The Greek term for the structure of a polis government was its politeia (πολιτεία), which would could mean the government (the way we would say “the state”) or the structure of that government (its “constitution”) or the rights and conditions of the citizenry (in the sense of “citizenship”); as with the many meanings of polis, the many meanings of politeia all shade into each other and are understood as blended.
Because this week we’re interested in the politeia of a polis, that’s going to mean we’re mostly focused on the politai, the citizens, who we discussed last time as one of the key building blocks of the polis. Now, as we noted last time, it’s important to keep in mind that the politai are not all of the people in the polis or indeed even very many of them: women, children, resident foreigners, native members of non-citizen free underclasses and slaves were all set outside the politai and often had no means of gaining entrance. We’re going to talk about all of those folks in more depth in the third part, where we’ll look at the status layer-cake of polis society. But for now I just want to note that all of those people are there, even if they won’t figure very prominently in this discussion of the structures of polis government.
Now we’ll explore this question of how a polis was governed: first laying out the standard elements of a polis constitution, which as we’ll discuss were surprisingly similar from one polis to the next. Then we’ll deal with variations in how those elements are structured, which the Greeks understood to define the differences in the three kinds of constitution that a polis might normally have: oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Then […] we’ll look at what sort of magistrates a polis might have and what their jobs might be as well as the structure of the legal system a polis might have.
THis is going to mean that we’re discussing the “constitutions” of poleis, but I want to be really clear here at the start that these are almost never written constitutions. So when I say “constitution”, understand that we mean this in the broad sense of “the actual makeup of the state’s institutions” rather than in the narrow sense of “a formal set of instructions for the running of the state”. Some poleis did actually have the latter (the oldest we have that I know of is a constitution established by Ptolemy I Soter for Kyrene in 322; the fact that this is a constitution dictated by a king to a subordinated polis should signal how odd it is), but they seem to have been very rare.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIa: Politeia in the Polis”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-17.
April 5, 2026
QotD: The structure of a typical polis government
April 4, 2026
If we think that “ordinary criticism and disagreement are bullying, then we have an infantilized and feminized culture”
Chris Bray finds a highly accurate label for the pearl-clutching “elites” who — to a persyn — believe that your words are violence, but their violence (delivered through third parties, of course) is merely emphatic communication to the distasteful lower orders:
Donald Trump is a mean man. He’s a bully!
Oh no SCARY, he’s trying to BULLY the Supreme Court! I wrote at the Federalist this week about the stupidity of this argument — what is he implying he can do to the life-tenured justices, for crying out loud? — but I suspect I undersold the underlying sickness. Adults don’t use the word “bully” to talk about other adults, arguably outside of a few very narrow spaces involving things like domestic violence. It’s a preschool word. The easy recourse to toddler language at the New York Times is a sign of cultural regression. But it’s also a sign of habitual and persistent dishonesty. They’re pretending. I suspect they’ve pretended so much that they’ve forgotten they’re pretending, and the mask has become the face, but at root, they’re pretending.
We have fictional characters like Willie Stark and Frank Underwood because no one on the planet is dumb enough to think that politics is nice. The federal government spends $7 trillion a year, and the lure of that bucket of money brings out a bunch of throatcutters. This is possibly one of the most obvious realities of human existence. Politics is a knife fight. […]
Quite famously, members of Congress who suggested that they would oppose the legislative priorities of President Lyndon Johnson would get phone calls in the middle night from the man himself, waking them up and letting them know that they were dead men. He’s supposed to have said things like, “I’m gonna cut your balls off, you cocksucker”, though it’s not like anyone had a stenographer on the calls to nail the quotes. He was threatening and nasty on all days ending in -y, and got bills passed by, among other things, actually, physically intimidating people who didn’t roll over. He was a leaner. He got in faces, constantly and openly.
You gonna pass my bill [insert string of highly personal threats and profanity], or is your political career over? Pressure, threats, and horsetrading are the default behaviors, the normal stuff. Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act through Congress by handing out government sinecures. The premise that I can take care of you or I can go to war with you, and it’s your choice which one happens is … politics. The make-believe story about Mean Donald Trump bullying the Supreme Court by tweeting at them or sitting in a chair where they could see him is playtime, clutching at Fisher-Price pearls. Somewhat remarkably, Trump appears to bully institutional opponents quite a bit less than the historical norm, and Lisa Murkowski can do whatever she wants without consequence. I am personally calling for Donald Trump to start actually bullying some people who have it coming, but be sure to have a fainting couch ready in the newsroom at Times Square.
Update, 6 March: 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.
Be on the lookout for “toxic confidence”
Freddie deBoer disagrees with a recent New York Times piece which proclaims that “toxic confidence” is the current psychological tic of choice:
[…] But then, the whole theatrical embrace of imposter syndrome wasn’t really about a sincere belief that they didn’t belong in the program, that they had gotten in through some mistake. It was, instead, an expression of a very weird element of Millennial culture, which is the embrace of insecurity as a means of belonging.
Which brings me to Savannah Sobrevilla and her recent trend piece, destined to be a New York Times classic, “Toxic Confidence Has Taken Over”. You can already guess the argument here, but I’ll give you the nut anyway:
… it used to be that “impostor syndrome” dominated conversations, the anxious stance of millennials with adult responsibilities and women leading corporate workplaces trying not to rankle. Even if you felt deserving of accolades, the social graces of the time required the expression of modesty.
Now, in an era of aggressively handsome incels and macho political posturing, cultivated humility feels trite. A younger generation, coming out of high school and college in Covid lockdown, feels less beholden to dampening their light. Who has time for affected meekness when playing the braggart not only tickles the soul, but has the potential to convince others of one’s own greatness?
The phrase itself, “toxic confidence”, is doing a lot of work in this essay, and I can just imagine an NYT editor reading the pitch, seeing that phrase, and salivating. But there’s not a lot there, really. Strip away the arch tone and the carefully curated examples (reality-television grifters, Trump-administration blusterers) and what you’re left with is a fairly straightforward complaint: some people believe in themselves too much, and it’s making a certain kind of person uncomfortable. Of course, there’s always been braggarts and narcissists and perennially self-impressed people around us, in any era, and that they’re annoying is not generally considered newsworthy. What makes this a classic NYT trend piece is that it makes an observation that’s comprehensible only to a certain strata of reader — middle aged or younger, culturally savvy, educated, urban in ethos if not necessarily in geography, too online. These people aren’t experiencing the age-old frustration with the conventionally overconfident, but are facing (if Sobrevilla is to be believed) the demise of a recent generational embrace of performative insecurity, which makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth examining, because it reveals less about a cultural pathology than about whose neuroses we’ve decided to normalize.
As usual, I blame my own generation. For roughly fifteen years, Millennial culture ran a remarkable experiment: it rebranded anxiety, self-doubt, and chronic insecurity as virtues. This is certainly connected to the phenomenon of illness as identity and disorder as fashion I’m always complaining about […] but is, I think, a distinct phenomenon, the rearrangement of healthy confidence into pathology and pathological self-doubt into virtue. The weird affordances of social media gave certain culturally and socially influential people the ability to imprint their own neuroses onto the wider culture, recasting that neuroses as a sort of down-to-earth norm. In that context, impostor syndrome ceased to be something to overcome and became a membership card. Everybody started bragging about their social anxiety; people gleefully declared their FOGO; “I’m the worst”, said with the right ironic lilt, became fodder for bonding. Vulnerability, performed on cue, was currency. The implicit agreement was powerful and, when you examine it, fairly cruel: if you seemed too assured, too unbothered by your own inadequacy, you were either deluded or dangerous. The rules had been rewritten by indoor kids, the chronic overthinkers, the people who had built entire identities around their relationship with self-doubt, and the rules said confidence was suspect.
What Sobrevilla calls “toxic confidence” is largely just the renegotiation of those rules, an attempt to cast an incipient reclamation of basic, uncomplicated self-assurance as some sort of aggressive masculinist cult. A couple of examples that Sobrevilla calls out specifically include Olympic free skier Eileen Gu and actor Timothée Chalamet; I’m afraid these examples just make Sobrevilla seem afraid of excellence. When Gu — an Olympic gold medalist, a celebrity, a Stanford student, and a burgeoning entrepreneur — says that being inside her own head is “not a bad place to be”, that isn’t pathology; it’s the statement of a young woman who has done the work and is honest about it. (And wouldn’t we prefer for everyone to feel like insider their own head is a nice place to be?) Maybe Gu is a genuinely awful human being, I don’t know, but nothing Sobrevilla references rises to the level of narcissism or whatever other pseudo-medical accusation we’re throwing around these days. I find Chalamet a little aggravating, but when he says that he aspires to be considered among the great actors of his time, when all is said and done, that’s not a statement of Trumpian bellicosity but instead a reflection of honest, healthy ambition. We’ve been so conditioned to expect performative self-deprecation that accurate self-assessment reads as arrogance.
Artemis II – later than hoped, but better now than never
CDR Salamander goes fullbore (because it’s Friday, and that’s what he normally does on a Friday):
Official crew portrait for Artemis II, from left: NASA Astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Photo by Josh Valcarcel for NASA
I grew up with the Apollo Program and some of my earliest memories were watching astronauts during the lunar landings. You could see the Saturn V launches from my backyard.
Just as I was getting old enough to really enjoy it, it all stopped.
The 1970s.
The worst people for the worst reasons killed the space program as it became part of the national malaise of the 1970s, the core of which was defined by the period from the last person on the moon in 1972 through the fall of Saigon three years later, and bookended by the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.
For those who received the promise of 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as to what the future in space would be never fulfilled, we tried to get excited by partial measures — Skylab; the Space Shuttle and its disasters; the downgrading of Reagan’s Space Station Freedom into the “Model UN in space”, the International Space Station; and the lingering malaise and distraction that we endured during the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Here we are 53 years later, and at last we are reaching for the moon again. We never should have left.
[…]
And so North America—three Americans and a Canadian—is heading to the moon.
Back at last.
The Commander Reid Wiseman, is a U.S. Navy Captain and former F-14 driver. The Pilot is another U.S. Navy Captain, Victor Glover, though he was a F/A-18 bubba.
Navy wins again!
Mission Specialist Christina Koch comes from a great ACC school, and for comic relief, we have our Canadian Mission Specialist, Jeremy Hansen, the only one who is on their first space flight.
Somewhere there are plenty of young men and women who, I hope, are watching as my generation did, the best of mankind again reaching out.
Let’s not let the momentum stop this time. Keep pushing out. It is what our species does best, and it brings the best out of us.
RESISTANCE and REBELLION – The Conquered and the Proud 19
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 10 Sept 2025Today we think about attitudes to Roman rule and discuss how frequent rebellions were in the Roman empire’s provinces and what were their causes. In particular we think about Judaea, and the Jewish population of the empire more generally, in the first and second centuries AD. Why was there a big rebellion in AD 66 against Nero’s rule, another of the Jewish population in Egypt, North Africa and Cyprus but NOT Judaea against Trajan, and then the final major rebellion in Judaea under Hadrian.
QotD: Protect us from “disinformation”, Big Brother!
Troy Westwood @TroyWestwood
The only thing more important than “free speech” is protecting society from disinformation.Troy is trying to sound enlightened, but unfortunately he has the IQ of a lobster. “The only thing more important than ‘free speech’ is protecting society from disinformation.”
Translation: “I’m terrified of ideas I don’t like, so please, Big Brother, put a nanny filter on everyone else’s brain … just to keep us all safe, of course.”
Nothing says “I trust the marketplace of ideas” quite like demanding a government-approved Ministry of Truth to decide what’s true for the rest of us. Bonus points for implying that the plebs can’t possibly sort fact from fiction without an elite class holding their hand.
Truly the hallmark of a deep thinker. Admitting you don’t believe people are capable of handling freedom, then dressing it up as noble concern for society.
If free speech is dangerous, the most dangerous speech of all is the one declaring that some authority should get to silence the rest. But don’t worry, comrade, they’ll only censor the bad information. Promise.
Another swing and a miss for Troy.
Martyupnorth, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-28.
April 3, 2026
“Rocket launches are America at its best”
Jen Gerson on the Artemis II launch on April 1st:
Artemis II launch, 1 April, 2026
NASA imageI’m not The Line‘s resident space dork; and, yet, I, like everyone likely reading this piece, watched the launch of Artemis II last night, enraptured and hopeful for a successful slingshot around the moon.
My son watched with me, he counted down from 10, and he jumped up when the rockets lit up, throwing four astronauts in a tin can into space.
This stuff is cool on its own merit, but it hits us all somewhere a little deeper than mere wonder at the extraordinary mechanics.
Watching a manned rocket launch is the barest little window-crack opening into a distant future. It’s a monumental effort to throw a fine fishing line into the darkness, hoping against hope that some great destiny is on the other side just waiting for us to tug at it.
By all rational accounts space travel is dumb. It’s an extraordinarily expensive use of human capital and time and resources to reach into nothingness and expanse. We all love pictures of stars and planets and nebulae, but we may never glean much of real material value from these investments in our own lifetimes. Or our great-grandchildren’s lifetimes.
There may be nothing but lifeless rock and death beyond our own ecosystem; no other place we will ever call home.
In fact, from where we sit today, that’s probably true.
Yet we do this stupid thing anyway. We must do the stupid thing anyway.
[…]
Rocket launches are America at its best, and perhaps now more than usual, we need to remind ourselves that this best still exists. Perhaps especially on the same night we sat fearing the President would announce that NATO was over and the world was breaking. (He didn’t, and I guess it’s not for now.)
And regardless of what nation we belong to, whether we’re accountants, butlers, or mothers, every single one of us carries that thin thread of life forward. We all take part in the project. We all have a place. Some of the big roles may be assigned to individual players, but the destiny of humanity is shared. (Whether we like it or not.)
So, we can all be moved together in these moments. We can all imagine what great-great-great grandchildren who have long forgotten our own names might think while watching archival footage of the Artemis II launch. What even greater world might they achieve. What more fanciful ambitions might be open to them. Maybe they will say that this was the moment we started to get our priorities right and our acts together. Maybe things will get better.
Maybe Artemis II, absurd and wasteful, is neither. Who knows how my son will metabolize the video stream of this really cool rocket; I cannot say who he may come to be for witnessing it.
Our craziest aspirations are the way we send our love to the children too far distant for us to see or know.
For my own part, I caught the space bug very early through science fiction of the 1950s and 60s, especially from the writings of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Earth is just our starting point, and one planet isn’t enough to ensure the survival of our species, so exploring space is an evolutionary necessity.
Eight years of Canadian government “international assistance” spending
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Reclamare has a thread on examining what the Canadian federal government has been supporting through Global Affairs:
Biggie here – I took 8 years of Global Affairs spending, and made searchable databases🧵
It details
$61 billion spending
218,000 records
6,600 recipients around the world
https://thereclamare.github.io
You can search by;
– Year
– Spending Destination (country where money is spent)
– Recipient
– Purpose
– Amount
– Continent
Govt data files will show a recipient as Simon Fraser University in BC
However, if SFU is spending the money on a project in China, its actually money destined for China
There is 1,192 spending records of our taxes being spent in China, totalling $93 million dollars
One of the largest entrees is Refugee spending, but its a bit dishonest
Global Affairs details all its spending on Refugees, except they are inside Canada
In 8 years there has been $6.4 billion tax dollars spent on refugees inside Canada, but shown as foreign affairs spending
You can search for specific organizations to see how Canada is helping fund terrorist connected organizations like UNRWA
A quick look shows $211 million in tax dollars given to UNRWA, to be spent in places like Syria for reason like Gender equality🤪
Government lists many programs under Gender Equality
You can search for those too – in 8 years Canada gave away $35 billion tax dollars to foreign countries around the world under the guise of “Gender”
This is for your interest and knowledge but also for the searchers and journos out there, who like me, can’t make heads or tails of published government data
Please have a look and share what you find:)
https://thereclamare.github.io/fin
Hot Cross Buns – Mother Goose Would Love These
Food Wishes
Published 12 Apr 2017Pretty much all I know about hot cross buns, I learned from the nursery rhyme, but thanks to a recipe I found on Anson Mills, I was still able to make a fairly decent batch. Including real crosses, not to be confused with dinner rolls on which an icing cross has been piped.
In addition to its eye-catching appearance, the dough-based “cross” provides an interesting textual contrast, as it gets sort of chewy, and crispy edged.
Like I said in the video, any sweet dough will work with this easy technique, especially rich, and fragrant examples, like our Italian Easter Bread dough. Times may vary, but regardless of the dough, simply wait for the dough to double in size, and proceed.
If you want to get all your buns the same size, weigh your dough in grams before dividing, and then divide by 16. Then, weight each of your dough balls to that exact amount, and boom, your tray of buns will look like the ones you saw on that magazine cover. Or, just eyeball it and take your chances. Either way, I really hope you give this a try soon. Enjoy!
QotD: The Great Purge
Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.
The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.
This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.
The Z Man, “What Comes Next”, The Z Blog, 2020-08-03.
April 2, 2026
Modern-day serial killers are called “Doctor”
At Science is not the answer, William M. Briggs explains why these are the long-foretold “hard times”:
Poor John Wayne Gacy. Reports are that the infamous mass murderer was looking up from his perch in Hell, musing about the more than thirty people he raped, tortured, then butchered and said “I was born too early”.
He was right.
If he had only waited a few short years to begin his horror spree, not only would he not have been arrested and executed, he would have received glowing tributes, warm praise from his colleagues, and he would have been paid by the state for every person he killed. And he would have had a much, much higher score than a mere 33 (official count).
Tale the case of modern-day born-on-time serial killer Dr — doctor, doctor — Ellen Wiebe. She beats Gacy’s score by more than ten times. She is credited with slaughtering over 500 people in Canada’s MAiD program. As impressive as that tally is, it is incomplete. It doesn’t count the lives inside would-be mothers she ended, for she is also an abortionist. And she is still going strong, cheered on by the Canadian government. By the time she is done, Mao himself will be envious of her feats.
That its own government joyfully starts killing off its own people proves Canadian civilization has exhausted itself. It, and a great many other civilizations, are experiencing the last phase of the ancient cycle: hard men make good times, good times make soft men, soft men make hard times. The hard times are just coming upon them, and us, created by the good times the remarkable lives of our predecessors created for us.
There are small cycles and large. Small versions of this litany are always playing out: in individual lives, in select localities, in nations. These are easy to see. But there are also larger waves, harder to spot because they are so encompassing. They are global in scope and span eras. This is why even when riding down a Great Wave toward an abyss, it can seem, and be, for a time and in a place things are improving.
Our lives are short, we see most things only with immediacy; we extrapolate too easily, and we expect matters will play out in Hollywood time, as it were. The fault is expected because when history is presented it is foreshortened. Events which took centuries are completed in pages. It is almost impossible to put ourselves in the position of a man who lived in the latter stages of the Roman empire, who lived his entire life in reasonable enough times, and who didn’t see the end coming.
It is a great mistake to view the litany wholly, or even largely, in material terms. Certainly cushy living makes for sloth and fat men. But we are also spiritual (rational) creatures. When the bulk of our ideas are given to us in packaged “education”, and we don’t have to work from them, we are cursed by easy thinking, intellectual malaise. It’s true the West has largely given up Christianity, its ideas stale and uninspiring to most. But in the East it is the same. The great hope of Science has paled. Our customary motivating forces are no longer motivating, the great old visions no longer forceful as they once were. Largely. There are many local exceptions. But they are just that: exceptions.
We recall Emil Cioran, who said, “Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon”. Our barbarians are no longer awaited (we are their demons). Rulers in the West are inviting them in. And making it a crime, in many places, to oppose the inflow. Such is their ardor to have strangers among us, it is hard not to argue that these rulers want to be put out of their misery.
The persistent wish to “seize the means of production”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Rational Animal explains why the din of progressives demanding that “the rich” be dispossessed of their property always leads to the worst kind of results:
This perfectly captures the parasite’s delusion: that wealth is static loot to be seized and redistributed.
Here’s what actually happens when you “repossess all their stuff”:
The producers will rebuild. They’ll create new wealth because that’s what they do. They identify opportunities, solve problems, innovate, build businesses, and generate value. Their wealth came from their minds, not magic.
The looters will consume what they stole at light speed and wind up with nothing. Because they never learned to produce. They only know how to take.
Look at every socialist revolution in history: seize the factories, the farms, the businesses. Within years, everything collapses. The factories stop producing. The farms stop yielding. The wealth evaporates. Venezuela. Cuba. Soviet Union. Zimbabwe. The pattern is identical.
Why? Because wealth isn’t stuff sitting in a vault. Wealth is the ongoing process of human intelligence applied to production. Confiscate a factory and you get the building. You don’t get the knowledge, vision, and competence that made it productive.
The “rich” you want to loot aren’t dragons hoarding gold. They’re producers creating value. Rob them and you rob everyone, including yourself.
You’ll be left with ruins and still blame capitalism.
Update: Fixed missing URL.
m/27PH aka m/37: Finland’s First Standard Sniper Rifle (and it’s really bad)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Nov 2025The m27PH, aka the m/37, was the first standardized Finnish sniper rifle. It was developed as part of the plan to make a whole family of m/27 rifles for the Finnish Army, including cavalry, trainer, and sniper models. The sniper model was delayed because of the structural problems with the m/27 base rifle, and it was not formally adopted until 1937. The rifle used a 2.2x prismatic scope made by Finnish company Physica Oy. The scope was heavy, fragile, and had a very short eye relief.
When first adopted, the rifles had short, slightly bent bolt handled and standard stocks. Once they began to see use in the Winter War (for which they were Finland’s only standardized sniper rifle), experience showed these features to be problems. The bolt handles were largely replaced with much longer Soviet-style sniper bolts, and wooden cheek rests were added to the stocks.
During the Continuation War, m/27PH rifles were still in service, but as they were damaged their scopes were generally used to build new m/39PH sniper rifles instead. Today they are extremely rare rifles.
(more…)
QotD: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain
Which makes sense if you think about it. When everybody’s snitching on everybody else, shameless is the only way to live. Everybody’s guilty of something, so own it — being, of course, perpetually prepared to snitch anyone and everyone else at a moment’s notice if someone drops the dime on you. Also, if you have to stand in line six hours to maybe get a few potatoes, damn it, you’re gonna get those potatoes. It doesn’t matter if you like potatoes, or have any possible use for potatoes at the present time. You’re going to take every single spud you can get your hands on, plus steal anything that isn’t nailed down, because you never know when you’ll get another chance.
As it turns out, overabundance creates the same conditions. When you’ve been standing in line for six hours with 1,000 of your new best friends just to get some tampons — and you’re a guy, you don’t need tampons, but you can always barter them for something — you’re not going to scruple to do anything and everything to get them. Indeed you want people to know Ivan’s got some tampons, because that’s how the black market works …
… anyway, as I say, we’re not in line for six hours, but we are perpetually at least under the threat of surveillance. And not from the Feds — just as Ivan’s not worried about the KGB, but rather his neighbors, so we don’t have to worry about the Feebs monitoring us. Instead, it’s that Basic College Girl with the iPhone. She’s not filming you, of course, she’s filming herself, but there you are anyway, in the background, doing whatever. Under those conditions — and when everyone’s volunteering the most intimate details of their lives on Fakebook and Twatter — shameless is the only way to live.
In other words, thanks to constant social media “surveillance”, it has gone in the blink of an eye from “It didn’t happen unless someone caught it on film” to “It’s all on film anyway, so fuck it, I’m gonna get mine”. I used to see this all the time in class. Basic College Girls will lie straight to your face, for any reason or no reason. They’ll do it on spec, just to see if you bite. More importantly, they’ll tell you such obvious, easily disproven whoppers that you start wondering if they’re having a schizoid break. You have to know I know you’re lying, right? That Dead Grandma Story is very sad, but you have pictures of yourself all over Twitter drunk at the sorority formal, when you told me you were at Nana’s funeral.
It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t care. Because somehow I’m the asshole for not believing them, despite the evidence of my own lying eyes.
Severian, “Friday Male Bag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-03.
April 1, 2026
“Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”
Perhaps it’s just me, but I read Freddie deBoer‘s refutation of Facilitated Communication with a kind of rising horror, that a parent or trusted adult could so take advantage of a disabled person to commit this kind of fraud:
“Facilitated Communication” by Faure P, Legou T and Gepner B is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.
The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests … This is the inconvenient, damning reality.
Message passing, or double-blind, tests are simple and remarkably effective. Information is provided to both the disabled person and the facilitator, often in the form of pictures or individual words, with both the facilitator and the test subject receiving the same information some times and discordant information other times. That is to say, the disabled person and the facilitator will sometimes both be shown a star or a watermelon or a flower or a bird, while at other times one might get the star picture while the other gets the bird, etc. If the disabled person genuinely crafts their responses, this should be a trivially easy test to pass: the facilitated communication will produce the information that the disabled subject received. And yet very close to literally 100% of the time in rigorous research, across dozens of studies with thousands of combined attempts, interactions produce the information the facilitator received and not the information the disabled person received. Surveying the literature, the consistency of this finding is remarkable — and there is no coherent explanation for how this could happen if indeed FC results in messages being sent from a conscious and alert test subject. Instead, these findings are perfectly consistent with Occam’s razor and the assumption that the facilitator is the one speaking.
Thanks to this overwhelming body of research literature, professional societies have tended to be unusually blunt about FC. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the leading professional body in this field, states unequivocally: “Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”. It continues: “There is no scientific evidence of the validity of FC, and there is extensive scientific evidence … that messages are authored by the ‘facilitator’ rather than the person with a disability”. This is not a marginal view; it reflects decades of careful studies across multiple countries. There are many other statements from relevant medical organizations and expert bodies that reach the same conclusion, which is to be expected, considering that the evidence points in only one direction. Are the facilitators deliberately engaging in fraud? No, it’s very likely that they’re being sincere, at least in the large majority of cases. The explanation is the ideomotor effect, the same unconscious motor influence that drives Ouija boards. The facilitator is not deliberately faking communication but unknowingly producing it, usually to satisfy their own desperate longing to connect with the disabled person.
So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling”, which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.
