Marie Antoinette arrived in Paris at the end of this era of strict censorship, which helps explain why her honeymoon with French public opinion was short-lived. The official press, notably the Mercure and Gazette, continued churning out fawning snippets of society news about the royal couple. But the scandal-mongering libelles and pamphlets had their own paragraph men, called nouvellistes, who picked up “news” from well-informed sources posted on benches in the Tuileries, Luxembourg Gardens, and, of course, under the tree of Cracow. Police efforts to repress nouvellistes‘ gossip proved futile in the face of high demand. One famous libelle of the era, Le Gazetier cuirassé promised “scandalous anecdotes about the French court”. (It was printed in London, out of reach of official French censors.) Another publication printed in London starting in the 1760s was the famous Mémoires secrets, an anonymous chronicle of insider gossip and anecdotes from Parisian high society. A scurrilous book about Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry, also appeared as a collection of gossip that nouvellistes had picked up around Paris.
Despite the libelles circulating in Paris, the Bourbon monarchy was still relatively protected compared with the hurly-burly across the channel in London, where coffeehouses buzzed with political innuendo and intrigue. Some French philosophes, it is true, attempted to replicate London’s coffeehouse culture at Parisian cafés, such as the Procope on the Left Bank. (Voltaire frequented the place, where he liked to add chocolate to his coffee.) Other regulars at the Procope — named after the Byzantine writer Procopius, famous for his Secret History — were Rousseau, Danton, and Robespierre, as well as Americans Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
The Parisian equivalent of the coffeehouse was the salon, which differed from London coffeehouses in both ambience and function. Whereas London coffeehouses were boisterously public, salons were essentially closed spaces, usually held in private homes. Most were by invitation only. Many were hosted by women, usually titled or wealthy ladies with an interest in culture and politics — such as Madame de Rambouillet, Madame Necker, Madame Geoffrin, and Mademoiselle Lespinasse. There was also the Marquise du Deffand, a friend to Voltaire and the English man of letters Horace Walpole, to whom she bequeathed not only her papers, but also her pet dog, Tonton.
As access to these rarefied spaces increasingly became a symbol of social success, admission got more tightly controlled. (Madame Geoffrin expelled Diderot from her salon because she found his conversation “quite beyond control”.) Still, those who frequented salons represented a great diversity within the elites — from rising young writers and established authors to powerful politicians and eccentric aristocrats. The tacit rule was, as in London coffeehouses, that wit was more important than rank. Many great French writers launched their careers thanks to their admittance. One was the philosopher Montesquieu, who found success at the salon of Madame Lambert.
Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.
July 27, 2025
QotD: London coffeehouses and Paris salons of the Ancien Régime
July 26, 2025
The desperate narcissism of the “Cool Professor”
Freddie deBoer on the pathetic academic specimen sometimes known as “Bob” or “Biff” or “Lizzie” — the dreaded self-imagined “cool professor”:
“heh, probably never expected to have a professor with full sleeve tattoos, huh? well, that’s not the last time your mind’s gonna be blown this semester …”
Image and caption from Freddie deBoer’s Substack
Let me tell you about the saddest figures in the American university. They wear black jeans and Chuck Taylors to class, except maybe on the first day, when they stroll in wearing semi-ironic suits designed to contrast with their ample tattoos. Their syllabuses are printed in Helvetica. They mention Chappell Roan in the first fifteen minutes of the first day of class. They tell their students, with a wink, that they don’t believe in grades — why, who are they to judge their students! They encourage everyone in class to call them by their first names, or perhaps a contrived nickname. They hope to blow everyone’s minds when they theatrically announce that in their classes, students pick the readings, because the students are the ones who really know what’s worthy of their time. They describe themselves as “friends” or “guides” or “partners”, not as teachers or professors. They disdainfully invoke the words “rigor” and “standards” only with ironic scare quotes and want you to know that they don’t believe in deadlines. They subtweet the provost on BlueSky. They are the Cool Professors. And they are frauds.
The Cool Professor fundamentally does not want to teach, as teaching requires the teacher to sometimes be the bad guy. The Cool Professor can’t stand to be the bad guy, chafes at the very idea. That’s the core of all of this. The posture, the cultivated aesthetic of rejection, the performance of cool — none of it’s about students, even though Cool Professors will not shut the fuck up about how they run a “student-centered classroom”. Their affect isn’t about pedagogy. It’s about insecurity and narcissism, their desperate need to be perceived as the rare exception, the rogue academic, the anti-institutional rebel. Cool Professors aren’t trying to liberate students. They’re trying to be loved, and in being loved by students stave off their horror about growing old. And if that means letting students drift intellectually, if that means mistaking chaos for creativity, if that means failing to ever give anyone a hard but necessary lesson, then so be it. Because the thing the Cool Professor wants to avoid at all costs is being perceived as an authority figure, and that is precisely what students most need them to be.
It’s a common misunderstanding, particularly among faculty who feel alienated from the bureaucracy of the university or who fancy themselves transgressive thinkers, that teaching should never be hierarchical. The idea is that it’s somehow oppressive to know more than your students or to presume to evaluate their performance; that knowing more than your students and evaluating their performance are publicly understood to be core parts of being a teacher typically goes ignored. Many who consider themselves modern or progressive in the academy insist that education should be horizontal, an equal exchange between learner and guide, that the classroom is a site of resistance or liberation. But these ideas, while maybe flattering to the professor’s ego and superficially appealing to a certain kind of idealist, are incoherent. They’re built on a fundamental category error: mistaking the classroom for a club meeting, or a dinner party, or a DSA breakout session. The classroom is none of those things. It’s a site of instruction, and in a site of instruction one party knows more than the other; one party evaluates the other; one party is, necessarily, in charge.
(And, for the record, the fundamental dictate of critical pedagogy is always and forever self-defeating: if you inspire your students to rebel against your authority in your own classroom, they’re still following your lead and thus not rebelling at all. The ubiquitous goal of prompting students to resist top-down education, whatever that means, is unachievable, because if you do prompt them to resist, they’re actually complying with your desires, not resisting them. It’s a good old fashioned paradox and not one you can bluff your way out of with abstruse academic vocabulary.)
The plain fact that a teacher must necessarily have some sort of control over the classroom space that the students do not makes people uncomfortable. Authority always does. But then, the job of a teacher is not to minimize discomfort; indeed, a good teacher will necessarily make their students uncomfortable, on occasion, as it’s often only in the space of genuine discomfort that we’re inspired to achieve our deepest growth. The professor’s job to be responsible for the intellectual development of students, which inevitably involves making judgments: what is true, what is false, what is well argued, what is sloppy, what is insightful, what is clichéd. If you aren’t willing to say those things, if you shrink from judgment, you’re abandoning the role you signed up for, you’re copping out. You’re indulging yourself, and your own flattering self-mythology, at the expense of the people you’re supposed to be teaching.
The unaffordable luxury of a second-best army
At History Does You, Secretary of Defense Rock considers the downfall of Prussia’s vaunted army at the hands of Napoleon in a blink-of-the-eye campaign in 1806:
“Prussian wounded and stragglers leaving battle [after the battles of Jena and Auerstadt]. The mortally wounded Duke of Brunswick is the prominent figure in the painting.”
Painting by Richard Knötel (1857–1914) via Wikimedia Commons.
A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job.1
– Carl von Clausewitz on Prussia in 1806In the autumn of 1806, the Kingdom of Prussia, “The Iron Kingdom”, suffered one of the most rapid and humiliating military defeats in modern European history.2 The twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt shattered not only its army but the myth of invincibility that had surrounded the legacy of Frederick the Great. For the young Carl von Clausewitz, then a junior officer in the collapsing Prussian forces, this moment marked a personal and national catastrophe that would shape his life’s work. Clausewitz would come to see the defeat not simply as a failure of generalship or tactics, but as the exposure of a more profound institutional and societal crisis; one in which a state had grown complacent, a military rendered obsolete, and a society stripped of civic vitality falling apart during “the most decisive conflict in which they would ever have to fight”.3 In that collapse and Clausewitz’s later reflections, one finds an unsettling parallel to present-day America, a powerful nation outwardly strong, yet increasingly vulnerable to the same internal rot.
Prussia’s disaster in 1806 was the formative experience for the author of On War. How the armies of Frederick the Great and the state that he painstakingly built collapsed like a house of cards was a question that bothered Clausewitz for many years.4 It was a comprehensive disintegration of a system that had, since the mid-eighteenth century, claimed a position of prominence in European military affairs based on its discipline, linear tactics, and centralized command. Yet by the turn of the nineteenth century, these very strengths had calcified into weaknesses. Clausewitz foresaw disaster. Even as a young lieutenant, he was already warning of the Prussian army’s growing detachment from reality. In his early writings, he criticized military exercises as highly scripted performances, lacking genuine tactical challenge, unpredictability, and creativity.5 The number of steps marched in a minute of the cadence, what awards should be placed on a uniform, how a rifle should be cleaned for parade, all of this he feared, was cultivating a “lassitude of tradition and detail”.6 Clausewitz understood that rehearsing war under artificial constraints produced not readiness but ritual. Even though he later wrote, “no general can accustom an army to war”, he worried, presciently, that when confronted by a real enemy operating under real conditions, the army would collapse, and in 1806, it did.7
Whatever reservations he may have held, Clausewitz fulfilled his duty. He led a battalion of grenadiers at the battle of Auerstedt and managed to withdraw with most of his men intact in the chaotic aftermath of defeat. His escape was short-lived; however, he was captured on October 28, 1806, and subsequently marched into captivity in France, where he would spend the next year as a prisoner.8 Napoleon’s campaigns revealed that war had been transformed: faster, larger, and fundamentally political. Clausewitz wrote, “War was returned to the people, who to some extent had been separated from it by the professional standing armies; war cast off its shackles and crossed the bounds of what had once seemed possible”.9 The levée en masse and the corps system shattered the static paradigms of eighteenth-century warfare. Yet the Prussian high command, clinging to the geometries of the past, failed to respond with imagination or speed with any kind of seriousness.
Clausewitz’s later concept of friction — the unpredictable resistance that disrupts even the best plans — emerged directly from this experience.10 The Prussian army collapsed not for lack of courage, but because its institutional mindset could not withstand the volatility of an age that demanded adaptability, political intelligence, and creative command.
1. Carl von Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 32.
2. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006).
3. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 81.
4. Frederick the Great ruled from 1740-1786 and is usually credited as turning Prussia from a regional power to a continental power.
5. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 92-93.
6. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 36.
7. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 122.
8. Partet, 126.
9. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 287.
10. Clausewitz discusses this concept in Chapter 7 in On War, 119-121.
VIA Rail’s premier passenger train, The Canadian
In the National Post, Raymond J. de Souza discovers the aging crown jewel of VIA Rail’s passenger services, The Canadian, which VIA inherited from Canadian Pacific Railway when the country’s long-distance and intercity rail passenger services were merged into a single Crown Corporation in the 1970s:
Canadian Pacific FP7 locomotive 1410 at the head of The Canadian stopped at Dorval, Quebec on 6 September, 1965. The Canadian was Canadian Pacific’s premier passenger train before VIA Rail was formed.
Photo by Roger Puta via Wikimedia Commons.
What did I learn after four days and four nights, some 4,500 kilometres, from Vancouver to Toronto on board Via Rail’s The Canadian? Many things, as it happens.
I learned that The Canadian attracts train aficionados the world over for one of the last great rail journeys on one of the last great trains. The stainless steel rolling stock is 70 years old, the cars having been upgraded along the way, but still rolling as a living part of railway history.
Part of the cultural history Via Rail preserves is superlative meals thrice daily, served in fine style in the dining cars. Four dinners: rack of lamb, beef tenderloin, AAA prime rib, bone-in pork chop. Delicious desserts. Canadian wines and craft beers. Fish eaters and vegans also had options. The question arises ineluctably: Why is the Via Rail food between Montreal and Toronto so horrible?
Perhaps it would be too expensive; The Canadian in sleeper class certainly is. Expense was really the question in the 1870s.
“Could a country of three and a half million people afford an expenditure of one hundred million dollars at time when a labourer’s wage was a dollar a day?” asked Pierre Berton in his 1970 chronicle of that decision, The National Dream.
The cost of not building was greater, argued Sir John A. Macdonald. It was the price of remaining a sovereign continental country. Part of the financing was creative; the Hudson’s Bay Company gave Rupert’s Land to Canada, and Canada paid the contractors partly in free land.
Growing up in Calgary, I presumed that the greatest challenge was putting the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) through the mountains. And it is true that the most spectacular scenery on the route is the Fraser Canyon and the mountains of the Yellowhead Pass. (The Canadian now travels the northern route of the Canadian National (CN) Railway, not the original southern route of the CPR.)
Yet it was the Canadian Shield, thousands of lakes and muskeg atop the hardest rock on earth, that was the real obstacle. John Palliser, one of the 1860s expeditioners between Thunder Bay and the Rockies, reported back that while getting through the mountain passes could be done, the impenetrable land north of Lake Superior was the insuperable problem. And without getting around the Shield, Canada would be constrained, cooped up, with the prairies and mountains and west coast inaccessible.
VIA dome observation car on The Canadian in 2007. The best views are available from the domed seating on the upper level.
Photo by Savannah Grandfather via Wikimedia.
I’d always hoped to travel The Canadian at some point, but I was never able to afford the tickets at the same time that I had available time to travel, and there’s no hope I’ll ever be able to scrape up the money these days. According to VIA Rail’s website, the trip from Toronto to Vancouver would be between C$5860 to $9460 per person.
The Julio-Claudians – The Conquered and the Proud 15
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 26 Feb 2025This time we take a look at the reigns of Augustus’ successors — Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius and Nero, referred to collectively by scholars as the Julio-Claudian dynasty. We think about the whole question of the succession, and trace how each diverged from Augustus when it came to the style of governing.
QotD: The accumulated friction of bureaucratic growth
[…] In the early Republic, raising a legion was as simple as a patrician calling his clients to service, or the Senate issuing a conscription decree. One task: the summoning of free men, with their own equipment, and there you go — Legio I Hypothetica.
By the late Empire, though, all those freeholds had been turned into slave-worked Latifundia, so the effort of raising a legion increased enormously. Now the bureaucracy had to go out and hire freemen (if it could even find them), equip them at State expense, train them (again at State expense), and so on. In itself, the number of tasks isn’t that large — we’ve identified three — and they only increase at the rate of n+1.
But the effort each task requires increases to the power of n, such that if you could somehow express the effort expended in physical terms — joules or kilowatts or whatever — you’d see that the creation of Legio I Hypothetica under Scipio Africanus took 10 kilowatts, while raising the same legion under Diocletian took 10,000,000.
This isn’t (just) corruption. Sure, everyone at every level of the Imperial Bureaucracy was getting his beak wet, that goes without saying, but it’s the nature of bureaucracy itself that’s most to blame.
Severian, “Collapse II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-09.
July 25, 2025
The Royal Canadian Navy announces eight of the Kingston-class ships will be retired this year
The Kingston-class Maritime Coastal Defence Vessel (MCDV) has been in RCN service starting in the mid-1990s and they’ve apparently done well for the navy in their intended role. Unfortunately, naval ships have a normal working life expectancy of 20-30 years, and the Kingstons are at the upper end of that range, so it’s not surprising that they will be taken out of service. It is a bit of a surprise that the announcement came on Thursday and two-thirds of the class will be paid off this fall, without a direct successor class of ships on the slipways:
The Kingston-class Maritme Coastal Defence Vessel (MCDV) HMCS Moncton in Baltimore harbour for Sailabration 2012.
Photo by Acroterion via Wikimedia Commons.
Starting this fall the Royal Canadian Navy will begin divesting of the Kingston-class vessels. Eight of the Kingston will be divested while four, Moncton, Yellowknife, Edmonton, and Nanaimo will remain in service for the time being.
Formal ceremonies will take place in Halifax for Shawinigan, Summerside, Goose Bay, Glace Bay and Kingston. Ceremonies in Esquimalt, B.C. will be held for Saskatoon, Whitehorse and Brandon.
The remaining four will be divested over the next three years:
- Yellowknife in 2026
- Edmonton in 2027
- Moncton and Nanaimo in 2028.
The duties of the Kingstons will be transferred to other vessels in the fleet. The AOPS have already taken over the OP CARRIBE and Patrol roles the last few years, while training duties will be moved fully to the Orca [class].
The new Remote Minehunting and Disposal Systems, being containerized can theoretically be deployed on any available vessel, and will be another role taken by the AOPS and the Kingston divest. They’ve already been doing MCM testing so that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
The remaining four Kingstons will likely continue to participate on things like OP REASSURANCE, which Yellowknife and Edmonton are currently deployed on until October as part of SNMCMG1.
In basic terms the AOPS will be taking over a majority of the Kingston‘s tasks, which they have been slowly adding to their belt already. To say there hasn’t been a slow transition would be ignorant of me.
Nor is this surprising. We knew this was coming. Its been an open discussion for a while. I expected we would hear something this year about the divestment plan, however I didn’t expect eight to be paid off right away.
That comes as a surprise to me, also dropping it out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting this to come at this time, so this is a rare moment of genuine shock for me. Of course the Kingston fleet isn’t in the greatest of shape.
Several haven’t sailed in years (I believe Whitehorse is on almost five?) and the decision to not do another refit was basically the death blow to the class as a whole.
Things get harder before they get better. It is better to divest now and have people available for the platforms that are working and in greater need than it is to try and stretch the Kingstons for a few extra years, nor was it deemed worth the ever-increasing cost to keep them in service.
The Kingstons will be replaced by the future Continental Defence Corvette. I expect as the fall comes that we will be hearing more publicly about the project. I was a bit surprised they didn’t bring it up in the Press Release given it’s not exactly a secret, although it was teased a bit.
Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship (AOPS) HMCS Harry DeWolf shortly after launch in 2018. The ship was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy in June, 2021.
Autism, then and now
At Psychobabble, Hannah Spier traces the rise of autism from its first formal definition to something that 1 in 36 kids is diagnosed with:
When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group.
From experts, instead of raised alarms or calls for serious public health investigation (as would be expected for any other childhood disorder) we get calls for inclusivity and a self-congratulatory attitude toward their advancement in diagnostic understanding and tools. Another example of ideological capture of psychiatry by cultural sentiment.
Characters like Sheldon Cooper and Sherlock Holmes have helped turn the image of autism into a badge of honour. It means you’re socially odd, intellectually superior, and emotionally detached in an edgy and endearing way. For many, especially mothers with narcissistic tendencies hungry for a narrative of exceptionalism, this offered a seductive reframing of their child’s misbehaviour and non-conformity as evidence of giftedness. She could thus become the one who gave birth to the quirky but special genius. She alone saw the hidden brilliance beneath the “weird” behaviour. She became the martyr and the insider to an elite subculture. It’s Munchausen by proxy, 2025 edition.
People with narcissism and psychopathic traits exploit wherever they can, we know this. And yet again, psychiatry, the ones who should be the best at recognizing these, made it easy pickings by flinging the diagnostic gates wide open. Longtime readers will recognize the pattern: I’ve written before about the diagnostic creep in trauma, expanding definitions that blur the line between disorder and ordinary variation. The same diagnostic creep has unfolded here. Autism, once narrowly defined, was steadily loosened through each revision of the DSM.
The Great Diagnostic Expansion
Originally, Kanner’s autism was unmistakable: nonverbal children, socially disconnected, cognitively impaired, often with seizures. These were not quirky introverts. These were children who required full-time care and specialized schooling. In the DSM-III of the 1980s, it was called infantile autism. The criteria required clear onset before 30 months, marked language delays, gross deficits in social interaction, and repetitive behaviours. These were developmental dysfunctions, not misunderstood personalities. And neither clinicians nor parents had a problem naming them as such.
Then came the DSM-III-R in 1987, which introduced pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and broadened the field significantly. Suddenly, language delay and intellectual disability were no longer central. Subclinical cases were included. Asperger’s Syndrome followed in the DSM-IV in 1994, adding high-IQ individuals with no language delays but poor social functioning. A child who spoke on time but didn’t understand jokes, had poor eye contact, and rigid routines was now also autistic.
But the most dramatic change came with DSM-5 in 2013. The subtypes were eliminated. Autism became one spectrum. The criteria were thinned down to two domains: social communication difficulties and restrictive, repetitive behaviours. A person needed to meet just six out of twelve traits, spread across these two clusters. Language and cognitive delay? Optional. Even the requirement for early onset was removed. A diagnosis could now be given based on historical symptoms. Questionnaires like the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) are so broad and subjective they can be easily gamed. This made it possible for 30-year-olds to recall feeling “socially overwhelmed” in school and not liking itchy clothing to receive the same diagnosis as a nonverbal child requiring lifelong care.
The diagnostic category has become a black hole, pulling in people with no clinical resemblance, collapsing distinction into sameness. From what I’ve observed, three distinct autism “patients” now account for much of the increased prevalence, none of whom would have qualified under the original criteria.
The ongoing conflict in Gaza
On his Substack, John Spencer responds to a New York Times op-ed that claims Israeli forces in Gaza are engaged in genocide:
In his New York Times op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It“, Omer Bartov accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As a professor of genocide studies, he should know better. Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media. It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. That is a high legal bar. Bartov did not meet it. He did not even try.
I am not a lawyer or a political activist. I am a war expert. I have led soldiers in combat. I have trained military units in urban warfare for decades and studied and taught military history, strategy, and the laws of war for years. Since October 7, I have been to Gaza four times embedded with the Israel Defense Forces. I have interviewed the Prime Minister of Israel, the Defense Minister, the IDF Chief of Staff, Southern Command leadership, and dozens of commanders and soldiers on the front lines. I have reviewed their orders, watched their targeting process, and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians. Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent.
Bartov claims that five statements by Israeli leaders prove genocidal intent. He begins with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on October 7 that Hamas would “pay a huge price”. That is not a call for genocide. It is what any leader would say after the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history. He also cites Netanyahu’s statements that Hamas would be destroyed and that civilians should evacuate combat zones. That is not evidence of a desire to destroy a people. It is what professional militaries do when fighting an enemy that hides among civilians.
Bartov presents Netanyahu’s reference to “remember Amalek” as a smoking gun. But this is a phrase from Jewish history and tradition. It is engraved at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and also appears on the Holocaust memorial in The Hague. In both places, it serves as a warning to remain vigilant against threats, not as a call for mass killing.
He also highlights Defense Minister Gallant’s use of the term “human animals” to describe Hamas fighters. That is not a war crime. After the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians on October 7, many would understand or even share that reaction.
Unable to find intent among those actually directing the war, Bartov turns to far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Nissim Vaturi. These individuals do not command troops, issue orders, or shape battlefield decisions. I have studied the actual orders. They focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible. Their rhetoric is irrelevant to the legal case.
Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.
Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad.
How to make square stock straight, smooth and square (stock preparation part 1) | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 8 Apr 2013Paul Sellers shows how to prepare wood from its rough sawn state into useable stock. He goes into detail about how to remove twist from a square piece of wood and make it “four square”. He does all of this with hand tools. Specifically the plane, square and winding sticks. The video was first posted on https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com
To find out more about Paul Sellers and the projects he is involved with go to http://paulsellers.com
QotD: Evolved threat display mechanisms
Animals, especially predators, are all pretty good at risk assessment. I’m absolutely certain, as an enthusiastic student of evolution, that dinosaurs had different kinds of threat display mechanisms, too. Maybe even trilobites. They do their thing and they stay alive.
On the other hand, just suppose you’re walking down a badly-lit sidewalk in any town or city in this or practically any other country, when you’re suddenly approached by half a dozen tough-looking young punks. They could be a murderous gang of thugs out to “make their bones” or just the local hockey team. But if you pull out your 6 1/2 inch nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum, and simply hold it down beside your leg, you could be arrested for “brandishing” and your attractive, shiny, valuable weapon stolen from you by sticky-fingered cops.
When it comes to threat display — which could save your life as well as the lives of those who make you feel uneasy — you don’t have the rights of a lowly blow-fish. The insanity of ignorant government pencil-necks forbidding four billion year old violence-reducing behavior cannot be overstated.
L. Neil Smith, “Maybe Even Trilobites”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-10-14.
July 24, 2025
The vicious competition for Indian civil service jobs
Once upon a time in most of the Anglosphere, the advantage of civil service jobs was that they were nearly impossible to get fired from and had a relatively good pension at the end of a long career. Private sector jobs were far less permanent, but paid more, had better benefits, and more prestige. Over the last fifty years, little of that is still true — civil servants still have fantastic job security, but they’re also better paid, have better benefits, and for many there are opportunities to retire and get re-hired back into a similar position with even higher pay while collecting a generous pension. The private sector no longer pays better nor offers significantly better benefits, so lots of people look to get into the civil service who once would have shunned positions like that.
It’s apparently much worse in India:
In India, government jobs pay far more than equivalent jobs in the private sector — so much so that the entire labor market and educational system have become grossly distorted by rent-seeking to obtain these jobs. Teachers in the public sector, for example, are paid at least five times more than in the private sector. It’s not just the salary. When accounting for lifetime tenure, generous perks, and potentially remunerative possibilities for corruption, a government job’s total value can be up to 10 times that of an equivalent private sector job. (See also here.)
As a result, it’s not uncommon for thousands of people to apply for every government job — a ratio far higher than in the private sector. In one famous example, 2.3 million people submitted applications for 368 “office boy” positions in Uttar Pradesh.
The consequences of this intense competition for government jobs are severe. First, as Karthik Muralildharan argues, the Indian government can’t afford to pay for all the workers it needs. India has all the laws of, say, the United States, but about one-fifth the number of government workers per capita, leading to low state capacity.
But there is a second problem which may be even more serious. Competition to obtain government jobs wastes tremendous amounts of resources and distorts the labor and educational market.
If jobs were allocated randomly, applications would be like lottery tickets, with few social costs. Government jobs, however, are often allocated by exam performance. Thus, obtaining a government job requires an “investment” in exam preparation. Many young people spend years out of the workforce studying for exams that, for nearly all of them, will yield nothing. In Tamil Nadu alone, between one to two million people apply annually for government jobs, but far fewer than 1% are hired. Despite the long odds, the rewards are so large that applicants leave the workforce to compete. Kunal Mangal estimates that around 80% of the unemployed in Tamil Nadu are studying for government exams.
Classical rent-seeking logic predicts full dissipation: if a prize is worth a certain amount, rational individuals will collectively spend resources up to that amount attempting to win it. When the prize is a government job, the “spending” is not cash, but years of a young person’s productive life. Mangal calculates that the total opportunity cost (time out of the workforce) that job applicants “spend” in Tamil Nadu is worth more than the combined lifetime salaries of the available jobs (recall that jobs are worth more than salaries, so this is consistent with theory). Simply put, for every ₹100 the government spends on salaries, Indian society burns ₹168 in a collective effort of rent-seeking just to decide who gets them.
The winners are happy but the loss to Indian society — of unemployed young, educated workers who do nothing but study for government exams — is in the billions. Indeed, India spends about 3.86% of GDP on state salaries (27% of state revenues times 14.3% of GDP). If we take Mangal’s numbers from Tamil Nadu, a conservative (multiplier of 1 instead of 1.68) back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that India could be wasting on the order of 1.4% of GDP annually on rent-seeking. (Multiply 3.86% of GDP by 15 (30 years at 5% discount) to get lifetime value, and take 0.025 as annual worker turnover.) Take this with a grain of salt, but regardless, the number is large.
SNK – The Me210 – An Ode To the Best Fighter of the War*
HardThrasher
Published 23 Jul 2025* fighter may actually be rubbish
References
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1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_…
2 https://planehistoria.com/hawker-typh…
3 https://www.historynet.com/why-britai…
4 The Development of French Interwar Bombers…
5 The Bombing War, Overy, 2012, p.200
6 p1, Profile 161, The Messerschmitt Me210/410 Series, Smith
7 p.43, Chpt 6, The Me210/410 Story, Jan Forsgren, Fonthill Media, 2019
8 The B-29 Turret System: An Expensive, Effe… – Alexander OK’s B-29 Video
9 p.43 The Me210/410 Story, Jan Forsgren, Fonthill Media, 2019
10 Ibid p.74
11 Ibid p.53
12 Ibid p.58
13 Ibid p.65-67
14 Ibid P.78 -85
15 Ibid p.231
16 The Bomber War, Robert Overy, 2012 p.203
17 Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer, 1970, Simon & Schauster (reprint Touchstone, 1997)
18 p. 175 The Me210/410 Story, Jan Forsgren, Fonthill Media, 2019Cars For Ukraine – https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/sum…
When tolerance becomes a fatal flaw
At The Crescent and the Guillotine, Paul Friesen explains why too much tolerance leads to the eventual collapse of social order and perhaps even the culture itself:
It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.
It was Karl Popper who warned that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, or it would cease to be tolerant at all.1 A delicious paradox, too often quoted and too rarely heeded. For we have taken the first half of the dictum — the imperative to tolerate — and chiseled it into law, into policy, into university mission statements and NGO pamphlets. But the second half — the requirement to draw a line, to say “no further” — has been treated like garlic in a vampire movie: an antique, anathema, unfashionable.
And so, the paradox has become pathology.
Our courts allow sharia arbitration councils to function in British cities, adjudicating matters of family and inheritance with standards that would make a 12th-century canon lawyer flinch. Our schools include faith-based curricula that require hijabs for seven-year-olds and teach that homosexuality is satanic filth. Our public broadcasters will air a documentary about the importance of free speech, followed immediately by a segment about why cartoons of Muhammad are “unhelpful”.
This is not multiculturalism. It is masochism. It is the belief that liberalism must be so open-minded that its own brains are spilled onto the prayer mat. It is the fetishization of identity at the expense of liberty. It is the ideological pacifism of a society too terrified to assert its own values, lest it be accused of “racism” by those who mistake ideology for ethnicity.
We have enshrined the rights of the theocrat while criminalizing the instincts of the secularist. The result is not harmony — it is humiliation.
[…]
The West’s greatest achievement is not democracy, nor capitalism, nor even the separation of powers. It is the separation of truth from tribalism — the idea that individuals are not to be judged by their creeds, but by their conduct. That women are not property. That speech is not violence. That blasphemy is a right, not a crime.
These are not Western values. They are universal values, discovered in the West by accident of history and preserved through blood, rebellion, and satire. They are the principles that allowed Jews, heretics, atheists, and apostates to live not just safely, but freely. And they are now under threat — from within.
The real problem is not Islam. It is the Western inability to demand anything of those who import their gods and their grievances into liberal society. We treat every imported superstition as sacrosanct and every local tradition as suspect. We require ex-Muslims to whisper their fears while we amplify the complaints of veiled Islamists who denounce our culture from our own podiums.
We are not being pluralistic. We are being duped.
And the cost of this self-deception is measured not just in freedoms surrendered, but in lives lost.
Lives like that of Yameen Rasheed, the secular Maldivian blogger who thought he could use satire to push back against theocracy — stabbed to death in his own hallway. Lives like that of Farkhunda Malikzada, beaten and burned in the streets of Kabul by a mob of men — because someone thought she burned a Qur’an. Lives like that of Samuel Paty, beheaded outside a French school by a refugee he welcomed — because he dared to show a cartoon in a civics class.
These are not random tragedies. They are the predictable outcomes of an ideological toxin given immunity in the bloodstream of liberal society.
What do all these victims have in common? They did not die at the hands of misunderstood minorities or “oppressed voices” who simply needed better integration programs. They died at the hands of men who were indoctrinated — sometimes abroad, often at home — with the idea that God’s honor is more valuable than human life, and that dissent is not to be debated but extinguished.
And more damning still: they died in environments that should have protected them. Environments that instead prioritized sensitivity over security, dialogue over clarity, understanding over justice. Environments where the ever-watchful eye of diversity officers and DEI consultants was trained, not on the assailants, but on the tone of the victims.
We have created a culture where courage is pathologized, clarity is punished, and moral equivalence is the new orthodoxy. When Islamist mobs swarm the streets chanting slogans that would make the Inquisition blush, we are told to “listen to their anger”. When feminists protest the veiling of children, they are told to “respect cultural differences”. When Jews complain about chants of “From the River to the Sea”, they are informed that they are “overreacting”, “weaponizing trauma”, or — most insultingly of all — “confusing Zionism with antisemitism”.
This is not inclusivity. It is assisted suicide.
1. I refer here to Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, specifically in Volume 1: The Spell of Plato, Note 4 to Chapter 7. Here’s the relevant passage, paraphrased for clarity:
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Popper argues that a tolerant society has the right — not to suppress opinions — but to defend itself against those who would destroy tolerance itself, especially if such groups refuse to engage in rational discourse and instead promote violence or coercion. It’s often called “the paradox of tolerance“.
Glock 18 & 18C Machine Pistols: How Do They Work?
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Mar 2025After the success of the Glock 17 in Austrian military trials, the company chose two specific markets to target for expansion. One was competition shooters, for whom the Glock 17L was released. The other was the international law enforcement and military market, for whom they decided to make a machine pistol — the Glock 18. The 18 was released in 1986, a model identical to the 17 except for the addition of a rotary selector switch on the slide.
In response to complaints about the controllability of the Glock 18, the 18C (Compensated) was released in 1996. This was a new model which added four barrel ports and a lightened slide to the 18. Neither has ever been really successful simply because machine pistols are by their very nature not very practical.
The question we are going to look at today is how the Glock 18 system works. As one would expect from Glock, it is a quite simply mechanical change to the semiauto lockwork.
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