Quotulatiousness

March 13, 2026

The Raj – a cut-and-dried case of plunder?

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Celina considers the claim that the period of British rule over India was a period of British plunder of Indian resources:

The historical evaluation of the British Raj has increasingly become a battleground for competing political and academic narratives. In the 21st century, the discourse has shifted significantly toward an oppression narrative that characterises the period from 1757 to 1948 as one of singular depredation. This perspective, popularised by public intellectuals such as Shashi Tharoor and economic historians like Utsa Patnaik, posits that British rule was defined by systematic deindustrialisation, engineered genocide, the intentional dismantling of educational systems, and the looting of wealth on a scale that defies standard economic modelling.1 However, when subjected to the rigours of aggregate statistical data, comparative institutional analysis, and a sense of historical proportion, these claims frequently reveal themselves as founded on misleading anecdotes and founding myths rather than objective economic realities.2 To accurately understand the trajectory of India under British influence, it is essential to move beyond evocative stories, such as Winston Churchill’s peevish marginal notes and examine the underlying population trajectories, industrial output figures, and the structural transition from a traditional to a constructed capitalist economy.3

“Political Map of the Indian Empire, 1893” from Constable’s Hand Atlas of India, London: Archibald Constable and Sons, 1893. (via Wikimedia)

Chronology and the Context of the Great Divergence

A critical assessment must begin with a precise periodisation of Indian history. The interaction between Europe and the subcontinent can be divided into four distinct phases: the pre-European period (before 1505), the era of initial coastal contact and Portuguese outposts (1505–1757), the transition under the East India Company (1757–1818), and the era of English domination and formal Raj rule (1818–1948).4 The central contention of modern critics centers on the final period, arguing that India’s share of the global economy collapsed from approximately 24.4% in 1700 to roughly 4.2% by 1950.5

While these proportions are grounded in data, most notably the work of Angus Maddison, the interpretation of this decline as evidence of absolute impoverishment is a fundamental statistical fallacy. The decline in India’s share of world GDP was not the result of a shrinking absolute economy, but rather the consequence of the Great Divergence. During this period, Western Europe, North America, and eventually Japan experienced explosive, intensive growth through the Industrial Revolution, while India remained largely stationary.6

Between 1850 and 1947, India’s absolute GDP in 1990 international dollar terms actually grew from $125.7 billion to $213.7 billion, representing a 70% increase.7 The stagnation in per capita terms, GDP per capita was approximately $550 in 1700 and $619 in 1950, reflects a classic Malthusian trap.8 The unprecedented population growth stimulated by the introduction of Western medicine, increased land cultivation, and the relative political stability of the Raj absorbed almost all economic gains.9 Far from being genocided, the Indian population expanded from 165 million in 1700 to nearly 390 million by 1941.10

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor%27s_Oxford_Union_speech
  2. https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
  3. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l9nve2/he_peevishely_wrote_on_the_margins_of_the_file/
  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India
  5. Ibid
  6. https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
  7. https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/
  8. Ibid
  9. https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
  10. https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/

Enacting the original proposed 12th Amendment

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, guest writer David Speiser discusses the two “extra” proposed amendments that didn’t make it into the Bill of Rights, but crucially, didn’t have an expiration date. The 11th did eventually make its way into the Constitution as the 27th Amendment in 1992, leaving only the 12th original still in limbo. The proposed 12th was a doozy:

Here is the text of the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, the sole unratified amendment from the Bill of Rights:

    After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

In other words, there will be one Representative per X people, depending on the size of the US. Once the US is big enough, it will top out at one Representative per 50,000 citizens.

(if you’ve noticed something off about this description, good work — we’ll cover it in the section “A Troublesome Typo”, near the end)

The US is far bigger than in the Framers’ time, so it’s the 50,000 number that would apply in the present day. This would increase the size of the House of Representatives from 435 reps to 6,6412. Wyoming would have 12 seats; California would have 791. Here’s a map:

This would give the U.S. the largest legislature in the world, topping the 2,904-member National People’s Congress of China. It would land us right about the middle of the list of citizens per representative, at #104, right between Hungary and Qatar (we currently sit at #3, right between Afghanistan and Pakistan).

Would this solve the issues that make Congress so hated? It would be a step in the right direction. Our various think tanks identified three primary reasons behind the estrangement of Congress and citizens: gerrymandering, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors. This fixes, or at least ameliorates, all of them.

Gerrymandering: Gerrymandering many small districts is a harder problem than gerrymandering a few big ones. Durable gerrymandering requires drawing districts with the exact right combination of cities and rural areas, but there are only a limited number of each per state. With too many districts, achievable margins decrease and the gerrymander is more likely to fail.

We can see this with state legislatures vs. congressional delegations. A dominant party has equal incentive to gerrymander each, but most states have more legislature seats than Congressional ones, and so the legislatures end up less gerrymandered. Here are some real numbers from last election cycle1:

So for example, in Republican-dominated North Carolina, 50.9% of people voted Trump, 60% of state senate seats are held by Republicans, and 71.4% of their House seats belong to Republicans. The state senate (50 seats) is only half as gerrymandered as the House delegation (14 seats).

In many states, the new CAA-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature, and so could also be expected to halve gerrymandering.

As a bonus, the Electoral College bias towards small states would be essentially solved. Currently, a Wyomingite’s presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian’s. Under the CAA, both states would be about equal.

Money: This one is intuitive. If you can effectively buy 1/435 elections, you’ve bought 0.23% of Congress. If the same money only buys you 0.02% of Congress, you’re less incentivized to try to buy House elections and more incentivized to try to buy Senate seats or just to gain influence within a given political party. Money in politics is still a thing, but it becomes much harder to coordinate among people. This makes it easier for somebody to run for Congress without having to fundraise millions of dollars. Because it’s less worth it to spend so much money on any one seat, elections to the House become cheaper2.

Polarization: Some of the think tanks that want to increase the size of Congress by a few hundred members rather than a few thousand claim that this increase will fix political polarization by making representatives more answerable to their constituents who tend to care more about local issues than national ones.

I’m more skeptical of this claim, mainly because it seems that all politics is national politics now. There’s one newspaper and three websites and all they care about is national politics. My Congressional representative ran for office touting her background in energy conservation and water management, arguing that in a drying state and a warming climate we really need somebody in Congress who knows water problems inside and out. Now that she’s actually in Congress, it seems that her main job is calling Donald Trump a pedophile3. The incentives here are to get noticed by the press and to go viral talking about how evil the other side is, so that people who are angry at the evil other side will give you money and you can win your next election.

But maybe Big Congress can solve that. Maybe in a district of less than 50,000 there will be less incentive to go viral and more incentive to connect with your constituents. At the very least, it seems that people trust their state representatives more. And when my state representative and my state Senator tell me about the good work that they’ve done and ask for me to vote for them again, they point to legislation that they’ve passed, not clips of them calling their opponents pedophiles.

  1. In case this smacks of cherry-picking, here is a breakdown of the “error” in every state’s Congressional delegation, state house delegation, and state senate delegation. “Error” here is defined as the difference between the representation of each state’s delegation and the percentage of that state that voted for Trump over Harris (or vice versa). In only two states, Florida and Virginia, is the error greatest in the largest body, and both of those states would have Congressional delegations larger than that largest body. In the case of Florida, their delegation would be nearly quadruple the size of their state house.
  2. There could also be an effect from the structure of the TV market. Stations sell ads by region, and each existing media region is larger than the new Congressional districts. So absent a change in market structure, a candidate who wanted to purchase TV advertising couldn’t target their own district easily; they would have to overpay to target a much larger region.
  3. And just to harp on this more, we just blew by the Colorado River Compact agreement deadline and now the federal government is going to start mandating cuts; everybody’s going to sue everybody else. Lake Powell is quite possibly going to dead pool this year, and as far as I can find the congressperson who ran on water issues is saying nothing about it.

What did ordinary Tudors do for work? Inside the 16th-century daily grind

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Food, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HistoryExtra
Published 4 Nov 2025

From sunrise in the fields to the heat of the brew house, Ruth Goodman reveals the untold story of how the Tudors really worked.

Forget silk-clad courtiers – most people in the 16th-century toiled from dawn to dusk just to keep food on the table. Men ploughed, hedged, and hauled in the fields while women brewed ale, milked cows, churned butter, and raised children – often all at once. Every Tudor household was a finely balanced machine of survival.

In this episode of her new series on Tudor Life, historian Ruth Goodman explains how every pair of hands mattered. It wasn’t as simple as “men’s work” and “women’s work”. You’ll hear how the two worlds were completely intertwined. And what about those who were unable to work? This video sheds light on an innovative 16th-century welfare scheme that made all the difference.

Filmed on location at Plas Mawr – an Elizabethan townhouse in Conwy, North Wales, now in the care of Cadw – this series with Ruth looks beyond the royals who often dominate the headlines, and considers the everyday routines of those living in England and Wales in the Tudor era.

00:54 How did Tudors earn money?
03:20 Where did men work?
08:15 What if you were unable to work?

QotD: “I was one-shotted in my teens by Guns, Germs, and Steel“

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was one-shotted in my teens by the way Guns, Germs, and Steel ✨explained everything✨ and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since. At this point honestly half the books I’ve reviewed could probably be described as arguments against Jared Diamond. But that’s okay. I can stop any time. Just one more sweeping transdisciplinary exploration of global history. Just let me see a map of British coalfields next to a chart of GDP per capita and I promise I’ll go back to that book about esoteric writing. C’mon, bro, I won’t ever talk about the Hajnal Line again, I swear. Just let me have one more study of an under-appreciated causal factor for the differing trajectories of human societies and I’m done. I have this under control.

Jane Psmith, “BRIEFLY NOTED: Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-11-03.

March 12, 2026

“It is precisely the embracing of such inconsistency that shows your commitment to the cause”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Many, many people have called attention to the incongruity — if not total absurdity — of progressives agitating and protesting for what appear to be thoroughly anti-progressive causes. And all of those people have discovered that most progressives are in accord with Emerson’s opinion that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. As Lorenzo Warby explains, “the issue is never the issue; the issue is the revolution”:

There is a common “culture war” sport where more conservatively-minded folk, and various liberal ones, point out how inconsistent it is for various ideological/identity groups to make a thing of supporting organisations and regimes which are very much against — even murderously against — the ideals those ideological/identity groups allegedly stand for.

Queers for Palestine, and feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, are particularly blatant examples of this. Hamas in Gaza and the Islamic regime in Iran literally kill homosexuals and violently repress women’s rights: they are religiously committed to women having less rights than men and being subordinate to them.

The inconsistency between who Hamas and the Islamic regime are, what they do, and the alleged ideals of Queers for Palestine and the feminists supporting Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran is obvious. Pointing out such inconsistency has, however, no purchase on Queers for Palestine, feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, or similar groups.

On the contrary, pointing out the inconsistency brands one as not merely an outsider, but an enemy. It is precisely the embracing of such inconsistency that shows your commitment to the cause; to the shared political goals; to the shared politicised moralised status games. Doing all the required not-noticing, the required rationalisations, is a signal of commitment.

If they can make people ignore — or, even better, embrace — such inconsistency, that manifests their social and political dominance. The propensity of academics to be “risk averse“, and be conformist in various ways, has enabled motivated zealots to create the Critical Theory magisterium that has come to dominate more and more of Anglo-American academe.

As women are more risk averse and conformist than men, this has gathered steam as academe has feminised. This effect is all the stronger when they generate an accompanying elite status strategy based on “good people believe X”, turning beliefs into moralised cognitive assets. Assets to be defended — and defended together — as shared assets in a shared status game.

By attacking such inconsistency, one is simultaneously signalling one’s outsider status and attacking the signal they are using the show commitment to the cause; to the moral in-group.

As part of such signalling commitment, believers produce commentary shorn of all inconvenient context. We saw plenty of that in commentary blaming NATO and the US for the Russian attack on Ukraine. We are seeing plenty of the same on Iran.

Even more important than this—at least among the core believers — is that, at the foundational belief level, it is not inconsistent at all. The question is not what Hamas or Hezbollah or the Islamic Regime actually stands for: the question is, who they are enemies of.

Carney’s Liberals buy gain another seat in Parliament

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

What couldn’t be obtained at the ballot box can apparently be constructed through non-electoral methods. After the Liberals fell short of a majority in the 2025 federal election, they’ve now gained four more seats through attracting opposition MPs to join their caucus:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Consider several ridings from the last election where Conservatives defeated Liberals by extremely small margins. Terra Nova–The Peninsulas was decided by only a handful of votes. Milton East–Halton Hills South by just a few dozen. Windsor–Tecumseh–Lakeshore by fewer than a hundred. In Markham–Unionville and Edmonton Riverbend the margins were still narrow by federal election standards, measured in the low hundreds.

In ridings with tens of thousands of ballots cast, those margins are not ideological fortresses.
They are statistical coin flips.

Now imagine you are a strategist trying to change the parliamentary math without calling another election. Would you target MPs who defeated your party by twenty thousand votes? Or would you look at ridings where the electorate was already split nearly fifty fifty? Where persuading one individual changes everything!?

That is where the Moneyball logic appears.

Instead of persuading fifty thousand voters, you persuade one MP. The scoreboard shifts instantly. No campaign. No election. No voters trudging through snow to mark an X. Just a quiet change of jersey on the House of Commons floor.

Now consider the MPs who have crossed the floor or whose ridings are currently the focus of speculation. Seats like Edmonton Riverbend held by Matt Jeneroux and Markham–Unionville represented by Michael Ma sit squarely in that category of competitive swing ridings. Even Nunavut, represented by Lori Idlout, illustrates how single seats in geographically unique ridings can dramatically affect parliamentary arithmetic.

Notice the pattern.
Not massive strongholds.
Swing ridings.
Seats where the Liberal candidate already came within striking distance.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

Is this coincidence?
Or strategy?

Because if a riding was decided by one hundred votes, persuading the MP to change parties is dramatically easier than persuading fifty thousand voters to change their minds. The parliamentary math changes instantly.

The voters never get another say.

    Just like Canadians did not get a say when 131,674 votes from Liberal Party members at Mark Carney’s leadership race installed Mark Carney as defacto Prime Minister. He effectively became the Prime Minister of Canada through installation, not election.
    That is 0.33 percent of Canadians.
    Or, put another way, roughly one third of one percent of the country’s population participated in choosing the Liberal leader who then became Prime Minister through the parliamentary system without being elected by the people of the country.
    • 131,674 people chose the leader
    • out of about 41 million Canadians

Of course nobody in Ottawa will describe it this way. Politics prefers softer language. You will hear phrases like cooperation, evolving priorities, responsible leadership, and national unity.

Politics prefers poetry.
Arithmetic prefers patterns.

Individually every floor crossing can be explained. Each one comes with its own “so-called” story, its own “so-called” reasoning, its own “so-called” justification.

But collectively something else begins to emerge.
A seat here.
Another seat there.
Nothing dramatic.
Until one day the standings look different.

Exactly the way Moneyball worked. No blockbuster moves. Just quiet arithmetic accumulating advantage until the outcome changed.

In the past I’ve been comfortable with the Parliamentary tradition that voters elect individuals as their representatives so if that MP leaves the party they were elected for, it doesn’t change the representation of the constituents. Historically, when most MPs were free to vote their conscience except for a minority of “whipped” votes, where they were obligated to vote on party lines, this made sense. I’m becoming less comfortable as this pattern of “recently elected opposition MPs suddenly discovering they’d run for the wrong party” repeats, indicating that it’s not just ordinary politics, but a deliberate strategy on the part of the Liberals.

Some have speculated that a major factor in the latest defection was a recent federal financial benefit to the territory, but it might perhaps have been something more concrete:

Homelessness can’t be solved by just throwing more money at the problem

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to someone explaining their family’s tragic problem of a homeless relative:

The post hits a nerve because it exposes the part of the homelessness debate people prefer not to talk about.

A lot of the public story says homelessness is mainly about housing and compassion. If we build more units and remove stigma, the problem fades. That sounds humane. The trouble is that it ignores what families dealing with severe addiction and psychosis actually face.

Emily Baroz describes the reality many relatives know too well. The person on the street is often not just poor. They are deeply mentally ill, addicted, paranoid, sometimes violent, and frequently refusing help. Families try everything. Housing. Money. Treatment. Support. The illness itself destroys the ability to cooperate. Meanwhile the legal system often blocks intervention until someone gets hurt.

So the public debate becomes strange theatre. Compassion is defined as leaving the person alone. Authority is treated as cruelty.

That brings us closer to home. Manitoba’s NDP government is now moving toward supervised consumption sites. The argument is harm reduction. The idea is that if people are going to use drugs anyway, the state should at least make it safer.

The problem is that the evidence across Canada is far from comforting. Vancouver, Toronto, and other cities expanded harm-reduction sites over the last decade. Yet overdoses, street disorder, and visible addiction kept rising. Recovery rates did not suddenly surge. In many neighbourhoods the result was more normalization of drug use without a clear path back to stability.

If a policy is supposed to reduce harm, the basic question is simple: are fewer people addicted, dying, or trapped in the street?

If the answer is no, the policy deserves scrutiny.

Safe consumption sites may prevent some immediate overdoses. But they also risk locking people into a long-term cycle where the system manages addiction instead of helping people escape it. Families who are begging for treatment beds, detox spaces, psychiatric care, and recovery programs often watch governments invest more energy in enabling use than in ending it.

That’s the tension people feel but rarely say out loud.

A compassionate society does not abandon people to addiction while calling it care. Compassion sometimes means structured treatment, involuntary intervention when someone is clearly incapable of making rational choices, and serious investment in recovery infrastructure.

Otherwise we are simply managing decline.

And families like the one in that post already know it.

Update, 14 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.

Update, the second: Devon Eriksen had a relevant-to-this-topic aside on a longer post –

One of the most common sources of confusion is “using the wrong word”.

For example, if you have a drug zombie problem, and you call it a “homeless” problem, then you spend a lot of tax money giving houses to drug zombies, who turn them into rat-infested drug dens.

The wrong word implies the wrong understanding.

Deep Diving: Bit Sharpening | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 14 Nov 2025

Auger bits need sharpening from time to time, and they can seem complicated when, in fact, they are not. With a small saw file, auger bits of any size can be readily sharpened with just a few file strokes.

In this short video, I explain the process and walk you through what to look for in buying secondhand and how they will work for you.
(more…)

QotD: Roman armies of the middle and late Republic

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Polybius remarks both on the superior flexibility of Roman soldiers (18.31.9-11) and the intensity and effectiveness of Roman rewards and punishments (6.35-38). Josephus, a Greek-speaking Jewish man from the province of Judaea who first rebelled against the Romans and then switched sides offers the most famous endorsement of Roman drills, “Nor would one be mistaken to say that their drills are bloodless battles, and their battles bloody drills” (BJ 3.5.1).

It is hard to tell if the Roman triple-line (triplex acies) fighting system created the demand for synchronized discipline or if the Romans, having already developed a tradition of drill and synchronized discipline, adopted a fighting style that leveraged that advantage. Probably a bit of both, but in any event our evidence for the Roman army before the very late third century is very poor. By the time we truly see the Roman army clearly (c. 225 BC) the system seems to already [have been] in place for some time.

A Roman consular army was a complex machine. It was composed of an infantry line of two legions (in the center) and two socii “wings” (alae) to each side, along with cavalry detachments covering the flanks. Each of those infantry blocks (two legions, two alae) in turn was broken down into thirty separate maneuvering units (called maniples, generally consisting of 120 men; half as many for the triarii), which were in turn subdivided into centuries, but centuries didn’t really maneuver independently. In front of this was a light infantry screening force (the velites). So notionally there were in the heavy infantry of a standard two-legion consular army something like 120 different “chess pieces” that notionally the general could move around on their own and thus notionally the legion was capable of fairly complex tactical maneuvers.

You may have noted that word “notionally” because now we get into the limits of drill and synchronized discipline, because this isn’t a system for limitless tactical flexibility of the sort one gets in video games. Instead, recall that the idea here is to create coordinated movement and fighting (the synchronized discipline) through rigorous, repeated practice (drill). Of course one needs to practice specific things. Some of those things are going to be obvious: a drill for marching forward, or for turning the unit or for advancing on the charge.

In the Roman case, a “standard” battle involved the successive engagement and potentially retreat of each heavy infantry line: first the hastati (the first line) formed a solid line (filling the gaps) and attacked and then, if unsuccessful, retreated and the next line (the principes) would try and so on. Those maneuvers would need to be practiced: forming up, then having each maniple close the gap (we don’t quite know how they did this, but see below), the attack itself (which also involved usually throwing pila – heavy javelins), then retreat behind the next line if things went poorly. It’s also pretty clear from a battle like Cynoscephelae (197) or Bibracte (58) that individual maniples or cohorts (the Romans start using the larger 480-man-cohort as the basic maneuver unit during the second century BC) could be “driven” over the battlefield to a degree so there were probably drills for wheeling and turning.

Now even in this “standard” battle there is a lot of movement: maniples need to open and close gaps, advance and retreat and so on. This is what I mean by saying this army is a complex machine: it has a lot of moving parts that need to move together. The men in a maniple need to move together to make that mutually-supporting line and the maniples need to move together with each other to cover flanks and allow retreats. In terms of how the individual men moved, I’ve tended to think in terms of a “flow” model akin to this video of South Korean riot police training, rather than the clunkier Spartacus (1960) model.

But once an army has practiced all of these drills, it creates the opportunity for great improvisation and more complex tactics as well. Commanders, both the general but also his subordinates, can tell a unit to perform a particular maneuver that they have drilled, assuming the communication infrastructure exists in terms of instruments, standard shouted commands and battle standards (and note [that] Roman methods of battlefield communication were relatively well developed). That, for instance, allowed Aemilius Paullus to give orders to his first legion at Pydna for each of those maneuver units to either push forward or give ground independently, presenting the Macedonian phalanx with a tactical problem (an unevenly resisting line) it did not have a good solution for (Plut. Aem. 20.8-10). Having good junior officers […] was required but it wasn’t enough – those officers needed units which were already sufficiently drilled so that their orders (to press hard or retreat and reform in this case) could actually be carried out by soldiers for whom the response to those calls had become natural through that very drill.

At the same time I don’t want to give the wrong impression: even for the Romans battles where there was this sort of on-the-field improvising led by the general were uncommon (though not extremely rare). For the majority of battles, the legionary “machine” simply pushed forward in its standard way, even when – as at Cannae (216) – pushing forward normally proved to be disastrous. Just because an army can fight flexibly doesn’t mean it will or even that it should.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-17.

March 11, 2026

The Supreme Court of Canada in Santa Claus mode (even if they no longer use those robes)

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In a pretty conclusive 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada seems to have overturned not only the Quebec childcare entitlement at issue in this case, but the notion of citizenship in a much wider sense:

The SCC recently abandoned their traditional red robes for black robes more similar to those of the US Supreme Court. This is a case where the older robes would be more appropriate for other reasons.

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered its latest stupefying ruling. According to an 8–1 majority in the case of Quebec (Attorney General) v. Kanyinda, the Charter requires the Quebec government to extend subsidized daycare benefits to refugee claimants — asylum seekers who have not yet proven the legitimacy of their claim to refugee status. Founded on a prevalent but contentious reading of constitutional equality rights, the court’s reasoning has far-reaching potential to destabilize parts of the nation’s immigration and social welfare systems.

Until last week, Quebec law granted daycare subsidies to certain categories of parents, including Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and those with approved refugee status. When Bijou Cibuabua Kanyinda, the plaintiff in this case, arrived in the province and sought asylum in 2018, she fell into none of those categories. Aided by cause lawyers, and a coterie of social justice interveners (third party interest groups who submit arguments to the court), Kanyinda argued that the exclusion of refugee claimants from this welfare scheme amounted to unconstitutional discrimination.

Remarkably, the majority of the Supreme Court not only agreed with Kanyinda that the Quebec daycare scheme violated Section 15(1) of the Charter — which provides for “the right to the equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination” — but bypassed the Quebec legislature by “reading in” a remedy directly into the law. In other words, the court rewrote the statute to immediately grant subsidies to “all parents residing in Quebec who are refugee claimants”.

More troubling than the outcome itself, however, will be the judicial reasoning that rationalized it. Writing for the majority, Justice Andromache Karakatsanis held that the Quebec scheme created a distinction “on the basis of sex”, a proscribed ground of discrimination under Section 15. But rather than fostering a distinction between men and women, Justice Karakatsanis asserted that the scheme discriminated between “men and women refugee claimants” — even though neither group was eligible for benefits at all. Because Quebec’s exclusion of refugee claimants worsened the economic disadvantage of the female claimants, she concluded, it constituted discrimination that violated Section 15.

The court’s reasoning is convoluted, to be sure. Readers may be forgiven for struggling to understand how a ruling that extends benefits to “refugee claimants” can follow from a supposed distinction on the basis of “sex”. In fact, the judgment exposes the incoherence into which the Supreme Court’s equality rights jurisprudence has fallen.

The Korean War Week 90: No Surrender, No Armistice … No Hope? – March 10, 1952

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 10 Mar 2026

Ultimatums and blackmail! Well, sort of. US President Harry Truman is trying to strong arm South Korean President Syngman Rhee into accepting any armistice negotiated, but the armistice talks are taking forever, so there are those who wish to simply give the Communists a take it or leave it ultimatum. What might such an ultimatum be? Find out this week!

00:58 Recap
01:26 Inspection Teams
03:15 Ultimatums
05:08 Epidemic Disease
07:54 Syngman Rhee
10:57 ROK Training Programs
16:30 Summary
16:46 Conclusion
(more…)

Britain’s reputation in the Near East just cratered

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack Notes, Earl explains why the inexplicable delay in getting a Royal Navy warship out to protect Gulf allies from Iranian missiles is having serious negative impact on Britain’s longstanding relations with the targeted nations:

A MASTERCLASS IN MILITARY INCOMPETENCE

The Starmer administration’s handling of the Iranian crisis is being whispered about in the corridors of Whitehall as a historic “cock up” of the highest order. Despite receiving a formal request from the Americans on 11 February — a full 17 days before the offensive actually commenced — the British government appears to have spent that critical window in a state of paralyzed indecision. The U.S. request was not an invitation for Britain to join the initial “decapitation strikes”, but rather a plea for the Royal Navy to help shield vulnerable Gulf allies from the inevitable Iranian retaliation. Instead of stepping up to protect the 240,000 British citizens living in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the Ministry of Defence oversaw a period of baffling inaction that has left regional partners feeling utterly betrayed.

The diplomatic fallout has been described by insiders as nothing short of catastrophic, with Middle Eastern allies expressing “undiluted fury” at the lack of British support. A former minister with deep ties to Amman reports that Jordan is “fking furious”, while leaders in Kuwait and the Emirates are openly questioning whose side Britain is actually on. The Cypriots are reportedly “incandescent” after learning that military assets were actually withdrawn from their vicinity just as the threat level spiked. Only this week did it emerge that HMS Dragon would finally deploy — nearly three weeks after the initial American SOS — a timeline that military experts say is far too little and far too late to restore trust.

Strategic failures have been compounded by what veteran commanders call a total lack of foresight regarding naval positioning. The only available Astute-class submarine was permitted to continue its journey toward Australia, despite having passed through the Gulf just weeks ago when it could have been held as a vital contingency. Security officials now warn that the Trump administration is viewing the UK’s “free riding” with growing contempt. There is a palpable fear in the MOD that the Americans, tired of London’s dithering, will simply cut Britain out of the loop entirely and strike a direct deal with Mauritius to secure the long-term use of Diego Garcia for future operations.

Inside the government, the situation is being described as “incoherent” and “unconscionable”. By allowing the United States to utilize British bases like RAF Fairford for strikes while simultaneously refusing to participate in the missions themselves, Starmer has managed to achieve the worst of both worlds. Critics say they have invited the risk of being targeted by Tehran without the benefit of having any say in the coalition’s strategic direction. One former defence chief has branded this policy “reprehensible”, arguing that Britain has effectively surrendered its seat at the table in exchange for a front-row seat to its own strategic irrelevance.

The sobering reality in Whitehall is a growing sense that the UK no longer has the capacity to shape events in the Middle East. A former Downing Street adviser noted that the “intensity of Labour’s feelings” on the conflict is now matched only by their lack of influence. Allies have stopped listening because they no longer believe Britain can — or will — deliver on its security promises. As the Trump administration continues its high-tempo campaign to dismantle the IRGC, the United Kingdom finds itself sidelined, watched with suspicion by its friends and emboldened by its enemies, all due to a fortnight of inexcusable hesitation.

On March 9th, The Guardian reported that HMS Dragon will sail “in the next couple of days”, heading to Cyprus to take over duties from French, Greek and Spanish ships in providing missile defence to the British air base at Akrotiri. YouTube channel Navy Lookout posted footage of HMS Dragon leaving Portsmouth here.

CDR Salamander looks back at the naval “special relationship” that appears more and more to be just a fading memory:

We need to stop pretending we have a Royal Navy we knew in our youth or even that of two decades ago. No, we have something altogether different. Something shrunken. Something weaker. Something that is, in the end, really sad. A symptom of a nation who has lost an enthusiasm for herself or even an understanding of her national interest and led by a ruling class that seems uninterested in stewardship.

The state of the Royal Navy — a condition that took decades of neglect to manifest into its form today and will take decades to repair if there is ever the will to do so — has become, as navies can often do, a symbol of the state of the nation it serves.

There is a lesson here, not just for the United States, but all nations who consider themselves a naval power.

If you fail over and over to properly fund, develop, train, and support your navy, you can coast for quite awhile on the inertia of the hard work and investment of prior generations, but eventually that exhausts itself, and you are left with the husk of your own creation.

Yes, I’m looking at you, DC.

Foldy-Glock: The Full Conceal M3D (History and Shooting)

Filed under: USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Oct 2025

Full Conceal was a company that designed a folding Glock. The intent was to create a pistol that could be easily, discreetly, and safely carried in a pocket but still offer the handing and capability of a full size service pistol. They did this by cutting off the grip of a Glock 19 (M3D) or Glock 43 (M3S) and rebuilding it with a hinged trigger guard. An extended magazine could be then carried parallel to the barrel, folded up to render the trigger safe and giving it the profile of a big cell phone instead of pistol.

The M3D and M3S were shown as prototypes at SHOT 2017 and began shipping in early 2018. In October 2020 the company filed for bankruptcy and in June 2021 its assets were sold at auction. The problem was that the guns were simply too expensive for their target market. The company tried to reduce costs by developing their own slides and frame instead of using commercial Glocks, but this was too little too late to save them financially.
(more…)

QotD: Traitors are worse than open enemies so we hate them more

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Officer Frenly (High IQ) @FrenlyOfficer
    The most hated character from Harry Potter is not Voldemort. It’s not Bellatrix. Not even Draco.

    It’s Umbridge.

    Ask yourself why.

Simple.

Umbridge does one thing the main villain doesn’t do, that none of the other villains do.

She pretends to be on the heroes’ side. And prevents them from defending themselves.

This is how the human mind evolved. Foemen, tribal enemies who oppose us on the field of battle, provoke our fear, anger, even hatred. But traitors provoke our contempt and disgust.

We instinctively know that a disloyal friend is worse than an enemy.

Against an enemy, we can defend ourselves, and our tribe will support us. Oppose the traitor, and she will cry that she is an innocent victim, and we are the evil ones.

The traitor not only betrays her own tribe, she turns her tribe against each other.

But it’s worse than that. The enmity between this tribe and that, between lion and zebra, between farmer and rat, is dictated by opposing interests, by incompatible needs.

Our cruelty to the foe is forced upon us. It is the indifference of the universe, manifesting its conclusion through us. It’s adaptation, not sadism.

The traitor isn’t like that. She didn’t have to do it. She could have supported the tribe, and everyone, including her, would have been fine.

The traitor didn’t have her path forced on her. She chose it out of spite, or for gain.

Traitors are worse. So we hate them more.

Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-28.

March 10, 2026

Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry

Filed under: Australia, Books, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:

… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.

But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.

Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.

In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.

Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.

Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”

The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.

Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.

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