What are affairs like for poor spartiates?
First, we need to reiterate that a “poor” spartiate was still quite well off compared to the average citizen in many Greek poleis – we talk about “poor” spartiates the same way we talk about the “poor” gentry in a Jane Austen novel. None of them are actually poor in an absolute sense, they are only poor in the sense that they are the poorest of the rich, clinging to the bottom rung of the upper class.
Nevertheless, we should talk about them, because the consequences of falling off of that bottom rung of the economic ladder in Sparta were extremely severe because of the closed nature of the spartiate system. Here is the rub: membership in a syssition was a requirement of spartiate status, so failure to be a member in a syssition – either because of failure in the agoge or because a spartiate could no longer keep up the required mess contributions – that meant not being a spartiate anymore.
The term we have for ex-spartiates is hypomeiones (literally “the inferiors”), which seems to have been an informal term covering a range of individuals who were (or whose family were) spartiates, but had ceased to be so. The hypomeiones were, by all accounts, mostly despised by the spartiates and the hatred seems to have been mutual (Xen. Hell. 3.3.6). Interestingly in that passage there – Xenophon’s Hellenica 3.3.6 – he lists the Spartan underclasses in what appears to be rising order of status – first the helots (at the bottom), then the neodamodes (freed helots, one step up), then the hypomeiones, and then finally the perioikoi. The implication is that falling off of the bottom of the spartiate class due to cowardice, failure – or just poverty – meant falling below the largest group of free non-citizens, the perioikoi.
Herodotus gives some sense of the treatment of men who failed at being spartiates when he details the two survivors of Thermopylae – Aristodemus and Pantites. Both had been absent from the battle under orders – Pantites had been sent carrying a message and Aristodemus had suffered an infection. When they returned to Sparta, both were ostracized by the spartiates for failing to have died – Pantites hanged himself (Hdt. 7.232) while Aristodemus was held to have “redeemed” himself with a suicidal charge at Plataea which cost his life (Hdt. 7.231). And as a side note: Aristodemus is the model for 300’s narrator, Dilios – so when you see him in the movie, remember: the Spartan system drove these men to pointless suicide because they followed an order.
But my main point here is that falling out of the spartiate system meant social death. Remember that the spartiates are a closed class – failing at being a spartiate because your kleros is too poor to maintain the mess contribution means losing citizen status; it means your children cannot attend the agoge or become spartiates themselves. It means you, your wife, your entire family forever are shamed, their status as full members of society forever revoked and your social orbit collapses on you, since you are cut off from the very ties that bind you to your friends. No wonder Pantites preferred to hang himself.
In essence then, the core of the problem here is not that these poor spartiates were poor in any absolute sense – they weren’t. It was that the difference between being rich and being merely affluent in Sparta was a social abyss completely unlike any other Greek state. And that abyss was completely one way. As we’ll see – there was no way back.
Our sources are, unfortunately, profoundly uninterested in answering some crucial questions about the hypomeiones: did they keep their kleroi? What happened to the status of their children? What happened to the status of the women in their families? We can say one thing: it is clear that there was no “on-ramp” for hypomeiones to get back into the spartiate system. This is made quite clear, if by nothing else, by the collapsing number of spartiates (we’ll get to it), but also at the inability of extremely successful non-Spartan citizens – men like Gylippus and Lysander – to ever join the homoioi. Once a spartiate was a hypomeiones, they appear to have been so forever – along with any descendants they may have had. Once out, out for good.
All of that loops back to the impact of the great earthquake in 464. It is likely there were always spartiates who – because their kleroi were just a bit poorer, or were hit a bit harder by helot resistance, or for whatever reason – clung to the bottom of the spartiate system financially, struggling to make the contributions to the common mess. When the earthquake hit, the death of so many helots – on whom they relied for their economic basis – combined with the overall disruption seems to have pushed many of these men beyond the point where they could sustain themselves. Unlike in a normal Greek polis, they could not just take up some productive work to survive and continue as citizens, because that was forbidden to the spartiates, so they collapsed out of the class entirely.
(As an aside – the fact that wealthy spartiates, as mentioned, seemed to prefer each other’s company over the rest probably also meant that the social safety-net of the poor spartiates likely consisted of other poor spartiates. Perhaps in normal circumstances they remained stable by relying on each other (you help me in my bad year, I help you in yours – this is very common survival behavior in subsistence agriculture societies), but the earthquake – by hitting them all at once – may well have caused a downward spiral, as each spartiate who fell out of the system made the remainder more vulnerable, culminating in entire social groups falling out.)
As I said, our sources are uninterested in poor spartiates, so we can only imagine what it must have felt like, clinging desperately to the bottom of that social system, knowing how deep the hole was beneath you. One imagines the mounting despair of the spartiate wife whose job it is to manage the household trying to scrounge up the mess contributions out of an ever-shrinking pool of labor and produce, the increasing despair of her husband who because of the laws cannot do anything but watch as his household slides into oblivion. We cannot know for certain, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a particularly happy existence.
As for those who did fall out of the system we do not need to imagine because Xenophon – in a rare moment of candor – leaves us in no doubt what they felt. He puts it this way: “they [the leaders of a conspiracy against the spartiates] knew the secret of all of the others – the helots, the neodamodes, the hypomeiones, the perioikoi – for whenever mention was made of the spartiates among these men, not one of them could hide that he would gladly eat them raw” (Xen. Hell. 3.3.6; emphasis mine).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
August 23, 2022
QotD: The fate of suddenly poor Spartiates
August 22, 2022
QotD: The inevitability of World War 1
You can blame the usual suspects for a lot of this — the Kaiser et al are far too White and male to be worth spending time on, especially when you’ve got to devote so many weeks to Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks. But the other reason — the far more important one for our purposes — is this: It’s a mystery to the teachers, too.
As academics who have never set foot in the real world, they take other academics’ words at face value. And the academics of 1913 couldn’t figure it out either. They pointed out that a general European war would cause the world’s financial system to collapse; ergo there would be no war. Besides, they argued, even if Germany did go to war, she lacked the natural resources to sustain the fight. And finally, they claimed, the firepower of modern infantry is just too overwhelming — given their rates of fire, two regiments equipped with machine guns would wipe each other out in less than two minutes.
Credit where it’s due: The eggheads were right about all of that. The global financial system did collapse; Germany as constituted at the outbreak of war didn’t have the resources to keep fighting; and the initial skirmishes showed the overwhelming impact of massed firepower. But the eggheads never learned that people are people, and since people love fighting more than anything else in the world, solutions were quickly found.
The United States, with its shiny new Federal Reserve system (created late 1913), was more than happy to step into the financial breach, just as American companies were more than happy to help Germany (and everyone else) with their armaments shortage. And Walther Rathenau happened, as my students would write, keeping the raw materials flowing to German industry. And faced with the overwhelming firepower of machine guns, soldiers ducked. Then they dug, and there’s your four years of bloody trench warfare.
Even the outbreak of the war, far from being a mystery, is painfully obvious if you know the first thing about the major players. In what historians call the Long 19th Century (1789-1914), it was taken for granted that a nation needed colonies to be a serious power. The reasoning behind this was never too sound, and by the turn of the 20th century various smart guys had figured out that on balance colonies were more trouble than they were worth, but pretty much by definition smart guys don’t hold on to the reins of power. Bismarck didn’t — the Berlin Conference was supposed to keep jingo knuckleheads like Wilhelm II from starting a war over a few acres of scrub jungle, but since Wilhelm II shared his class’s raging hardon for colonial expansion, all it ended up doing was sweeping Bismarck out of office. And as for Tsar Nicholas and his colonial adventures in the Balkans (and the Far East), one could write an entire book about that stupidity and still not cover all of it. Throw in England’s stuffed shirt of a king, and France’s legendary inability to maintain a stable government, and tragedy was inevitable.
In short, World War 1 was a massive, indescribably bloody dick-measuring contest between a few inbred yokels. To anyone who has met the Sons of Privilege*, or who is passingly familiar with the Peter Principle, this comes as no surprise. Hell, Lenin saw it, and a guy with his egg head further up his own ass you’ll never find.** All you have to do is look at the people, not the paper.
* they’re like the Sons of Anarchy, but effete and usually gay.
** though he basically just stole the idea from Hobson, who, though a goofy love-the-worlder, was actually a pretty smart guy.Severian, “1913”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-08-20.
August 21, 2022
QotD: The “social responsibility” of the corporate executive
In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.
Needless to say, this does not mean that it is easy to judge how well he is performing his task. But at least the criterion of performance is straight-forward, and the persons among whom a voluntary contractual arrangement exists are clearly defined.
Of course, the corporate executive is also a person in his own right. As a person, he may have many other responsibilities that he recognizes or assumes voluntarily — to his family, his conscience, his feelings of charity, his church, his clubs, his city, his country. He may feel impelled by these responsibilities to devote part of his income to causes he regards as worthy, to refuse to work for particular corporations, even to leave his job, for example, to join his country’s armed forces. If we wish, we may refer to some of these responsibilities as “social responsibilities.” But in these respects he is acting as a principal, not an agent; he is spending his own money or time or energy, not the money of his employers or the time or energy he has contracted to devote to their purposes. If these are “social responsibilities,” they are the social responsibilities of individuals, not business. What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a “social responsibility” in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers. For example, that he is to refrain from increasing the price of the product in order to contribute to the social objective of preventing inflation, even though a price increase would be in the best interests of the corporation. Or that he is to make expenditures on reducing pollution beyond the amount that is in the best interests of the corporation or that is required by law in order to contribute to the social objective of improving the environment. Or that, at the expense of corporate profits, he is to hire “hardcore” unemployed instead of better qualified available workmen to contribute to the social objective of reducing poverty.
In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else’s money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his “social responsibility” reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.
Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times, 1970-09-13.
August 20, 2022
QotD: The improbable survival of the Byzantine empire
The reason for this is that the Mediaeval Roman State was directed by creative pragmatists. Look for one moment beneath its glittering surface, and the Ancient Roman Empire was a ghastly place for most of the people who lived in it. The Emperors at the top were often vicious incompetents. They ruled through an immense and parasitic bureaucracy. They were supreme governors of an army too large to be controlled. They protected a landed aristocracy that was a repository of culture, but that was ruthless in its exaction of rent. Most ordinary people were disarmed tax-slaves, where not chattel slaves or serfs.
The contemporary historians themselves are disappointingly vague about the seventh and eighth centuries. Our only evidence for what happened comes from the description of established facts in the tenth century. As early as the seventh century, though, the Mediaeval Roman State pulled off the miracle of reforming itself internally while fighting a war of survival on every frontier. Much of the bureaucracy was shut down. Taxes were cut. The silver coinage was stabilised. Above all, the senatorial estates were broken up and given to those who worked on them, in return for service in local militias. Though never abolished, chattel slavery became far less pervasive. The civil law was simplified, and the criminal law humanised – after the seventh century, as said, the death penalty was rarely used.
The Mediaeval Roman Empire survived because of a revolutionary transformation in which ordinary people became armed stakeholders. The inhabitants of Roman Gaul and Italy and Spain barely looked up from their ploughs as the Barbarians swirled round them. The citizens of Mediaeval Rome fought like tigers in defence of their country and their Orthodox faith. Time and again, the armies of the Caliph smashed against a wall of armed freeholders. This was a transformation pushed through in a century and a half of recurrent crises during which Constantinople itself was repeatedly under siege. Alone among the ancient empires in its path, Mediaeval Rome faced down the Arabs, and kept Islam at bay for nearly five centuries. Would it be superfluous to say that no one does this by accident?
Sean Gabb, “The Mediaeval Roman Empire: An Unlikely Emergence and Survival”, SeanGabb.co.uk, 2018-09-14.
August 19, 2022
QotD: How pre-modern polytheistic religions originated
This is exactly backwards for how the ancients, practicing their practical knowledge, learn about the gods. The myths, philosophical discussions and well-written treatises are not the foundation of the religion’s understanding of the gods, but rather the foaming crest at the top of the wave. In practice, the ruminations of those philosophers often had little to do the religion of the populace at large; famously Socrates’ own philosophical take on the gods rather upset quite a lot of Athenians.
Instead of beginning with a theory of the divine and working forwards from that, the ancients begin with proven methods and work backwards from that. For most people, there’s no need to know why things work, only that they work. Essentially, this knowledge is generated by trial and error.
Let’s give an example of how that kind of knowledge forms. Let’s say we are a farming community. It is very important that our crops grow, but the methods and variations in how well they grow are deep and mysterious and we do not fully understand them; clearly that growth is governed by some unseen forces we might seek the aid of. So we put together a ritual – perhaps an offering of a bit of last year’s harvest – to try to get that favor. And then the harvest is great – excellent, we have found a formula that works. So we do it next year, and the year after that.
Sometimes the harvest is good (well performed ritual there) and sometimes it is bad (someone must have made an error), but our community survives. And that very survival becomes the proof of the effectiveness of our ritual. We know it works because we are still here. And I mean survival over generations; our great-great-grandchildren, for whom we are nameless ancestors and to whom our ritual has always been practiced in our village can take solace in the fact that so long as this ritual was performed, the community has never perished. They know it works because they themselves can see the evidence.
(These sorts of justifications are offered in ancient works all the time. Cicero is, in several places, explicit that Roman success must, at the first instance, be attributed to Roman religio – religious scruples. The empire itself serves as the proof of the successful, effective nature of the religion it practices!)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part I: Knowledge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-25.
August 18, 2022
QotD: Nostalgie de la boue
Nostalgie de la boue (French: “nostalgia for mud”) is the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements … Tom Wolfe described a party in New York in 1970: “It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano — there was also a south piano — in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future in which, after the revolution, there would no longer be any such thing as a two-story, thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, with twin grand pianos in the living room, for one family.”
I think TWS is right:
It explains everything from those parties where they pretend to eat people and the Podesta brothers love of pedo-murder art to the Jersey Shore and all rap music. People of Wal-Mart and people who enjoy mocking them. The idea covers everything happening.
Back in the days, they called all that “authenticity”. The Working Man ™ was supposed to have an “authenticity”, a raw experience of life, that the Intelligentsia did not, so the Intelligentsia made it their mission to ape “authentic” proletarian manners and mores. That’s why every self-styled “Intellectual” since Marx has carried on like an unbathed schizophrenic hobo — they think they’re being “authentic”.
It never occurs to them that this is grossly insulting to The Workers they’re supposedly helping, because of course they never ever meet any Workers — they imagine how they think a longshoreman would act, and then go do that.
I have far more respect for “the People of Walmart” than I do for those who make fun of them, because “the People of Walmart” have been beaten down and brutalized by the dominant culture. They’ve had all their self-respect kicked out of them by little college snots with Gender Studies degrees. It’s like the peasantry in pre-Revolution Russia: Everything the intellectuals said about the nobility was true … but everything the nobility said about the serfs was also true. It was a chicken-and-egg problem with no solution save one.
I also have some respect for Walmart as an institution. Yeah, I know, it’s cheap Chinese shit, but trust me: Though I didn’t grow up poor, you could see “poor” from my house for a lot of my childhood. I don’t recall having Walmart back then, but K-Mart’s Blue Light Specials improved our day to day quality of life enormously. And when I first got out on my own, I decorated my entire first apartment in Walmart — it wasn’t fancy, but it worked, and I had a hell of a lot more stuff that I could actually use than I ever could’ve afforded any other way.
You want to make fun of Walmart, and the people who shop there? Ok, fine, motherfucker, but first try living in a trailer where your couch is patched up with duct tape, and go to school wearing your California cousins’ hand me down clothes, so that you’re dressed like a surfer when you’re 500 miles from the nearest ocean.
I will never, ever understand this. You can choose to be ugly, and to surround yourself with ugliness. Or you can choose NOT to do that. Why would anyone pick the former?
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-13.
August 17, 2022
QotD: Larry Correia’s proposal for a DoFYJS
Depending on the department you could fire a ton of them and all it would do is free up parking spaces.
Now, there are some government employees who work their asses off. Good. There are some government functions which are necessary. Great.
A great many don’t work, or the work they do is utterly pointless.
Ask any honest gov employee. They will admit this to you in private.
If they say no, everything we do is vital and everyone here is vital, they’re a liar protecting their budget, or one of the useless ones.
Most places, if there are 5 employees, 2 do 90% of the work.
Pournelle’s Iron Law says that as it grows over time any bureaucracy’s purpose will change from its original mission, to a new mission of protecting and growing the bureaucracy.
So now our Department of Labor by itself is bigger than LBJ’s entire federal government. This stuff never shrinks. It only grows. It’s an endless Leviathan.
The Leviathan needs to grow and protect itself against all threats, which is how you get super evil shit like the CIA and FBI meddling in US elections …
Or constantly expanding its powers into new places, like the #MinistryOfTruth
This Leviathan will find allies which help it expand in size and power. The more power/money you give it, the more it can bribe and co-opt other institutions. Academia, media, corporations, etc.
Whichever political philosophy is the most unprincipled will rock this arrangement
As the Leviathan grows in power, it will become more malicious, spiteful, and controlling. Dissent is crushed. Freedom dies.
@elonmusk is currently a speed bump in this, which is why the control freak contingent is super pissed at him.
The big question is, do the people own their government, or does the government own its people? If we are just assets of the gov, we can be spent freely, and bad assets get eliminated.The Leviathan is compelled to own EVERYTHING.
Slowing the Leviathan down isn’t enough. If you concentrate on stopping one part, others keep growing. Then when our bipolar country elects a new leader, those parts start growing again. Repeat forever. And it just keeps getting bigger.
So we’ve got to shrink the whole thing
If the GOP had a brain/spine (lol) they’d slash the shit out of everything. They’d starve the beast. They usually don’t, because they are total chickenshits. They’ll pay lip service to this, do nothing, or feed their favorite parts.
The DNC gleefully feeds the whole thing.
Trump’s biggest weakness was he surrounded himself with people who loved government, and loved expanding government. Of course all of those fucked him at every opportunity.
We need somebody who actively HATES the government to run it.
If I was President (ha!) I would only create a single new executive branch entity. The Department of Fuck Your Job Security.
The DoFYJS would consist of surly auditors, and their only job would be to go into other government agencies to figure out-
A. do you fuckers do anything worth a shit?
B. which of you fuckers actually get shit done?Then fire everyone else.
Right now it is pretty much impossible to fire government employees. The process is asinine. It is so bad that the worst government employees, who nobody else can stand, don’t get fired. They get PROMOTED. It’s easier, and then it’s somebody else’s problem.
But the DoFYJS don’t care. If your job is making taxpayers fill out mandatory paperwork and then filing it somewhere nobody will ever read it?
Fuck you. Gone. Clean out your desk.
We need to get rid of entire agencies. Gone. WTF does the Department of Education improve? NOTHING.
Gone. Fire them all. Sell the assets.
Any agency that survives this purge, move it out of DC to an area more appropriate to its mission. Do we need a Dept of Agriculture? Okay. Go to Kansas.
This will also cause all the DC/NOVA powermonger set to resign so I don’t have to waste time firing them
Oh, and right wing pet causes, you’re not safe. I worked for the Air Force. We all know that we could fire 1/3 of the GS employees tomorrow and the only noticeable difference would be more parking available on base.
Cut everything. We never do, because somebody might cry. Too bad. They’re called budget cuts because they’re supposed to hurt. Not budget tickles. Fuck you. Cut.
Shutting off the money faucet will also destroy the unholy alliance between gov/media/academia/tech.
Right now there is a revolving door, government job, university job, corporate board, think tank, the same crowd who goes to the same parties and went to the same schools and all that other incestuous shit just take turns in the different chairs.
Sell the fucking chairs.
Every entity that gets tax money inevitably turns into a pig trough for these people. Cut it all off. All of these money faucets ALWAYS cause some kind of financial crisis later anyway.
See the student loan crisis caused by the government, here is free money, oh college has become expensive and useless, so now we need more government to solve it. You dummies get to pay for it. Have some inflation.
It’s all bullshit.
Quit pretending any of this makes sense.
The only way the Leviathan shrinks is we elect people who actively hate the government to the government, and then only let them stay there long enough to fuck the government without getting corrupted by it.
The instant you see the small government crusader you sent to DC going “Oh, well maybe an unholy alliance between the state and OmniGlobalMegaCorp to develop a mind control ray is a good thing” FIRE HIM.
So there you have it. That’s my platform if you elect me president. Fire fucking everybody. And only give me one term. Thank you.
Larry Correia, portion of a Twitter thread reposted at Monster Hunter Nation, 2022-05-11.
August 16, 2022
QotD: The first casualty of political campaigns
Walking in Paris just before the French election, I was handed some leaflets and stickers by partisans of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the demagogic left-wing candidate. “The rich pollute,” said one of them, “the people pay.”
Am I one of the rich, I wonder? Or one of the people? What about the customers chatting over lunch in the nearby café? Are they rich or are they of the people? Mélanchon’s slogan is founded on the old lie, as Wilfred Owen calls Dulce et decorum, etc., that society is divided neatly into two distinct categories with interests diametrically opposed.
No lie appeals more to the dissatisfied than this, offering as it does the illusory hope of a confiscatory solution to life’s little problems. The best that can be said of it is that it permits the dissatisfied an access of hatred and moral outrage, which is always enjoyable and gratifying to experience.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Election bumf”, The Critic, 2022-04-29.
August 15, 2022
QotD: Sparta – the North Korea of the Classical era
But Sparta was not equal, in fact it was the least equal Greek polis we know of. It was one of the least equal societies in the ancient Mediterranean, and one which treated its underclasses – who made up to within a rounding error of the entire society by the end – terribly. You will occasionally see pat replies that Sparta was no more dependent on slave labor than the rest of Greece, but even a basic demographic look makes it clear this is not true. Moreover our sources are clear that the helots were the worst treated slaves in Greece. Even among the Spartiates, Sparta was not equal and it never was.
And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550[BC], Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
August 14, 2022
QotD: The 2016 US election was a rejection of the media
The rise in support isn’t the surprising part. The surprising part is that the Media still find this surprising.
Not to toot my own horn too much here, but I’ve been writing about this since 2015 … “Make America Great Again” was the Trump campaign’s official slogan, but unofficially — and much, much more effectively — it was: “Fuck the Media”. The 2016 election is known far and wide as “The Great Fuck You”, but somehow, some way, almost everyone still fails to grasp that it wasn’t the Democrats who got told to fuck off. It wasn’t even the “Progressives”. It was The Media. The Great Fuck You was aimed entirely at the Media.
Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.
August 13, 2022
QotD: Erich von Manstein
In the Britain of the Sixties, a certain mystique still attached to the generals of the Third Reich. In their stylish uniforms and their gleaming jackboots, they had swaggered. Only two, Keitel and Jodl, were executed at Nuremberg; the rest got away with murder.
Even some of those who were convicted of war crimes had friends in high places. One of the most prominent was Erich von Manstein, the architect of many German victories both in the Battle of France and on the Eastern front. He was also complicit in the genocide of more than a million Jews and others by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine.
Yet Churchill was among those who successfully campaigned to have Manstein’s 18-year sentence reduced to 12, of which he served only four.
Manstein’s memoir Verlorene Siege (translated as Lost Victories) appeared in 1958, a key text in the mythology that depicted the Wehrmacht as “clean” and laid the blame for war crimes on Hitler. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the postwar Federal Republic, also played his part in the rehabilitation of Manstein, on the grounds that West German rearmament required a sharp distinction between the Nazis and an untainted military tradition as the basis for the new Bundeswehr.
Daniel Johnson, “The moral blindness of Putin’s generals”, The Critic, 2022-05-10.
August 12, 2022
QotD: Diplomatic adventures in the British Foreign Office
Auberon Waugh, Diary, 1976-05-02 (Posted by @AuberonWaugh_PE, 2022-05-02).
August 11, 2022
QotD: Logistical limits to Spartan military action against Athens
During the first phase of the Peloponnesian War, called the Archidamean war, after the Spartan king who conducted it, Sparta invaded Attica functionally every year in an effort to inflict enough agricultural devastation that the Athenians would be forced to come out and fight […] The core problem is that it just isn’t possible to do a meaningful amount of damage in the short campaigning season before the army has to go home.
And I want to be clear just how long they bang their head against this rock. The Spartans invade in 431, besiege a minor town, accomplish nothing and leave (Thuc. 2.18-20), and in 430 (Thuc. 2.47), in 429, because of a plague in Athens, they instead besiege tiny Plataea (Thuc. 2.71ff) and then leave, but in 428 they’re back at it in Attica (Thuc. 3.1), and in 427 (Thuc. 3.26), and in 426 but turn back early due to earthquakes (Thuc. 3.89). But they’re back again in 425 (Thuc. 4.2), leaving each time when supplies run out. Sparta mounts no attack in 424 because Athenian naval raiding forces them to keep the army at home (Thuc. 4.57); in 423 they have a year-long truce with Athens (Thuc. 4.117). They only finally suggest the creation of a permanent base in Attica in 422/1 (Thuc. 5.17) but the war ends first (they’ll actually fortify a small outpost, Decelea, only when the war renews in 413).
Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies. They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies. Their last invasion was six years after their first and they still had not resolved the logistics problem of long-term operations in what is effectively their own backyard.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
August 10, 2022
QotD: “Most academics [are] twitchy closet cases with the social skills of autistic badgers”
I say the answer is: Institutional incentives. I’m not a football coach, but I was an academic — there’s a surprising amount of overlap in their institutional structures. Let me explain: In both cases, working conditions for everyone except those at the very tippy-top are brutal. We’d all willingly endure them, I think, for the kind of money and bennies big league coaches / tenured professors get, but below that tiny handful of folks everyone works even worse hours for far less compensation. Even coaches at dinky little high schools in the middle of Flyover Country spend countless hours breaking down film — he might only have fifteen kids on the team, but he’s expected to win with those fifteen kids, damn it, and win now.
Consider, then, what type of person would willingly sign up for such a life. Leave aside the question of whether or not what academics do has any intrinsic value. The fact remains that simply writing one’s dissertation takes, at minimum, a year or two of grinding toil. I’m the laziest sumbitch in captivity, and nobody’s better than me at gaming the system (especially a droolingly stupid system like academia), but even I pulled more 80+ hour weeks in grad school than I care to remember. It’s simple economics: You’ve got X dollars in grant money to hit the archives. Archives are always located in expensive cities in distant states, if not on different continents. Your X dollars run out pretty goddamn fast in a place like London, even when you’re staying at the cheapest hostel, living on ramen noodles and water, walking everywhere. Given that, you work, for as long as they’ll let you in the building, for as long as your eyesight holds.
And all that is to complete the bare minimum requirement for the possibility — by no means anywhere near the certainty — of securing an entry-level job. I’d ask “Who in his right mind would ever do that?”, but the answer is obvious: Nobody in his right mind would. You have to either really, really want to be an academic (coach), or have absolutely no other choice. Most academics, of course, are the latter — they’re twitchy closet cases with the social skills of autistic badgers. But wannabe-coaches, I hypothesize, face a similar dilemma: You’re an athlete who has made his living off his body. And a nice living it was, too, while it lasted … but now you’re 35 and your body just can’t do it anymore. You have no other skills. What else is there to do, but try coaching?
Severian, “Organizational Behaviour in the Human Male”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-23.
August 9, 2022
QotD: Fusty old literary archaism
In fairy tales, this “once upon a time” has always delighted children. Novelists, and especially historical novelists, need archaic means to apprise readers of location, in their passage-making through time. Archaisms may paradoxically subvert anachronism, by constantly yet subtly reminding the reader that he is a long way from home.
Get over this adolescent prejudice against archaism, and an ocean of literary experience opens to you. Among other things, you will learn to distinguish one kind of archaism from another, as one kind of sea from another should be recognized by a yachtsman.
But more: a particular style of language is among the means by which an accomplished novelist breaks the reader in. There are many other ways: for instance by showering us with proper nouns through the opening pages, to slow us down, and make us work on the family trees, or mentally squint over local geography. I would almost say that the first thirty pages of any good novel will be devoted to shaking off unwanted readers; or if they continue, beating them into shape. We are on a voyage, and the sooner the passengers get their sea legs, the better life will be all round.
David Warren, “Kristin Lavransdatter”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-03-21.
