The shift from open concepts demanded by necessity to widespread construction of separate rooms to open concepts demanded by style is relatively recent. Before the 17th century, especially for the poor, “rooms did not have specialized functions”, explains architect Witold Rybczynski in Home: A Short History of an Idea. “Houses were full of people, much more so than today, and privacy was unknown.”
A single room could serve as a study in the morning, a dining room at noon, a living room in the evening, and a bedroom at night. Beds were couches, and couches were beds. Your house was your workspace, and your minimal furniture typically had no fixed arrangement, as it was constantly moved about to accommodate different uses of the only room available. (The French and Italian words for “furniture” still hint at this history: You can see the similarity to “mobile” in meubles and mobilia.)
These open concepts of old were not only motivated by different conceptions of privacy and the expense of building additional walls. They were also required for the lower classes by premodern heating technologies. A single open hearth, or, later, fireplace or stove, could warm one large room but could not do much for other, closed-off spaces. A lord or king could build a heating element into every room, but for the average family, winter warmth required most of life to happen in a single space.
As technology advanced, ideas about privacy changed, and standards of living improved over the last 500 years, ordinary people were increasingly able to move away from an open concept home, and they eagerly did so. “Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves,” notes Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Though the transition was slow — toilets long had “multiple seats, for ease of conversation” — rooms were increasingly devoted to particular uses, and those uses were separated from one another as much as resources permitted.
Bonnie Kristian, “Open concept homes are for peasants”, The Week, 2019-05-12.
December 5, 2022
QotD: Open concept house designs
December 4, 2022
QotD: In praise of mediocrity
Mediocrity is not a problem in itself; it is inevitable. Indeed the world needs many mediocrities, that is to say mediocrities who know themselves, and are perfectly content, to be such (complacency is as much an underestimated quality as rebelliousness is an overestimated one). The problem with mediocrity begins when it is allied to overweening ambition, as it seems so often to be the case nowadays.
Ambition is likewise a quality that is excellent when it attaches to something worthwhile in itself, but which is dreadful when it does not. And the rapid and phenomenal spread of education has increased the spread of ambition with it, much of it inevitably of the apparatchik type, that is to say the determination to climb some bureaucratic career ladder detached from any purpose except survival and, if possible, self-aggrandizement. To climb such a ladder you have to be both ruthless and submissive at the same time. You have to be egotistically prepared to stab people in the back in the scramble for advancement, while at the same time being prepared to suppress your own personality by uttering other people’s clichés at the expense of your own thoughts. Unpreparedness to do this, either through lack of training or moral scruple, unfits you for a career in the organization, any organization. You have to learn to lie with clichés, and do so with a straight face.
Theodore Dalrymple, “In Defense of Mediocrity”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-02-17.
December 3, 2022
QotD: Mantetsu and the Kwantung Army
Thus the South Manchuria Railway Corporation, originally contracted to develop a defunct line in a disputed territory, soon developed into a full-spectrum enterprise. Pretty much all heavy industry in the Japanese areas of Manchuria were divisions of Mantetsu. But since all the heavy industry depended on mines, and transportation, and food and housing for workers, and banks, and schools for the workers’ children, etc., pretty soon Mantetsu ran all of that, too. By the late 1920s, you could argue that Mantetsu was almost its own country.
It even had its own army, and that’s where things get really interesting.
The Kwantung Army was the security force assigned to the South Manchuria Railway Zone. The Japanese weren’t stupid; they knew the perils of independent commands far from home, and they rotated units through with some regularity. Nonetheless, the command staff remained fairly stable over the years … and so did Mantetsu’s.
The Japanese weren’t stupid, but they were people, and people being people, soon enough the lines between the Kwantung Army and Mantetsu began to blur. And since the lines between Mantetsu, the Imperial Army, and the government were already pretty blurry, pretty soon the concerns of one became the concern of all. (Nor was the Navy left out, though I’m not discussing them in order to keep it simple. They were up to their eyeballs in Mantetsu, too, because warships need lots of steel and steel comes from Manchuria).
A small but highly committed and totally ideologized faction developed inside the Kwantung Army. Several, in fact, and one of them (the Imperial Way faction) attempted an actual coup d’etat in 1936. It was put down, and the Imperial Way faction dissolved (in theory), but the problem of an intensely ideologized officer corps remained. Long story short, you had a small group of highly ideologized officers garrisoning a remote province pulling the entire Empire into big, unwinnable wars.
One could make the case that World War II in the Pacific was ultimately caused by about fifteen or twenty guys in the Kwantung Army.
That’s overly reductionist, but it highlights the huge problem with organizations slipping the leash. In theory, there was a clear chain of command, and even the head of the Kwantung Army was a down it a ways — he was subordinate to the Army Council, which was subordinate to the War Minister, who was subordinate to the Parliament, who were subordinate to the Emperor. In theory, lots of people could’ve sacked Gen. Araki, or his mini-me Ishiwara Kanji (a lieutenant colonel through most of it). Equally in theory, Mantetsu had no say in any of it — the Kwantung Army was a formation of the Imperial Japanese Army, not Mantetsu’s private security force.
But in reality, Mantetsu was so wired in to the Japanese government that in a lot of cases, it was the government. But not always, because the same could be said about the Army, and the Navy, both of which were also wired into Mantetsu up to the very top (or vice versa, your choice). And Mantetsu had their Media arm, of course, as did the Army and Navy …
What all this boiled down to, then, was a power vacuum. I know, that seems weird, but a skilled bureaucratic infighter like Ishiwara never lacked for groups to play against each other. The Army and Navy would oppose on principle any move that seemed to aggrandize the other, neither could go against Mantetsu (and neither could control it), and all had to pay at least lip service to the civilian government. Because of this, real power fell to whomever had the balls to grab it …
… which was the officer corps of the Kwantung Army. They assassinated at least two Manchurian warlords, staged a number of false flag attacks on their own positions, and generally got up to however you say “standard issue Juggalo fuckery” in Japanese, up to and including a full-scale war with China.
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
December 2, 2022
QotD: Rome’s legions settle down to permanent fortresses
What absolutely does begin happening during the reign of Augustus and subsequently is that the Roman legions, which had spent the previous three centuries on the move outside of Italy, begin to settle down more permanently on Rome’s new frontiers, particularly along the Rhine/Danube frontier facing Central and Eastern Europe and the Syrian frontier facing the Parthian Empire. That in turn meant that Roman legions (and their supporting auxiliary cohorts) now settled into permanent forts.
The forts themselves, at least in the first two centuries, provide a fairly remarkably example of institutional inertia. While legionary forts of this early period typically replaced the earthwork-and-stakes wall (the agger and vallum) with stone walls and towers and the tents of the camp with permanent barracks, the basic form of the fort: its playing-card shape, encircling defensive ditches (now very often two or three ditches in sequence) remain. Of particular note, these early imperial legionary forts generally still feature towers which do not project outward from the wall, a stone version of the observation towers of the old Roman marching camp. Precisely because these fortifications are in stone they are often very archaeologically visible and so we have a fairly good sense of Roman forts in this period. In short then, put in permanent positions, Roman armies first constructed permanent versions of their temporary marching camps.
And that broadly seems to fit with how the Romans expected to fight their wars on these frontiers. The general superiority of Roman arms in pitched battle (the fancy term here is “escalation dominance” – that escalating to large scale warfare favored the heavier Roman armies) meant that the Romans typically planned to meet enemy armies in battle, not sit back to withstand sieges (this was less true on Rome’s eastern frontier since the Parthians were peer competitors who could rumble with the Romans on more-or-less even terms; it is striking that the major centers in the East like Jerusalem or Antioch did not get rid of their city walls, whereas by contrast the breakdown of Roman order in the third century AD and subsequently leads to a flurry of wall-building in the west where it is clear many cities had neglected their defensive walls for quite a long time). Consequently, the legionary forts are more bases than fortresses and so their fortifications are still designed to resist sudden raids, not large-scale sieges.
They were also now designed to support much larger fortification systems, which now gives us a chance to talk about a different kind of fortification network: border walls. The most famous of these Roman walls of course is Hadrian’s Wall, a mostly (but not entirely) stone wall which cuts across northern England, built starting in 122. Hadrian’s Wall is unusual in being substantially made out of stone, but it was of-a-piece with various Roman frontier fortification systems. Crucially, the purpose of this wall (and this is a trait it shares with China’s Great Wall) was never to actually prevent movement over the border or to block large-scale assaults. Taking Hadrian’s wall, it was generally manned by something around three legions (notionally; often at least one of the legions in Britain was deployed further south); even with auxiliary troops nowhere near enough to actually manage a thick defense along the entire wall. Instead, the wall’s purpose is slowing down hostile groups and channeling non-hostile groups (merchants, migrants, traders, travelers) towards controlled points of entry (valuable especially because import/export taxes were a key source of state revenue), while also allowing the soldiers on the wall good observation positions to see these moving groups. You can tell the defense here wasn’t prohibitive in part because the main legionary fortresses aren’t generally on the wall, but rather further south, often substantially further south, which makes a lot of sense if the plan is to have enemies slowed (but not stopped) by the wall, while news of their approach outraces them to those legionary forts so that the legions can form up and meet those incursions in an open battle after they have breached the wall itself. Remember: the Romans expect (and get) a very, very high success rate in open battles, so it makes sense to try to force that kind of confrontation.
This emphasis on controlling and channeling, rather than prohibiting, entry is even more visible in the Roman frontier defenses in North Africa and on the Rhine/Danube frontier. In North Africa, the frontier defense system was structured around watch-posts and the fossatum Africae, a network of ditches (fossa) separating the province of Africa (mostly modern day Tunisia) from non-Roman territory to its south. It isn’t a single ditch, but rather a system of at least four major segments (and possibly more), with watch-towers and smaller forts in a line-of-sight network (so they can communicate); the ditch itself varies in width and depth but typically not much more than 6m wide and 3m deep. Such an obstruction is obviously not an prohibitive defense but the difficulty of crossing is going to tend to channel travelers and raids to the intentional crossings or alternately slow them down as they have to navigate the trench (a real problem here where raiders are likely to be mounted and so need to get their horses and/or camels across).
On the Rhine and the Danube, the defense of the limes, the Roman frontier, included a border wall (earthwork and wood, rather than stone like Hadrian’s wall), similarly supported by legions stationed to the rear, with road networks positioned; once again, the focus is on observing threats, slowing them down and channeling them so that the legions can engage them in the field. This is a system based around observe-channel-respond, rather than an effort to block advances completely.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part II: Romans Playing Cards”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-11-12.
December 1, 2022
QotD: Movie swordfighting
Most people don’t have that knowledge. So today I’m going to write about the quality of sword choreography in movies, and how that has changed over time, from the point of view of someone who is an experienced multi-style martial artist in both sword and empty hand. I think this illuminates a larger story about the place of martial arts in popular Western culture.
The first thing to know is this: with only rare exceptions, any Western swordfighting you see in older movies is going to be seriously anachronistic. It’s almost all derived from French high-line fencing, which is also the basis for Olympic sport fencing. French high-line is a very late style, not actually fully developed until early 1800s, that is adapted for very light thrusting weapons. These are not at all typical of the swords in use over most of recorded history.
In particular, the real-life inspirations for the Three Musketeers, in the 1620s, didn’t fight anything like their movie versions. They used rapiers – thrusting swords – all right, but their weapons were quite a bit longer and heavier than a 19th-century smallsword. Correspondingly, the tempo of a fight had to be slower, with more pauses as the fighters watched for an opening (a weakness in stance or balance, or a momentary loss of concentration). Normal guard position was lower and covered more of center line, not the point-it-straight-at-you of high line. You find all this out pretty quickly if you actually train with these weapons.
The thing is, real Three Musketeers fencing is less flashy and dramatic-looking than French high-line. So for decades there was never any real incentive for moviemakers to do the authentic thing. Even if there had been, audiences conditioned by those decades of of high-line would have thought it looked wrong!
Eric S. Raymond, “A martial artist looks at swordfighting in the movies”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-01-13.
November 30, 2022
QotD: The rise of liberalism
In sum, as one of the Levellers in the English Civil War of the 1640s, Richard Rumbold, said from the scaffold in 1685, “there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.” It was a shocking thought in a hierarchical society. In 1685 the crowd gathered to see Rumbold hanged surely laughed at such a sentiment. By 1885 it was a solemn cliché.
Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.
November 29, 2022
QotD: People have always lied about sex, but GenZ’ers lie even more than you’d expect
By the end of my last tour of duty, most college kids were dour puritans. I know, I know, but hear me out. This is the thing people keep forgetting about the Internet: People lie. I know we all know that consciously, but we seem hardwired to believe confessions. In the same way that we might not consciously watch TV — might go some distance out of our way to avoid it — but find ourselves staring mindlessly at the blinking screen when we’re in a bar or a waiting room or something. It seems to be hardwired. So when these folks start writing about all the bizarre sexual shit they’re into, we just … believe them. Sight unseen.
But y’all, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I want to state, unequivocally and for the record, that my entire knowledge of undergrads’ sex lives is secondhand. I have zero personal experience in this area. But it’s a close secondhand. For one thing, there’s not much to do in College Town that doesn’t involve undergrads, so I ended up drinking at a lot of the same bars, and in vino veritas. Second, kids these days have no filter. None whatsoever. Finally, social media — my last tour was at a SPLAC, where they strongly encouraged the faculty to be “friends” with the student body on their campus social media apps.
And yeah, they SAY a lot of things … but I highly, highly doubt they actually DO much of anything at all.
For one thing, those “student” bars were lucky I and a few other semi-normal profs were still in our “drink away the pain” phase, because otherwise they would’ve gone out of business. Friday and Saturday nights during football season were still pretty lively, but the rest of the week the “downtown” bars had all the crackling energy of singles’ night down at the mortuary.
Kids just don’t socialize much IRL, and when they do, they don’t hook up. In my not-inconsiderable experience, college drinking these days is like college anything — a grim, pinch-faced, assembly-line business. They intend to get blackout hammered, and they get after it like Heroes of Socialist Labor. Pausing for a quickie in the bathroom would mean skipping a turn in the drinking game — and they all play drinking games; it’s bizarre — so no thanks.
And y’all, those are the outgoing ones. The ones who still have some slight urge to see and be seen out in physical space. The rest of ’em never leave their rooms except at gunpoint, and when you force them to, their eyes never leave their phones.
That’s why I’d bet many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that all the “kink” in their social media profiles — even their personal ads — are just for show. They’re not listing all that stuff in order to find someone to have sex with. They’re using it as an excuse not to have sex with anybody, because “having sex with” entails personal interaction and they’re terrified of that. If they ever perfect those VR sex helmets like they had in Demolition Man, watch out, but as of now the whole idea is to seem weird and daring and liberated and kinky, but with no possibility of a follow-up. Oh, you’re into aardvarks and dental tools too? Um … yay? Oh, wait, you dress up as O. a. erikssoni, and I’m only into O. a. leptodon. Sorry!
Severian, “Saturday Miscellania”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-13.
November 28, 2022
QotD: The Carolingian army
But below that in the Carolingian system, you have the select levy, relatively undistinguished (read: not noble, but often reasonably well-to-do) men recruited from the smaller farmers and townsfolk. This system itself seems to have derived from an earlier social understanding that all free men (or all free property owning men) held an obligation for military service; Halsall notes in the eighth century the term arimannus (Med. Lat.: army-man) or exercitalis (same meaning) as a term used to denote the class of free landowners on whom the obligation of military service fell in Lombard and later Frankish Northern Italy (the Roman Republic of some ten centuries prior had the same concept, the term for it was assidui). This was, on the continent at least, a part of the system that was in decline by the time of Charlemagne and especially after as the mounted retinues of the great magnates became progressively more important.
We get an interesting picture of this system in Charlemagne’s efforts in the first decades of the 800s to standardize it. Under Charlemagne’s system, productive land was assessed in units of value called mansi and (to simplify a complicated system) every four mansi ought to furnish one soldier for the army (the law makes provisions for holders of even half a mansus, to give a sense of how large a unit it was – evidently some families lived on fractions of a mansus). Families with smaller holdings than four mansi – which must have been most of them – were brigaded together to create a group large enough to be able to equip and furnish one man for the army. These fellows were expected to equip themselves quite well – shield, spear, sword, a helmet and some armor – but not to bring a horse. We should probably also imagine that villages and towns choosing who to send were likely to try to send young men in good shape for the purpose (or at least they were supposed to). Thus this was a draw-up of some fairly high quality infantry with good equipment. That gives it its modern-usage name, the select levy, because it was selected out of the larger free populace.
And I should note what makes these fellows different from the infantry who might often be found in the retinues of later medieval aristocrats is just that – these fellows don’t seem to have been in the retinues of the Carolingian aristocracy. Or at least, Charlemagne doesn’t seem to have imagined them as such. While he expected his local aristocrats to organize this process, he also sent out his royal officials, the missi to oversee the process. This worked poorly, as it turned out – the system never quite ran right (in part, it seems, because no one could decide who was in charge of it, the missi or the local aristocrats) and the decades that followed would see Carolingian and post-Carolingian rulers more and more dependent on their lords and their retinues, while putting fewer and fewer resources into any kind of levy. But Charlemagne’s last-gaps effort is interesting for our purpose because it illustrates how the system was supposed to run, and thus how it might have run (in a very general sense) in the more distant past. In particular, he seems to have imagined the select levy as a force belonging to the king, to be administered by royal officials (as the nation-in-arms infantry armies of the centuries before had been), rather than as an infantry force splintered into various retinues. In practice, the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire under his heirs was fatal for any hopes of a centralized army, infantry or otherwise, and probably hastened the demise of the system.
Beneath the select levy there was also the expectation that, should danger reach a given region, all free men would be called upon to defend the local redoubts and fortified settlements. This group is sometimes called the general levy. As you might imagine, the general levy would be of lower average quality and cohesion. It might include the very young and very old – folks who ought not to be picked out for the select levy for that reason – and have a much lower standard of equipment. After all, unlike select levymen, who were being equipped at the expense, potentially, of many households, general levymen were individual farmers, grabbing whatever they could. In practice, the general levy might be expected to defend walls and little else – it was not a field force, but an emergency local defense militia, which might either enhance the select levy (and the retinues of the magnates) or at least hold out until that field army could arrive.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle oF Helm’s Deep, Part IV: Men of Rohan”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-05-22.
November 27, 2022
QotD: Gambling is not a “public health” issue
Nevertheless, the public-health lobby is keen to take over this area of policy and PHE ended its days with the following conclusion: “The evidence suggests that harmful gambling should be considered a public-health issue because it is associated with harms to individuals, their families, close associates and wider society.”
By this definition, anything that can cause harm to individuals and / or other people is a public-health issue. This would make every health problem and most social problems public-health issues. It spreads the net across such a vast expanse of human behaviour that it renders the term “public health” totally meaningless. Still, this is very much in keeping with the mission creep of a sector that claims everything from poverty and war to housing and climate change can be public-health issues.
It can be argued that almost everything has an effect on health, but what is the point of making everything a public-health issue? What expertise do people with a masters in public health have that makes them better at solving complex social and economic problems than anyone else? And as we saw during the pandemic, when the public-health lobby spreads itself too thinly, it becomes incapable of doing its day job. The World Health Organisation and Public Health England, for instance, were both far more interested in pushing for nanny-state interventions than in preparing for pandemics.
But if we see the modern public-health movement for what it really is – a paternalistic, bourgeois crusade for moral reform – it becomes obvious why gambling is in the crosshairs. A classic target of puritans, gambling will fit in well alongside the other supposed public-health “epidemics” of our age: gluttony, sloth, smoking and the demon drink. It wouldn’t surprise me if usury and lust were its next targets.
Christopher Snowdon, “No, gambling is not a “public health” issue”, Spiked, 2022-08-25.
November 26, 2022
QotD: The search for “authenticity”
Shakespeare knew that authenticity, in this sense, is for most people impossible and in all cases undesirable. The first few lines of Sonnet 138 should be enough to prove it:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she may think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.Should Shakespeare abandon his love because he knows she is inauthentic in what she says? Of course not:
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust …
Away, then, with your self-esteem, your true self and your authenticity, and all the bogus desiderata of modern psychology.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Lose Yourself”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-11-10.
November 25, 2022
QotD: Cults, conspiracy theories, progressives, and “the death wish”
… but alas, he does NOT lose his neuroses, his death wish. That becomes all-consuming.
When the very smart boys in the sociology departments first started studying cults, they assumed — being very smart boys — that cult members would all be dumb, mal-educated yokels. After all, those are the only kind who believe in Magic Sky Fairies, no? But because the urge to suppress or falsify research findings that don’t fit their pre-chosen Narrative hadn’t entirely permeated the academy yet, they actually published their “counterintuitive” findings — the average cult member is smarter, and much better educated, than the hoi polloi.
Which should’ve been obvious by the fact that cults as a general rule don’t bother trying to recruit in slums, or out in the sticks, but DO focus almost their entire recruiting effort near college campuses. They could’ve skipped the fieldwork entirely, and just looked around at the very obvious cult of “Leftism” that they and all their colleagues were already in, but self-awareness has never been a thing on the Left, and that goes triple for the egghead set.
The other thing that becomes immediately obvious in the academic study of cults is that the phrase “suicide cult” is redundant. They’re all suicide cults. Lots of them do us the great favor of admitting it, one way or the other, but THE cult belief is in the imminent immanentizing of the eschaton. The world’s gonna end, and they’re going to be the Big Guy’s right-hand persyns in the new dispensation. The Big Guy could be God, Jesus, the saucer people, Cthulhu, Satan, the Proletariat, whatever — they have a bewildering variety of mythologies, but the underlying belief is exactly the same, every time, and there’s only that ONE belief:
The world is gonna end in their lifetimes, and they themselves are helping to make it happen sooner.
Thus to pscircle back to [the] question: “has there been a historical situation where there is a generalised cult mentality which is attached and detached to a serial cult sequence (coof, ukraine, trump, etc).”
The way I’m interpreting this (please correct me if I’m wrong) is that the Juggalo Cult, unlike all the other known cults throughout history, seems to be able to change its mythology on a dime. We’re all familiar with Festinger, yeah? If not, go read When Prophecy Fails at the nearest opportunity — it’s short, and surprisingly readable for academic sociology. The UFO cult Festinger studied predicted the end of the world. When it didn’t happen, lots of members left the cult … but lots didn’t, and in fact they doubled down — it was only their constant vigilance, they said, that kept the saucer people from destroying the earth as originally planned.
(This is where the phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes from, by the way. Festinger coined it).
Note that the UFO cultists didn’t suddenly flip mythologies as a way to deal with their cogdis — oh, we were wrong, it wasn’t the saucer people, it was the Illuminati. And that seems to apply to any “disconfirmation” of any cult belief. Everything that happens, or doesn’t happen, gets folded in. In the same way, there’s only ever one Devil. See e.g. every conspiracy theory on the Internet, ever. When ___ happens, the guys who think the Freemasons control the world blame the Freemasons, the guys who think it’s the saucer people blame it on the saucer people, etc., same as it ever was.
But if the Freemasons step up and take credit for it, the guys who think it’s the saucer people don’t shrug and say ooops. Rather, they build it in — ok, ok, yeah, technically it was the Freemasons, but we all know who really controls the Freemasons! (It’s the saucer people and the RAND Corporation, in conjunction with the reverse vampires. We’re through the looking glass here, people).
In a sense, of course, the Juggalo Cult does do that — Whitey is always the Devil (do a find-and-replace, swapping in “White supremacy” for “capitalism”, and you could republish the entire Collected Works of V.I. Lenin, verbatim, as your dissertation and no one would be the wiser). But the Juggalos also seem to be unique in that the Apocalypse changes on a dime, too. Festinger’s cult all agreed that the saucer people were still going to destroy the world; they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet, because reasons.
The Juggalo Cult, by contrast, lurches from apocalypse to apocalypse. Global Cooling! Global Warming! Global Climate Change! Reagan! Boooosh! Drumpf! Covid! Ukraine! The Supreme Court! THE CURRENT THING!!!!
This, I think, is the reversion to bicamerality — the “digital clock effect” […] The Juggalo Cultists are still oppressed by their two-millennia-old sense of the passage of linear time — it’s baked into their DNA at this point — but they’ve been acculturated to the Endless Now of social media. There is no past on Twitter, nor any future — there’s just retweets and upvotes and replies, and what’s at the top of the news feed is all that is or could ever be, world without end amen.
They’re trapped in an endless loop — everything they do immanentizes the eschaton, because immanentizing the eschaton is simply a matter of tweeting it. And yet, the eschaton never comes. The tweet is merely replaced by another tweet, which is the only thing in the universe. It’s like what some old “paranormal researchers” said ghosts are — little loops of “film”, endlessly replaying the same thing forever. Time passes — the haunted house is bought and sold, remodeled, added to, stripped to the bricks and rebuilt, bought and sold again — but the ghost is still there, endlessly replaying the same scene, because it’s just static, just energy discharge from some kind of psychic dry-cell battery.
The difference being, of course, that these ghosts can actually pull the nuclear trigger … and they won’t even know they’re doing it, in the same way that the ghosts don’t realize they’re scaring the “occupants” of the “haunted house”, because there ARE no occupants, no house. It’s just the flickering, endlessly repeating NOW.
Severian, “The Ghosts”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-17.
November 24, 2022
QotD: Roman legionary fortified camps
It is probably not the camps themselves, but their structure which was exceptional. Polybius claims Greeks “shirk the labor of entrenching” (Plb. 6.42.1-2) and notes that the stakes the Romans used to construct the wooden palisade wall of the camp are more densely placed and harder to remove (Plb. 18.18.5-18). The other clear difference Polybius notes is the order of Roman camps, that the Romans lay out their camp the same way wherever it is, whereas Greek and Macedonian practice was to conform the camp to the terrain (Plb. 6.42); the archaeology of Roman camps bears out the former whereas analysis of likely battlefield sites (like the Battle of the Aous) seem to bear out the latter.
In any case, the mostly standard layout of Roman marching camps (which in the event the Romans lay siege, become siege camps) enables us to talk about the Roman marching camp because as far as we can tell they were all quite similar (not merely because Polybius says this, but because the basic features of these camps really do seem to stay more or less constant.
The basic outline of the camp is a large rectangle with the corners rounded off, which has given the camps (and later forts derived from them) their nickname: “playing card” forts. The size and proportions of a fortified camp would depend on the number of legions, allies and auxiliaries present, from nearly square to having one side substantially longer than the other. This isn’t the place to get into the internal configuration of the camp, except to note that these camps seemed to have been standardized so that the layout was familiar to any soldier wherever they went, which must have aided in both building the camp (since issues of layout would become habit quickly) and packing it up again.
Now a fortified camp does not have the same defensive purpose as a walled city: the latter is intended to resist a siege, while a fortified camp is mostly intended to prevent an army from being surprised and to allow it the opportunity to either form for battle or safely refuse battle. That means the defenses are mostly about preventing stealthy approach, slowing down attackers and providing a modest advantage to defenders with a relative economy of cost and effort.
In the Roman case, for a completed defense, the outermost defense was the fossa or ditch; sources differ on the normal width and depth of the ditch (it must have differed based on local security conditions) but as a rule they were at least 3′ and 5′ wide and often significantly more than this (actual measured Roman defensive fossae are generally rather wider, typically with a 2:1 ratio of width to depth, as noted by Kate Gilliver. The earth excavated to make the fossa was then piled inside of it to make a raised earthwork rampart the Romans called the agger. Finally, on top of the agger, the Romans would place the valli (“stakes”) they carried to make the vallum. Vallum gives us our English word “wall” but more nearly means “palisade” or “rampart” (the Latin word for a stone wall is more often murus).
Polybius (18.18) notes that Greek camps often used stakes that hadn’t had the side branches removed and spaced them out a bit (perhaps a foot or so; too closely set for anyone to slip through); this sort of spaced out palisade is a common sort of anti-ambush defense and we know of similar village fortifications in pre- and early post-contact North America on the East coast, used to discourage raids. Obviously the downside is that when such stakes are spaced out, it only takes the removal of a few to generate a breach. The Roman vallum, by contrast, set the valli fixed close together with the branches interlaced and with the tips sharpened, making them difficult to climb or remove quickly.
The gateway obviously could not have the ditch cut across the entryway, so instead a second ditch, the titulum, was dug 60ft or so in front of the gate to prevent direct approach; the gate might also be reinforced with a secondary arc of earthworks, either internally or externally, called the clavicula; the goal of all of this extra protection was again not to prevent a determined attacker from reaching the gates, but rather to slow a surprise attack down to give the defender time to form up and respond.
And that’s what I want to highlight about the nature of the fortified Roman camp: this isn’t a defense meant to outlast a siege, but – as I hinted at last time – a defense meant to withstand a raid. At most a camp might need to withstand the enemy for a day or two, providing the army inside the opportunity to retreat during the night.
We actually have some evidence of similar sort of stake-wall protections in use on the East Coast of Native North America in the 16th century, which featured a circular stake wall with a “baffle gate” that prevented a direct approach and entrance. The warfare style of the region was heavily focused on raids rather than battles or sieges (though the former did happen) in what is sometimes termed the “cutting off way of war” (on this see W. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America” in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)). Interestingly, this form of Native American fortification seems to have been substantially disrupted by the arrival of steel axes for presumably exactly the reasons that Polybius discusses when thinking about Greek vs. Roman stake walls: pulling up a well-made (read: Roman) stake wall was quite difficult. However, with steel axes (imported from European traders), Native American raiding forces could quickly cut through a basic palisade. Interestingly, in the period that follows, Lee (op. cit.) notes a drift towards some of the same methods of fortification the Romans used: fortifications begin to square off, often combined a ditch with the palisade and eventually incorporated corner bastions projecting out of the wall (a feature Roman camps do not have, but later Roman forts eventually will, as we’ll see).
Roman field camps could be more elaborate than what I’ve described; camps often featured, for instance, observation towers. These would have been made of wood and seem to have chiefly been elevated posts for lookouts rather than firing positions, given that they sit behind the vallum rather than projecting out of it (meaning that it would be very difficult to shoot any enemy who actually made it to the vallum from the tower).
When a Roman army laid siege to a fortified settlement, the camp formed the “base” from which siege works were constructed (particularly circumvallation – making a wall around the enemy’s city to keep them in – and contravallation – making a wall around your siege position to keep other enemies out. We’ll discuss these terms in more depth a little later). Some of the most elaborate such works we have described are Caesar’s fortifications at the Siege of Alesia (52 BC; Caes. B.G. 7.72). There the Roman line consisted of an initial trench well beyond bow-shot range from his planned works in order to prevent the enemy from disrupting his soldiers with sudden attacks, then an agger and vallum constructed with a parapet to allow firing positions from atop the vallum, with observation towers every 80 feet and two ditches directly in front of the agger, making for three defensive ditches in total (be still Roel Konijnendijk‘s heart! – but seriously, the point he makes on those Insider “Expert Rates” videos about the importance of ditches are, as you can tell already, entirely accurate), which were reinforced with sharpened stakes faced outward. As Caesar expressly notes, these weren’t meant to be prohibitive defenses that would withstand any attack – wooden walls can be chopped or burned, after all – but rather to give him time to respond to any effort by the defenders to break out or by attackers to break in (he also contravallates, reproducing all of these defenses facing outward, as well).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part II: Romans Playing Cards”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-11-12.
November 23, 2022
QotD: Humour and political correctness
But I never fully understood Wilde’s caustic satire of Victorian philanthropists and humanitarians until the present sludgy tide of political correctness began flooding government, education, and media over the past two decades. Wilde saw the insufferable arrogance and preening sanctimony in his era’s self-appointed guardians of morality.
We’re back to the hypocrisy sweepstakes, where gestures of virtue are as formalized as kabuki. Humor has been assassinated. An off word at work or school will get you booted to the gallows. This is the graveyard of liberalism, whose once noble ideals have turned spectral and vampiric.
Camille Paglia, “Hillary wants Trump to win again”, Spectator USA, 2018-12-04.
November 22, 2022
QotD: The obligatory orgy scene
It seems that all opera productions these days need an orgy scene, just as doctoral theses in the Soviet Union used to need at least one quotation from Lenin. There was a time when an orgy would have been censored, but now it is obligatory — no opera without one. There was a brief orgy scene in the last Flying Dutchman that I saw, and it was a bit of a relief when they got it over with because I knew that it must be coming and tension mounted until it did. It was a bit like childhood diseases in the old days: The sooner you had them, the quicker you got over them.
The problem with orgies is that once you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all, and these days they are staged literally rather than suggestively, as if the aging audience has to be reminded of what sex actually is. Moreover, they are staged like a tableau of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the fin de siècle compendium of what used to be called, in those far-off judgmental days, perversions. The implicit, however, is more powerful than the explicit, or it used to be. The explicit, in fact, is the enemy of the voluptuous.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Adding Injury to Insult”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-01-20
November 21, 2022
QotD: Socialism is nihilism
That seems bizarrely wrong, considering how much effort Socialists put into saving the world. But look at it objectively, comrade (heh heh), and you’ll see that Save-the-World-ism, of whatever flavor, always boils down to Destroy-the-World-ism. Always. It doesn’t matter how the world gets “saved;” it always gets blown up in the process. You still can’t find a better primer on chiliastic psychology than Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. The specifics of each loony doctrine changed, but the underlying presumption was always the same: Kill everyone, destroy everything, and then Jesus comes.
This is true even of millennialists whose doctrines don’t obviously entail killing everyone. Calvinists, for example. I spent decades trying to explain Calvinism to undergrads, and never once succeeded. The gulf between their words and their actions is too vast for the adolescent mind. There are only two logical responses to the doctrine of “double predestination”: quietism, or hedonism. They knew it, too, which is why they started burning people at the stake the minute they got any real power. Look at what they did, not what they said, and you’ll see nihilism plain as day. Calvin’s Geneva was the nearest thing to a police state that could be achieved with 16th century technology. The ideal Calvinist would say nothing, do nothing, think nothing, as he sat in the plain pews of his unadorned chapel, waiting for death and the Final Judgment. Calvinists wanted to grind the world to a halt, not blow it up, but once again the mass extinction of the human race is a feature, not a bug.
Take Jesus out of the equation, and you end up at pure shit-flinging nihilism in less than three steps. Marxism is perhaps the most exquisitely pointless doctrine ever devised. It’s more pleasant to have than to have not, I suppose, but no matter how much everyone has, we’re still just naked apes, living the brief days of our vain lives under an utterly indifferent sky. Marxists are a special kind of stupid, so they don’t realize it, but … they won. Modern Western “poor” people keel over from heart disease while fiddling with their smartphones in front of 50″ plasma tvs. While wearing $200 sneakers. We’re so far from being “alienated” from the fruits of our labor that “labor” is an all-but-meaningless concept for lots of us — and the further down the social scale you go, the more meaningless it gets. The modern ghetto dweller simply is Marx’s ideal proletarian. Does he look self-actualized to you? Ecce homeboy.
I assure you, the SJWs know this. Calvinists to the core, they know better than anyone the utter futility of all human effort. So they do what the original Calvinists did: Displace, displace, displace. Don’t take it from me, take it from a card-carrying Marxist. The end result is the same: Whether you’re a Puritan or an SJW, the only way to escape the crushing meaninglessness of your condition is to spend every moment of every day contemplating your pwecious widdle self.
Throw in the transitive property of equality, and you’ve got people like Hillary Clinton. If Socialism is Nihilism, then Nihilism is Socialism. Far from arguing against the idea … that Hillary et al are motivated solely by hatred, I’m 100% behind it. In fact, I’d argue that the Nihilism comes first — people who have convinced themselves that life is pointless always, always, embrace the biggest and most all-encompassing form of collectivism on offer. What could be crueler, than to be given all this for nothing? It’s not even a sick joke, since a joke implies a joker.
How can you not hate this world, then, and everything in it? More to the point: how can you not hate yourself, for seeing the world as it really is? Ignorance is bliss … but how can you not hate them, too, those poor deluded motherfuckers who still think stuff like God and love and family and the designated hitter might somehow mean something? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity … and if I have to face the existential horror of it all, then fuck it, so do you. “Capitalism,” the “free market,” “representative government” — call it what you will, it’s all just vanity, just another way for the sheeple to keep deluding themselves. Fuck it, and fuck them. Burn it down. Burn it allllll down.
Severian, “A Tyranny of Nihilism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-10-22.
