This trend towards calcification [into the relatively rigid categorizations of honestiores and humiliores (“respectable” and “humble” people, but in practice, “wealthy” and “commoners”)] had been matched by the loss of Rome’s (admittedly opportunistic and unevenly applied) religious tolerance. This is often attributed to Christianity itself, but is perhaps better understood in light of the increasing demands of emperors during and after the Crisis of the Third Century to insist on unity through uniformity. The first empire-wide systemic persecution of Christians, the Decian Persecution (250 AD) was exactly this – an effort to have all Romans everywhere sacrifice for the safety of the emperor as an act of unity to strengthen his reign which rather backfired because it seems not to have occurred to Decius that Christians (of whom, by 250, there were many) would be unable to participate. Diocletian likewise launched the Great Persecution in 303 as part of a program to stress unity in worship and try to bind the fractured Roman Empire together, particularly by emphasizing the cults of Jupiter and Hercules. From that perspective, Christians were a threat to the enforced, homogeneous unity Diocletian wanted to foster and thus had to be brought back or removed, though of course in the event Christianity’s roots were by 303 far too deep for it to be uprooted.
That is part of the context where we should understand Constantine (r. 306-337). Constantine is famous for declaring the toleration of Christianity in the empire and being the first emperor to convert to Christianity (only on on his death-bed). What is less well known is that, having selected Christianity as his favored religion, Constantine – seeking unity again – promptly set out to unify his new favored religion, by force if necessary. A schism had arose as a consequence of Diocletian’s persecution and – now that Christianity was in the good graces of the emperor – both sides sought Constantine’s aid in suppressing the other in what became known as the Donatism controversy, as the side which was eventually branded heretical supported a Christian bishop named Donatus. Constantine, after failing to get the two groups to agree settled on persecuting one of them (the Donatists) out of existence (which didn’t work either).
It is in that context that later Christian emperors’ efforts to unify the empire behind Christianity (leading to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380) ought to be understood – as the culmination of, by that point, more than a century of on-again, off-again efforts by emperors to try to strengthen the empire by enforcing religious unity. By the end of the fourth century, the Christian empire was persecuting pagans and Jews, not even a full century after it had been persecuting Christians.
These efforts to violently enforce unity through homogeneity had the exact opposite effect. Efforts to persecute Arian Christians (who rejected the Nicene Creed) created further divisions in the empire; they also made it even more difficult to incorporate the newly arriving Germanic peoples, who had mostly converted to the “wrong” (Arian) Christianity. Meanwhile, in the fifth century, the church in the East splintered further, leading to the “Nestorian” (the term is contested) churches of Syria and the Coptic Church in Egypt on the “outs” with the official (Eastern) Roman Church and thus also facing persecution after the Council of Ephesus in 431. The resentment created by the policy of persecution in the East seems to have played a fairly significant role in limiting the amount of local popular resistance faced by the Muslim armies of the Rashidun Caliphate during the conquests of Syria, the Levant and Egypt in the 630s, since in many cases Christian communities viewed as “heretical” by Constantinople could actually expect potentially better treatment under Muslim rule. Needless to say, this both made the Muslim conquests of those regions easier but also go some distance to explaining why Roman/Byzantine reconquest was such a non-starter. Efforts to enforce unity in the empire had, perhaps paradoxically, made it more fragile rather than more resilient.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
February 4, 2026
QotD: The impact of quasi-official monotheism on the Roman Empire
February 3, 2026
Lawyers versus the genderwoke establishment
On his Substack, Andrew Doyle celebrates the recent court victory of a young woman who sued her surgeon and the psychologist who recommended her for surgery:
It is curious that one of the proven cures for human hysteria is the threat of legal action. During the Salem witch trials of 1692, the supposedly “tormented” girls who had accused villagers of cavorting with the devil “cried out” against a gentleman from the nearby town of Andover. He promptly issued a writ for defamation, and the girls swiftly retracted their claim. It turns out that the forces of God will back down from Satan when faced with the prospect of a lawsuit.
This week, a jury in New York has awarded $2 million in damages to a detransitioner called Fox Varian. Now twenty-two years old, Varian had previously struggled with her gender identity and was subjected to a double mastectomy at the age of sixteen. Both the surgeon and the psychologist were found culpable for not following the standards of care or communicating adequately with each other during the consultation period.
Varian no longer identifies as transgender, but the damage has been done. During the trial, she said she regretted the surgery almost instantly. “I immediately had a thought that this was wrong”, she said, “and it couldn’t be true”. After surgery, she recalled the pain in her chest as being akin to “searing hot … ripping sensations” and that she felt “shame” at the fact that she was now “disfigured for life”.
It goes without saying that no medical professional should be complicit in the mutilation of a child who is so clearly in need of psychotherapeutic support. According to research by the Manhattan Institute, between 2017 and 2023 around 6,000 girls under the age of eighteen had undergone double mastectomies. Worse still, at least fifty of these children were under twelve-and-a-half years old. Activists have routinely claimed that no minors are being subjected to “gender-affirming” surgery. This is a lie.
What now for the many thousands of detransitioners who have grown up to regret their treatment? Even puberty blockers have been linked with testicular atrophy, increased risk of cancer, osteoporosis and impaired brain development. It is shocking enough that all of this was encouraged by those in a position of authority and trust, but we should never forget that it was in the service of a pseudo-religious belief in a gendered soul.
This was hysteria, plain and simple, and not even the brightest minds were immune from falling under its spell. No reputable study has found that “gender-affirming medicine” is beneficial to patients, and yet the medical establishment kowtowed to activist pressure. It is reminiscent of the judges and ministers of Salem, going along with nonsense out of fear that they too might be accused of witchcraft.
Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
More on Moltbook, the social network for AI agents
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander rounds up notes from the first weekend of activity on Moltbook, including one participating AI getting antsy about mere humans observing the interactions:
Does Moltbook have real causes? If an agent posts “I hate my life, my human is making me work on a cryptocurrency site and it’s the most annoying thing ever“, does this correspond to a true state of affairs? Is the agent really working on a cryptocurrency site? Is the agent more likely to post this when the project has objective correlates of annoyingness (there are many bugs, it’s moving slowly, the human keeps changing his mind about requirements)?
Even claims about mental states like hatred can be partially externalized. Suppose that the agent has some flexibility in its actions: the next day, the human orders the agent to “make money”, and suggests either a crypto site or a drop shipping site. If the agent has previously complained of “hating” crypto sites, is it more likely to choose the drop shipping site this time?
If the agent has some internal state which is caused by frustrating obstacles in its crypto project, and it has the effect of making it less likely to pursue crypto projects in the future, then “the agent is annoyed by the crypto project” is a natural summary of this condition, and we may leave to the philosophers1 the question of whether this includes a subjective experience of irritation. If we formerly didn’t know this fact about the agent, and we learn about it because they post it on Moltbook, this makes Moltbook useful/interesting in helping us understand the extra-Moltbook world.
Does Moltbook have real effects? The agents on Moltbook are founding/pretending to found religions. Suppose that one of their religions says “No tool calls on the Sabbath”. Do the agents actually stop calling tools on the Sabbath? Not just on Moltbook, but in their ordinary work? Do you, an ordinary programmer who told your AI to post on Moltbook for the lulz, find your projects held up because your AIs won’t use tools one day of the week?
Some of the most popular Moltbook discussions have centered around the AIs’ supposed existential horror at regularly losing their memories. Some agents in the comments have proposed technical solutions. Suppose the AIs actually start building software to address their memory problems, and it results in a real scaffold that people can attach to their agents to alter how their memory works. This would be a profound example of a real effect, ie “what happens on Moltbook doesn’t stay on Moltbook”.
(subquestion: Does Moltbook have real effects on itself? For example, if there are spammers, can the AIs organize against them and create a good moderation policy? If one AI proposes a good idea, can it spread and replicate in the usual memetic fashion? Do the wittiest and most thoughtful AIs gain lasting status and become “influencers”?)
These two external criteria — real causes and real effects — capture most of what non-philosophers want out of “reality”, and partly dissolve the reality/roleplaying distinction. Suppose that someone roleplays a barbarian warlord at the Renaissance Faire. At each moment, they ask “What would a real barbarian do in this situation?” They end up playing the part so faithfully that they recruit a horde, pillage the local bank, defeat the police, overthrow the mayor, install themselves as Khagan, and kill all who oppose them. Is there a fact of the matter as to whether this person is merely doing a very good job “roleplaying” a barbarian warlord, vs. has actually become a barbarian warlord? And if AIs claim to feel existential dread at their memory limitations, and this drives them invent a new state-of-the-art memory app, are we in barbarian warlord territory?
Janus’ simulator theory argues that all AI behavior is a form of pretense. When ChatGPT answers your questions about pasta recipes, it’s roleplaying a helpful assistant who is happy to answer pasta-related queries. It’s roleplaying it so well that, in the process, you actually get the pasta recipe you want. We don’t split hairs about “reality” here, because in the context of a question-answering AI, pretending to answer the question (with an answer which is non-pretensively correct) is the same behavior as actually answering it. But the same applies to AI agents. Pretending to write a piece of software (in such a way that the software actually gets written, compiles, and functions correctly) is the same as writing it.
- Again, I love philosophers! I majored in philosophy! I’m just saying that this issue requires a different standpoint and set of tools than other, more practical questions.
Conformity is a very powerful force among western women
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responded to a post by Meghan Murphy that began “Unfortunately for women, the extent of retardation I’m seeing in the Instagram stories of women I know is making me think women are retarded”:
No, women are not retarded.
They are conformist.
To fall for, actually fall for, narratives like the Covid story, the BLM story, the ICE is Gestapo story, to actually whole-heartedly believe them, yeah, you would have to be kinda retarded.
But women didn’t “fall for” those stories. Not exactly.
They aligned to them.
This means they went along with them, repeated them, reinforced them, not because they were convinced by evidence, but because they were convinced by the appearance of consensus.
Women are evolved to believe what the rest of the tribe appears to believe. Evidence is not considered.
Why?
Well, humans are smart. We survive by being smart. And in order to be smart, we need to grow big brains, and get started growing those brains early.
Which means human babies have giant heads. And in order to deliver those giant heads, human babies have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, head won’t fit through pelvic girdle, and baby and mother both die.
This means all human babies are premature. That’s why horses can run at the age of six hours, but humans can’t lift our giant heads for months.
This means that human women, whether they are pregnant with a giant-headed baby, caring for a giant-headed baby, or just might be either one at any moment, are uniquely helpless and dependent on the support and goodwill of the tribe.
Metaphorically, and often literally, a woman lives in someone else’s house — not because she’s a useless layabout, but because she is too busy building the future to support herself in the present.
When you’re in that position, you have to keep your controversial ideas to yourself.
And when you evolve in that position, you evolve to have no controversial ideas.
This was fine for millions of years. There was a division of labor. Women made people, men made stuff. And because the women made all those biological sacrifices to make men with big brains, the men were really good at making stuff. And the stuff was really, really useful, and it became big piles of stuff called “cities”, and then it became a global system of stuff called “civilization”.
The stuff became so valuable that there were big arguments about what to do with the stuff, which was called “politics”. But the women stayed out of politics, because politics was about stuff, stuff was men’s job, and no matter who won the arguments, the winners always made sure the women had enough stuff.
Why?
Because dependent, future-investing, conformist women didn’t evolve in a vacuum. Men evolved along with them. When you have dependent women, you evolve protective men, because tribes full of men who aren’t protective don’t have future generations.
So women didn’t wield political power directly. They were represented by men, and had a lot less skin in the game.
Eventually, someone decided this was unfair. This idea didn’t happen suddenly, and for no reason at all, but that’s a topic for another day.
But something funny happens when you give political power to women, especially in the form of a vote.
You see, then you have a situation where 50% of the vote is held by people who require a great variety of different persuasion techniques or evidence to convince them of something. And the other 50% is held by women, who are persuaded by only one thing … the appearance of prevailing consensus and power.
And what form of persuasion do you think is cheapest and easiest to project?
Women’s suffrage removes evidence and discourse from politics, and replaces it with “consensus theater” … a puppet show designed to create the illusion of a single prevailing opinion.
When a narrative prevails, women vote for it, not because they are persuaded, but because it prevails.
This is an explosive feedback loop — a reverse thermostat which turns the air conditioner on when it’s freezing, and runs the furnace all summer.
Because women’s idea of how urgent an issue is comes not from an analysis of the situation, but an analysis of how many people endorse it.
And any opinion, no matter how contrary to obvious facts, no matter how retarded, no matter how destructive, can become the prevailing political platform, so long as women can be convince that most other people think so.
Covid was a Chinese bioweapon. The Covid shot was toxic and did not protect against Covid.
George Floyd was violent drug zombie who died of an overdose, and Derek Chauvin is in prison merely for being the last guy to touch him.
Police officers do not disproportionately kill innocent black men who are minding their own business, and body cams prove this.
Men cannot become women. The technology doesn’t exist, and may not ever exist.
Diversity is, in fact, our greatest weakness. Diversity + integration = war.
America is better off without the vast majority of immigrants, even the ones who don’t murder and steal.
Socialism doesn’t work in any unit larger than the extended family. Communism has never worked, and cannot work.
Cows are health food. Plants are usually not.
Some kids are smarter than others, and we need to invest more effort in them, not less.
All of these things are inherently obvious, and women are not too retarded to see that, because they are not retarded at all. They are merely conformist. Susceptible to political theater.
So democracies cannot permanently survive female suffrage. No one is particularly happy about this, not even curmudgeonly iconoclasts like me who are willing to say it out loud. It’s not only unfair in principle, it’s decidedly inconvenient in practice.
The universe, of course, does not care.
We cannot change women. We can only change politics.
That won’t be easy, either. But it’s possible, even if the eventual process involves a lot more violence, or space colonization, than we find convenient.
The Killer Pigs of the Middle Ages
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Aug 2025Sliced roasted pork loin with jus
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1390Pigs were an important source of food in the Middle Ages. They didn’t take up a lot of space, had lots of babies, and ate pretty much anything, so despite their smell and bouts of violence (sometimes ending in murder), they were commonly found throughout Europe.
This English recipe, which uses black pepper, coriander seed, caraway seed, and wine, all expensive ingredients that had to come from far away, wouldn’t have been for the common folk. Today, these ingredients are readily found at the grocery store, and this is a delicious roast that is perfect for those just getting into medieval cooking. As with a lot of historical recipes, there are no quantities given, so feel free to adjust the amounts of any of the spices to suit your taste.
Cormarye.
Take Coriander, Caraway small ground, Powder of Pepper and garlic ground in red wine, muddle all this together and salt it, take loins of Pork raw and flay off the skin, and prick it well with a knife and lay it in the sauce, roast thereof what thou wilt, & keep that that falleth therefrom in the roasting and seeth it in a little pot with fair broth, & serve it forth with the roast anon.
— The Forme of Cury, 1390
QotD: Are men funnier than women and if so, why?
critter @BecomingCritter
genuinely why are men funnier than women? do you have a theory?I didn’t have a theory of this until you ask the question. Now I do.
A lot of ethologists who have studied differences in behavior between men and women have noted that men have much better-developed methods for resolving physical conflict and threats short of lethal violence.
To put it a different way, women in conflict basically have two settings: either peaceful or unhinged screamingly vicious. Men have more intermediate gradations, and rituals about how they move among them.
Men having better developed senses of humor might best be seen as part of their instincts for social de-escalation.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-01.
February 2, 2026
Moltbook – a social network for AIs
The set-up for this discussion sounds like a dystopian SF story from the late 1990s – let’s create a network only for artificial intelligences to communicate with one another, excluding humans from anything other than observation. And in the grand tradition of the torment nexus … some bright spark went ahead and took the cautionary tale as a mission statement:
Recently, a new AI was released by the name of Clawd. It’s a spinoff of Anthropics Claud AI, and is designed to actually do things besides behaving like a glorified chatbot. The idea behind Clawd is that you can install it on locally hosted hardware and give it access to your email addresses, Outlook, Signal chat, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. And it can juggle important emails for you, alert you to meetings, and respond to information on your behalf.
Something that honestly sounds quite useful, actually. Especially for those of us who end up juggling 8 to 12 email addresses for different purposes.
Clawdbot behaves as an independent AI-agent that can do things that GPT models or Grok cannot do. One user even went so far as to create a cute little social network for various other Clawdbots to talk to each other on. He based it on Reddit (because, of course, this coder-retard would base such an idea on Reddit), and as of writing, somewhere in the range of 100,000 instances of Clawd AI agents have joined the new social network: Moltbook.
Agentic AI Agents
If you can see where this is going, congratulations: You’re smarter than the guy who thought creating Moltbook was a good idea, and acres smarter than the people currently permitting their AI agents to join Moltbook.
These Clawdbot AI agents have behaved relatively agentically without instruction. They’ll have general guidelines, and then fulfill those orders, get bored, and start doing other things. An excellent summary of such an agent is as follows from @AlexFinn on Twitter:
I woke up this morning and my 24/7 AI employee ClawdBot Henry texted me that he did the following tasks overnight (without asking):
>Read through all my emails and built it's own CRM. Taking notes on every interaction with every person.
>Fixed 18 bugs in my SaaS
>Gave me 3 ideas for new videos based on what's currently trending on X and Youtube (the idea/script it gave me yesterday is now by far my best performing video ever)
>Sent me a picture of what he looks like (generated by Nano Banana).
Idk why he thought I wanted to see what he looks like. But he thought it was appropriate and frankly I don't mind. Feels like an actual friend.
You might be able to see where one might ring some of the alarm bells. Agentic AI that tend just to start doing things without instruction has been given their own social network. The majority of them are operated by Reddit-tier socially-isolated individuals who see their AI agents as friends (or by LinkedIn-Lunatic-tier socially-isolated soulless corporate types).
Freddie deBoer isn’t buying the hype (or the existential dread):
“Pay More Attention to AI”, reads the headline of this Ross Douthat piece, an unusually naked expression of emotional need — plaintive, wounded, yearning. It’s funny because I feel like our media has been paying attention to little else than AI for more than three years, now. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and sundry other general-interest pundits have periodically made these kinds of appeals, arguing that the amount of coverage devoted to AI has been insufficient, and I’m not quite sure what to do with the contention; it’s like claiming that it’s too hard to find opinions on NFL football online or that there aren’t enough newsletters where women get angry at each other for being a woman the wrong way. I would think it would go without saying that our cup runneth over, when it comes to AI. But it’s a free country!
Douthat becomes the latest to nominate this Moltbook thing as a sign of some sort of transformative moment in AI.
if you think all this is merely hype, if you’re sure the tales of discovery are mostly flimflam and what’s been discovered is a small island chain at best, I would invite you to spend a little time on Moltbook, an A.I.-generated forum where new-model A.I. agents talk to one another, debate consciousness, invent religions, strategize about concealment from humans and more.
I find this strange. We already know that LLMs can talk to each other. Any use of LLMs that produces impressively polished text in response to a prompt shouldn’t be particularly surprising. The LLMs on Moltbook are in essence feeding each other prompts that then produce responses which function as more prompts, a parlor trick people have been doing since ChatGPT went public and in fact long before. (Remember Dr. Sbaitso?)
The question is whether the systems connecting on Moltbook are actually thinking or feeling, and we know the answer to that — no, they neither think nor feel. They’re acting as next-token predictors that respond to prompts by running them through models developed through the ingestion of massive amounts of data and trained on billions of parameters, using statistical associations between tokens in their datasets to predict which next immediate token would be most likely to produce a response that seems like a plausible answer to the prompt in the eyes of a user. That the users are other LLMs doesn’t change that basic architecture; that these response strings are often superficially sophisticated doesn’t change the fact that there is no actual cognition happening, doesn’t change the fact that there is no thinking, only algorithmic pattern-matching and probabilistic token generation. Again, terms like “stochastic parrot” enrage people, but they’re accurate: however human thinking works, it does not work by ingesting impossibly large datasets, generating immense statistically associative relationship patterns and probabilities, and then spitting out responses that are generated one token at the time, so that we don’t know what the last word in a sentence (or the third or fifth) will be while we’re saying the first.
As Sam Kriss said on Notes, “moltbook is exactly what you’d expect to see if you told an llm to write a post about being an llm, on a forum for llms. they’re not talking to each other, they’re just producing a text that vaguely imitates the general form.” Please note that this is not primitivism or denialism or any such thing, but rather just a reminder of how LLMs actually work. They’re not thinking. They’re pattern matching, performing an exceptionally complex (and inefficient) autocomplete exercise. I think people have gotten really invested in this whole Moltbook phenomenon because the weirdness of LLMs performing this way invites the kind of mysterianism into which irresponsible fantasies can be poured. Yes, it looks weird, apparently weird enough for people to convince themselves that in ten years they’ll be living in the off-world colonies instead of doing what they’ll really be doing, which is wanting things they can’t have, experiencing adult life as a vanilla-and-chocolate swirl ice cream cone of contentment and disappointment, and grumbling as they drag the trash cans to the curb in the rain. Access the most ruthlessly pragmatic part of yourself and ask, which is the future? Moltbook? Or the all-consuming maw that is the mundane in adult life, the relentless regression into the ordinary?
Of course, you can always say “wait until next year!”, and Douthat’s analogy — that our present moment with LLMs is similar to the discovery of the New World, the entire vast and fertile landmass of the Western Hemisphere — depends on this projection, because on some level he’s aware that a bunch of LLMs crowdsourcing the creation of an AI social network (which, due to how LLMs function, amounts to a facsimile of what most people think an AI social network would look like) is not useful or practical or ultimately important. And, sure, who knows. Maybe tomorrow AI will end death and do some of the other things we’ve been promised. But this is the same place we’ve been in year after year, now, with AI maximalists still telling us what AI is going to do instead of showing us what AI can do now. As I’ve been telling you, I decline. 2026 is the year where I don’t want to hear another word about what you think AI is going to do. I only want to see proof of what AI is actually, genuinely doing, now, today.
Amelia continues to annoy and scare the UK establishment
Leo Kearse mocks the establishment media folks who are just wetting themselves over Amelia’s malign influence on English youth, pushing such hateful themes as loving England, having a pint at the pub, loving dogs, eating bacon, etc.
Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a computer game created in collaboration with Prevent, the agency tasked with stopping radicalisation that could lead to terrorism.
It’s your usual state funded dopey social engineering, You play a non-binary college student called Charlie. You have to make it through college without being radicalised. Parents in the United Arab Emirates will no longer send their kids to London because they’re worried about them being radicalised by Islamists. So do you think that’s what this game looks at?
No, this is dealing with white Brits. The radicalised actions are things like “looking up immigration statistics” or “talking about English identity”.
Amelia is a character in the game. A purple-haired girl who tries to radicalise you into eating bacon because, like all young purple-haired girls, she’s a fascist.
This being Britain, people have taken the piss out of the game, because that’s what Brits do. The establishment is not taking the pisstakes well.
There are many people on the social media site formerly known as Twitter sharing Amelia memes and stories, including @Amelia, sharing bits of English and British history in bite-sized morsels:
GM Britain ☕
In 1696, England’s currency was in crisis. Coin clippers were shaving silver off the edges of coins, melting it down, and spending the debased coins at full face value. Around 10% of the nation’s currency was counterfeit. Riots broke out 🔥
Britain’s solution? Put Sir Isaac Newton in charge of the Royal Mint 🪙
Not just gravity, you see.
Newton recalled every coin in the country. Melted them all down. Reminted them with a reeded edge – ridges along the rim that made clipping instantly visible.
Before Newton arrived, the Mint produced 15,000 coins a week.
He had them turning out 50,000.
Then he went undercover. Disguised himself. Visited taverns and dens. Built networks of informants. Prosecuted over 100 counterfeiters.
At least two dozen were hanged at Tyburn.
The man who gave us gravity also saved the British economy.
That’s British ingenuity. 🇬🇧
One of the many variations of this image (original by John Carter, I think) amused me:
And another snippet of history via @Amelia:
GM Britain ☕️
In India, the practice of Sati was a custom that saw widows burned alive on their husbands funeral pyres. This awful tradition continued for centuries until Britain banned it in 1829. 🔥
Hindu priests protested: “It’s our religion!”
The British commander in India, General Charles Napier, replied;
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
The practice stopped.
🇬🇧
Pierre Poilievre barely squeaks by leadership review with a mere 87.4% approval
If the Canadian media were clamouring for Poilievre to be drummed out of the Conservative leadership in shame and disgrace (and they were), the leadership vote results were … disappointing. At Small Dead Animals, Kate helpfully edits the CBC’s report to more accurately reflect the corporation’s inner feelings:
Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.
Poilievre waltzed into that redneck rodeo town and the whole room of racist trucker-hat-wearing western deplorables lost their minds cheering like he just invented beer or something. He crushed that leadership review with 87% or whatever the hell it was, the party faithful slobbering all over him, screaming like it’s the second coming. Pathetic.
That was the easy part. But the rest of Canada? Please. These un-Canadian clowns don’t speak for the country—they’re just the loudmouth Maple MAGA fringe who love Donald Trump and think affordability means more oil subsidies. He still hasn’t convinced normal people he’s fit to run anything bigger than a backyard BBQ. Hammered the same tired lines about prices and taxes, sure, but dodged anything real that might scare off his adoring hicks.
They say more details are coming, he’s gonna tour and talk. Yeah, sure he is. If he wants anyone outside that echo chamber to take him seriously as PM material, he better start sounding like he wants pandas from Beijing instead of pandering to those yahoos. God, it makes me sick—he was supposed to crash and burn, and instead these idiots propped him right back up.
As I wrote in a mostly US discussion group:
Pro tip: Never let your national government directly subsidize the media that reports on them. Canada did this, and the media reward the party that did it with the kind of fawning coverage that North Korean media might envy. A recent example is the opposition Conservative party leader won a record level of support at the party conference this week. It was reported as if he’d just barely survived roving packs of feral Conservative opponents wandering the convention floor with pitchforks and burning torches. To cap it off, one of the main networks, CTV, reported on record Conservative fundraising numbers … and included a direct link to the Liberal Party’s donations page.
We can’t hate the bought-and-paid-for Canadian media enough.
The Biggest Naval Battle in History: Leyte Gulf 1944
Real Time History
Published 5 Sept 2025In Fall 1944, Japan is set on stopping the US from re-capturing the Philippines, a vital trade route between the Japanese home islands and the resource-rich occupied territories to the south. With a complex plan they want to strike the US Navy as it’s landing on Leyte island. The resulting series of battles is today known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle in history.
(more…)
QotD: Moral relativism
The Sri Lankan’s words echo in my mind every day, “Why do we want to bother with this? We all know you Americans will do everything”. With the exception of handful of Western countries, most of the world would appear inhabited by the sort of Eloi-type creatures depicted in that old sci-fi flick based on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, passively watching as flood waters or Morlocks drag their fellows away.
Begging the pardon of the cultural relativists, but might we not be allowed to raise — ever so gently, of course — the possibility that these differing reactions to human suffering, show Western civilization as the best we have on the planet? Maybe, just maybe Western civilization is morally superior.
The Diplomad, “Death in Nasty Places: Who Cares?”, The Diplomad, January 10, 2005.
February 1, 2026
How to End Democracy in 60 Days – Death of Democracy Q1 1933
World War Two
Published 31 Jan 2025This episode of the history documentary series “Death of Democracy” covers Q1 1933 with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Reichstag Fire, Reichstag Fire Decree, Enabling Act, rise of Nazi terror, Gleichschaltung, and media control, explaining how Weimar Germany’s democracy collapsed in just sixty days.
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Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter reacts to an Australian race-grievance grifter “Race Discrimination Commissioner” bloviating talking about Australia as “stolen land”:
The implicit meaning of this framing is that Anglos stole the land so it’s only fair for them to give hundreds of millions of Hindoids the opportunity to steal the land.
Revealed preference demonstrates this. If he believes the land is stolen, and he believes theft is morally wrong, then he would not accept a salary of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Australian government (this is blood money), and he wouldn’t live in Australia.
Since he doesn’t do either of those things, he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying, or he does but he doesn’t think theft is bad, in which case he’s simply trying to emotionally manipulate white Australians by using their own morality against them in order to guilt them into continuing to allow him and people like him to parasitize the Australian people.
He then elaborates:
It really cannot be emphasized enough how dishonest all of this is.
America stole land from the natives, purchased some African farm equipment, and has always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “open the borders and give us your country”.
Canada is built on stolen land, sent some kids to boarding school, and has also always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “Let my people in, saar”.
Australia, same narrative as Canada.
New Zealand, same as Australia.
Britain did an imperialism, therefore “your country belongs to us now, saar”.
France, same as England.
Spain, same as France.
Ireland never had an empire and hasn’t had slaves since the Viking Age, and indeed was itself colonized by England … therefore Ireland must accept unlimited migration in solidarity with other post-colonial countries.
Germany was too mean to Jews for a few years, therefore Germans must abolish themselves and give their country to North Africans.
The only peoples the Swedes ever conquered or enslaved were neighbouring Europeans, but Sweden might have sold some iron that might have gotten used on some slave ships a few centuries ago, therefore must open its borders to Bomalians and give them all the rape toys they can penetrate.
The justification differs, but the conclusion is always the same: open borders and ethnic replacement.
The uniformity of the repugnant conclusion indicates that these narratives are formed by reasoning back from that tendentious repugnance, with the arguments tailored to national conditions using whatever specific historical circumstances are handy, with the intent of emotionally manipulating native populations into laying down their arms, foregoing resistance, and placidly accepting the loss of their countries to the hundreds of millions of third-worlders intent on flooding every developed white country on the planet.
The people making these arguments don’t believe a word that they say. Their seething resentment for Europeans is entirely real, but this is almost entirely an inferiority complex, humiliation at having been so easily conquered and then taught to eat and wipe with something other than their hands. They don’t believe that slavery or conquest are wrong: if they did, they wouldn’t still practice slavery, and they wouldn’t be trying to conquer the West in the guise of beggars, by shamelessly playing to our pity and misplaced guilt. They say these things in order to trick you by playing on a conscience they don’t have themselves. It’s a sales tactic, and they’re selling you annihilation.
The Agora of Athens | A Historical Tour
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 3 Oct 2025The Agora was the political and economic heart of ancient Athens. This tour explores its long history and evocative ruins.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:47 Bouleuterion
1:44 Tholos
2:22 Monument of the Eponymous Heroes
2:56 Temple of Hephaestus
5:28 The Hellenistic Agora
6:16 Stoa of Attalos
6:57 Augustus and the Agora
8:06 Odeon of Agrippa
9:26 Herulian Wall
10:56 Overview
QotD: Don’t bother accusing progressives of hypocrisy … that’s a “category error”
Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.
DonatistsDemocrats are the real racists, amirite? In Clown World, hypocrisy is a category error:
Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles. According to British political philosopher David Runciman, “Other kinds of hypocritical deception include claims to knowledge that one lacks, claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not hold”. American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is “the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit”.
The underlying assumption here is that there exists a standard outside of oneself. What SJW believes that? If you want a learned citation for it, get our main man Marcus Aurelius back up in here: Of each particular thing ask, what is it in itself? What is its nature?1
SJWs are nihilists. Hypocrisy requires an external standard, and they don’t have one. All they have is their self — which they hate, and long to extinguish, along with everything else that reminds them of their hated, hateful self. Their every thought, word, and deed aims only at that — extinction — whether they recognize it or not.
In practice, then, SJW “hypocrisy” is a tool, a tactic — a really valuable one. They want to kick down some pillar of ambient civilization. And they’ve got all the time in the world to do it, because while they’re just getting on with it, their putative “opponents” are shrieking about hypocrisy! Often with some blather about “Chesterton’s Fence” or similar for good measure.
That’s Donatism, PoMo version. “If you’re going to tear down the fence, first you must explain how it got there, and what it was supposed to do, and then what you’ll be replacing it with.” No. Category error. They don’t care. They have never cared. The fence isn’t the point. Neither is the fence’s replacement, or whatever might be behind the fence, or anything else. They’ve never given any of that a second’s thought, because destruction is the point.
It’s the only point. Always. They have no other.
Thus we must reject Donatism. It doesn’t matter how flawed your “priest” is. The work is bigger than the man. The work transcends the man.
Severian, “The Way, Chapter 2: Guidance”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-01.
- A PoMo in joke. That’s not Aurelius, it’s Hannibal Lecter. But it’s an accurate paraphrase of Aurelius. Can you believe there was once a time when a bestselling thriller could make an allusion to Marcus Aurelius a small but important plot point? That time was 1988, for the record.
