotD: John Foster Dulles

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

According to [Governor Harold] Stassen, “My best summary of Dulles is that he always knew he was absolutely right. Further, he knew that anyone who disagreed with him was, of logical necessity, always wrong. And finally, he could not understand how anyone could dare question the fact that he was always right.” It wasn’t just Stassen who had a problem with the priggish Dulles, though. As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once said, “I’m not sure I want to go to heaven. I’m afraid I might meet John Foster Dulles there”. Some U.S. allies had misgivings about Dulles as well. Harold Wilson, a British member of Parliament and future prime minister, once mocked Dulles’s propensity to try to be everywhere all the time: “I heard they are inventing an airplane that can fly without Dulles! They hope soon to get it into production.” Winston Churchill himself once famously mocked Dulles via declension: “Dull, Duller, Dulles”.

Tevi Troy, Fight Club: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump, 2020.

January 5, 2026

QotD: Nitpicking the opening battle in Gladiator (2000)

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This week, we’re going to take a close look at arguably the most famous and recognizable Roman battle sequence in film: the iconic opening battle from Gladiator (2000).1 Despite being a relatively short sequence (about ten minutes), there’s actually enough to talk about here that we’re going to split it over two weeks, talking about the setup – the battlefield, army composition, equipment and battle plan – this week and then the actual conduct of the battle next week.

The iconic opening battle, set in the Marcomannic Wars (166-180) during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180) dominates the pop-cultural reference points for the Roman army in battle and you can see its heavy influence in things like how the Total War series presents Roman armies (particularly in trailers and other promotional material). Students and enthusiasts alike will often cite this sequence as the thing which sparked their interest in the Roman army. It is hard to overstate how pervasive its influence is in the public imagination of what the Roman army, particularly of the imperial period, was like, especially as its style is imitated by later pop culture works.

Which is why it is so unfortunate that it is such a deceptive historical mess. This sequence in particular is a banner example of what I’ve termed elsewhere the “perils of historical verisimilitude“, the habit of historically based popular-culture works including what we might think of as fake signifiers of research, things that seem historically grounded rather than being historically grounded, as a way to cheaply cash in on the cachet that an actually grounded representation gets.

Gladiator actually provides a perfect metaphor for this: its main character’s name. Russell Crowe proudly informs us he is, “Maximus Decimus Meridius”, a name that certainly sounds suitably Roman, picking up the three-part name with that standard second declension -us ending. It sounds like it could be a real name – if you didn’t know Latin you would probably assume that it could be a real Roman name. But, as we’ve noted, it isn’t a Roman name and in fact gets nearly all of the Roman naming conventions wrong: Roman names are ordered as praenomen, nomen and cognomen, with the nomen indicating one’s gens (“clan” more or less) and the praenomen selected from just a couple dozen common personal names. Decimus is one of those two-dozen common praenomina (which also means it is never going to show up as the name of a gens), so it ought to go first as it is actually his personal name. Meanwhile Maximus (“the greatest”) is very much not one of those roughly two-dozen praenomina, instead being always cognomen (essentially a nickname). Finally Meridius isn’t a Latin word at all (so it can’t be a praenomen personal name nor a cognomen nickname),2 meaning it has to be the nomen (referencing a fictive gens Meridia). Every part of his name is wrong and it should read Decimus Meridius Maximus.

It sounds just right enough to fool your average viewer, while being entirely wrong. It is “truthy” rather than true – verisimilitudinous (like truth), rather than veristic (realistic, true).

In the case of Gladiator‘s opening battle scene, the attention is on creating verisimilitude (without fidelity, as we’ll see) in the visual elements of the sequence and only the visual elements. The visual representation of a Roman army – the equipment in particular – is heavily based on the Column of Trajan (including replicating the Column’s own deceptions) and since that is the one thing a viewer can easily check, that verisimilitude leads a lot of viewers to conclude that the entire sequence is much more historically grounded than it is. They take their cues from the one thing they can judge – “do these fellows wear that strange armor I saw on that picture of a Roman column?” – and assume everything is about as well researched, when in fact none of it is.

Instead, apart from the equipment – which has its own deep flaws – this is a sequence that bears almost no resemblance to the way Roman armies fought and expected to win their battles. The Roman army in this sequence has the wrong composition, is deployed incorrectly, uses the wrong tactics, has the wrong theory of victory and employs the wrong weapons and then employs them incorrectly. Perhaps most importantly the sequence suggests an oddly cavalry-and-archer focused Roman army which is simply not how the Romans in this period expected to win their battles.

Now I want to be clear here that this isn’t a review of the film Gladiator (2000) or my opinion in general on the film. To be honest, unlike the recent sequel, I enjoy Gladiator even though it is historical gibberish. So I am not telling you that you aren’t “allowed” to like Gladiator, but rather simply that, despite appearances, it is historical gibberish, particularly this opening scene, which I often find folks who are aware the rest of the film is historical gibberish nevertheless assume this opening scene is at least somewhat grounded. It is not.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nitpicking Gladiator’s Iconic Opening Battle, Part I”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-06.

  1. I’d think its only real rival for prominence would be Spartacus (1960).
  2. If you are wondering, “but then were does our word “meridian” come from, the answer is from Latin meridies, meaning “midday”.

January 4, 2026

QotD: The boomerang effect

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve noticed a common phenomenon. Let’s call it the boomerang effect.

Lament the rise of an opinion or policy without noticing how your preferred policies helped cause it.

Vaccination rates down — because you wrecked the reputation of vaccines during the pandemic by over claiming.

Anti-immigrant feeling leading to difficulties for legal immigrants — because you welcomed millions of illegal immigrants and prevented them being deported.

Prosecution of political opponents — because you did it too.

Dislike seeing people cancelled for their opinions — because you started it.

Rising climate scepticism — because you censored reasonable criticism of climate extremism.

Anger at trans rights activists — because you shouted down concerns about men pretending to be women in sports and prisons.

Government attacks on universities — because you turned them into ideological madrassas.

Patriotic nationalism turning uglier — because you told people flags were racist.

Criticism of judges — because they became nakedly political.

Defunding of biotechnology — because you failed to call out dangerous gain-of-function virology as the likely cause of the death of 20 million+ people.

Etc etc

Matt Ridley, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-27.

January 3, 2026

QotD: “Fumbling towards bicameralism”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Fumbling towards bicameralism” also seems to explain one of the Left’s other signature pathologies: Their ability to “lie” to themselves, and I’m going to have to stop putting stuff in quotation marks lest I destroy my keyboard, but here again “lie” is far too weak a word. Leftist self-deception is so total, we unicameral folks can’t grasp it. They know, right? On some deep down fundamental level? If only because it’s impossible — damn it, impossible — that they don’t know. How can they keep fucking up so egregiously, in exactly the same way, every single goddamn time, and learn nothing?

And yet, “self-deception” shouldn’t be possible. How can you lie to your self? It raises all kinds of heavy epistemological issues, explored in a fun little book called Self-Deception by philosopher Herbert Fingarette. As I recall (it has been years since I’ve read it), Fingarette ends up advancing a kind of split-consciousness theory, too, as the only internally consistent one. How could it be otherwise? The “liar’s paradox” is a fun little game to play in the first class meeting of Logic 101, but nobody can really live that way … and yet we do deceive ourselves, all the time, and no one more than SJWs, whose lives indeed seem to be nothing but “self-deception.”

Bicamerality explains that. The “god” that lives in the smartphone says X today, so X it is. That same “god” says not-X tomorrow, so now it’s not-X! It’s not self-contradiction, it’s not self-deception, for the simple reason that there’s no real “self” at all.

Finally, it explains what might be the most frustrating thing about the Left, the thing that’s likely to end in a nuke or two here before too long: Their utter inability to see the glaringly obvious consequences of their actions. Those of us who tend to see “Leftism” as a big conspiracy love to point out that if they, the Left, were just stupid (childish, contrarian, herd animals, whatever), cold impersonal chance alone would guarantee that at least some of their fuckups would benefit us at least some of the time. Much like The Media’s “retractions” and “admissions” and so on, the “mistakes” always always always go in only one direction … ergo, they’re not mistakes.

That’s the reef on which we “emergent behavior” types always crash. To me, “emergent behavior” still seems like the best explanation … but however the behavior emerges, it’s always retarded. They’ve never made a non-stupid decision, not once, and it’s always stupid in exactly the same way. I remember waking up one morning to the sound of something crashing into my bedroom window. I figured it was a bird, which happens all the time, and it was … except that it kept happening, monotonously, every fifteen seconds or so. I got up to look, and here was a robin, smashing itself into the glass over and over and over again. It was early spring — mating season — and this stupid robin had mistaken its own reflection for a rival. I must’ve watched this bird slam himself into the glass for ten minutes, “attacking” his “rival”, before he knocked himself out cold …

That’s how the Left do. Always. They simply can’t learn, and they can’t change their pattern. The only explanation for that, therefore, must be that it’s programmed. Literally. Zero consciousness involved. They do what they do because they literally cannot do otherwise. Their “god” has put “rage” into their thumos. Just as Achilles would’ve literally jumped off a cliff had his “god” told him to, so the Left does … well, pretty much everything their teevee tells them to.

Needless to say, this has some important implications for practical action. How does one “get inside that OODA loop”, as the keyboard commandos like to say? In the land of the utterly unconscious, the one-brained man is king …

Severian, “Striving Towards Bicamerality”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-20.

Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

January 2, 2026

QotD: From Rousseau to Marx, Hegel to Gramsci

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

How did we get here? Can those of us who understand what Communism and socialism would mean for our republic win the election that will be upon us in less than 100 days? Only if we understand how on earth Karl Marx’s ideology survived the end of the Cold War to flourish and grow here in America.

The fundamentals are clear enough. The New Left in America, which is the conveyor belt for everything from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) Green New Deal to Black Lives Matter, can trace its genetic roots back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who almost single-handedly upturned centuries of Western philosophical and theological wisdom.

Instead of believing that man is fallen, fatally flawed, and prone to selfishness and evil, Rousseau denied the reality of thousands of years of human history and posited that man is inherently good. Further, this goodness could be maximized by engineering society away from individual rights and liberties, prioritizing communal good, communal needs, and the communal will.

Thus civilization built according to how man actually behaves in real life fell out of favor; and eventually, Karl Marx’s collectivist ideology predicated on the subversion of individual human souls to the common interest (as defined by political leaders) gained steam.

Like an ideological scrapbooker, Marx picked and purloined the ideas of others to build his theory. Socialism is but a temporary stepping stone towards the eventual and inevitable end-state of all mankind, the utopian “Worker’s Paradise.” Marx stole the “inevitability” factor from Hegel and his eponymous “dialectic.”

Hegel, a profoundly religious man, unlike the rabidly and militantly atheist Marx, saw the history of man as a perpetual progression, a series of qualitative improvements in our collective lot as one new idea (antithesis) impacted upon an existing idea (thesis) and resulted in an improved conceptualization (synthesis) that has more truth value than the previous two ideas combined. This progression, so Hegel believed, would increase our enlightenment, until we perceived the ultimate synthesis, the purest version of truth’s expression, which is God himself.

Marx took Hegel’s key inevitability dynamic and removed the metaphysical elements. For Marx the intangible was irrelevant. His “dialectic materialism” posits that thesis and antithesis are instead expressions of the inherent conflict within society — the clash between the have and have nots, the oppressor and the oppressed, the capitalist and the exploited workers — which will result in a final revolution permanently removing class distinction and conflict from society.

This garbage is what Karl Marx sold the world with his books Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. And incredibly, some people believed this rubbish. So much so that they used it as a blueprint to sabotage and subvert multiple nations around the world, starting with czarist Russia and stretching all the way to Cuba and China. But then there was a problem. In all their attempts to effect a Communist revolution west of the Russian Empire, Marx’s followers would fail. America was an especially tough nut for Marxists to crack, because of how our nation was born.

America’s Founders, knowing full well that man is fallen and tends toward the selfish and the bad, built America with a system of separation of powers and also bequeathed us a written Constitution founded not on some absurd utopian collectivist vision of society, but built upon the recognition of the liberty of the individual and the unalienable God-given rights we each possess. Despite the advent of Progressive presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, America remained staunch in its resistance to socialism. Marx’s disciples, however, were not ready to surrender.

This is where the influence of a hunchback Italian cripple comes in.

Antonio Francesco Gramsci is the ideational grandfather to all that threatens modern America and our freedoms today, from AOC’s Green New Deal to the violence of Antifa. His writings, penned in an Italian prison cell, would be leveraged by the Hungarian Jewish writer and politician, Gyӧrgy Lukacs, each sharing the same conviction: Communism had failed in established Western democracies — as opposed to the backward and mostly peasant society of czarist Russia — because these societies are too resilient and too developed. For Marxism to flourish in the rest of Europe and America, these “bourgeois” societies must be dismantled piece by piece. From the inside.

The conceptual progeny of that realization leads straight to the panoply of Democratic Party articles of belief today — from Obamacare’s unprecedented intrusion into private healthcare choices to the anti-scientific insanity of transgenderism and beyond. This isn’t a random accusation, devoid of context. It’s not some accusation floating in space. The path from Gramsci and Lukacs to Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is a path that may be mapped historically, geographically, and institutionally.

Sebastian Gorka, “From Alinsky to AOC: Will Communism Finally Win in America?”, American Greatness, 2020-07-29.

Update, 3 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

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