Quotulatiousness

May 15, 2026

Sweden – “We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible”

Filed under: Education, Europe, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of us were enthusiastic about schools adopting digital technology, as it seemed to be the way of the future for kids to be fully immersed in the online world as part of their education. Reality has harshed the mellow for a lot of us misguided techno-fossils, as there seems to be a very strong correlation between childrens’ (computer) screen use and lower educational achievements. Sweden is trying to reverse this pattern:

“student_ipad_school – 038” by flickingerbrad is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.

Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.

The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”

Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”

I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.

Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.

At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.

“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.

Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)

High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.

The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.

But it’s not just the Swedes.

Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing — at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.

How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words — the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.

Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.

When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words “flip” and “glass of water” are statistically related to the word “spill”.

And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.

The good news: kids are drinking a lot less! But there’s also bad news …

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The good news seemed to be that teenage drinking was dropping fast. Fewer underage drinkers, happier teenagers, right? Not so fast …

⚡️The deeper signal is youth risk did not disappear.

It migrated inward.

Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.

That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.

So the surface looks healthier. Fewer kids drinking. Fewer kids using weed. Fewer kids doing reckless things in public.

The hidden layer looks worse. The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it.

The old teenage world produced damage, stupidity, alcohol abuse, pregnancy risk, fights, accidents, and bad decisions. No need to romanticize it. But it also produced social reps. It forced young people through discomfort. It made them practice attraction, rejection, conflict, reputation, risk, repair, and status in the open.

The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.

That is the trade.

A teenager can avoid drinking, avoid parties, avoid sex, avoid driving, avoid real confrontation, avoid rejection, avoid shame, avoid danger, and still arrive at 23 emotionally underbuilt. Cleaner behavior does not automatically mean stronger formation.

This is why the marriage chart and the teen drinking chart are the same story at different stages. People are not suddenly failing to pair in adulthood. The whole pathway into embodied adulthood has been slowing for years before marriage even becomes the question.

The real truth: society solved part of the teen vice problem by shrinking the arena where teenagers become adults.

It took away the dangerous commons and replaced it with controlled isolation.

The result is safer kids with weaker initiation into real life.

“One of the most iconic pictures of WWII” – the seen and the unseen, USN edition

Filed under: History, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander posts an iconic US Navy photo from late 1944, showing the unparalleled naval might of the American efforts against Japan. But, as with Bastiat’s famous economic essay, there are the obvious things we see and the important but unseen things that matter just as much:

Murderers’ Row. Ulithi anchorage, December 8th, 1944. Just three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

One of the most iconic pictures of WWII.

The carriers are (from front to back): USS Wasp (CV-18), USS Yorktown (CV-10), USS Hornet (CV-12), USS Hancock (CV-19) and USS Ticonderoga (CV-14).

The oldest of those ships, Yorktown, was only 19 months old. The youngest, Hancock, was commissioned only a little under eight months earlier. All were laid down and took from a bit under three to a bit under four years to build.

Just a year prior, the US Navy was so short of aircraft carriers, it had to borrow a carrier from the Royal Navy.

At first glance, it appears to be a flex of American naval power at flood tide — the aircraft carrier’s unassailable invincibility manifest — and it is. However, when you dig deeper, it has a more important story. It gives a warning. It informs us today, if we are willing to listen.

It isn’t about the power of being the world’s greatest shipbuider, that we were. It isn’t about an unequalled ability to project national will across the Pacific like no nation ever has in human history, which it is.

No. That isn’t what it tells us that is most important.

As we have done more than once over the last two decades, we’re taking a holder of a front row seat on the Front Porch and CDR Salamander Plank Owner Sid’s comments, in this case from yesterday, and bringing it to a standalone post.

Most of this post is his. The insight certainly is.

The actual story this picture tells is much more sobering, right there in plain sight, but you can’t see it.

The reality is that on the day this picture was taken, the Fast Carrier Task Force (TF 38/58) was down an entire Task Group from where it started two months earlier.

USS Franklin (CV-13) was severely damaged on 27 OCT by kamikaze and had to return [to] CONUS for repairs.

USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24) was severely damaged in the same attack.

USS Princeton (CVL-23) was sunk on 24 OCT by a Judy dive bomber.

USS Essex (CV-9) had a devastating hit by a kamikaze on 24 NOV followed by a disabling machinery casualty requiring a trip back to CONUS for repairs.

USS Enterprise (CV-6) departed a few days earlier for repairs in Pearl Harbor.

All the carriers in this picture had been damaged to varying degrees. Damage that today would require a trip to the yard to fix, like the absent Enterprise and Essex.

For example Ticonderoga (fourth Essex in the line from the bottom) would take damage to her radar waveguides in January. That could not be repaired forward and she would have to return to Bremerton as well.

“This is what luxury-belief failure looks like”

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

L. Wayne Mathison reacts to a pair of smarmy politicians congratulating one another in the House of Commons to the echoes of the trained seals clapping in the background:

This photo has the stink of Ottawa self-congratulation all over it.

Two suited insiders shaking hands while the room applauds, as if Canadians are supposed to mistake ceremony for competence. The whole scene screams managed success: the smiles, the poppies, the polished wood, the clapping loyalists in the background. Very official. Very staged. Very pleased with itself.

And that is the problem.

This is what luxury-belief failure looks like in picture form: people with secure salaries, protected pensions, communications teams, and zero personal exposure to the damage their policies create, congratulating each other for “building Canada” while ordinary Canadians are buried under housing costs, taxes, debt, inflation, weak productivity, and a government that thinks another announcement is the same thing as a result.

The photo says: “We are proud of what we’ve done.”

The Canadians with a brain say: “That’s exactly the problem.”

For over a decade now, the Canadian government has devoutly believed that appearances matter far more than reality, and conducts all of its operations with PR at the very tip-top of the priority list. If it will look really good on camera, it’s much more likely to get done … for Ottawa values of “done”. That usually means a big flashy announcement with whatever quick background props can be conjured up, followed by little or no actual work. Often the same thing will be re-announced multiple times in different places over an extended period of time, still with little else taking place. This is how Canada’s lost decade (and counting) has gone. And Liberal boomer voters love every performative second of it.

Bloodier Than Verdun? Winter Battles on the Eastern Front 1915

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published 16 Jan 2026

The first four months of 1915 witnessed a titanic struggle on the Eastern Front, in East Prussia, the Carpathians, Bukovina, and at Przemysl. Both sides suffered staggering casualties that surpass those of the Somme or Verdun the following year. Ironically, the Austro-Hungarians lost far more men trying to save Przemysl than there were in the fortress.
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QotD: Rediscovering Cræft

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

Of course this isn’t just a book about hedging, that would be silly. There’s also haymaking, shepherding, walling, beekeeping, weaving, tanning, basketry, thatching, plowing, and the making of everything from ponds to quicklime, because Alex Langlands is obsessed with preserving (and if necessary recovering) the skills of the rural past. He wants you to understand what’s been lost to industrialization, and how our contact area with the world has shrunk, and why doing things with your body is part of being human, and … oh wait I’m sorry I nodded off, because I’ve written this all like twelve times already.

So why am I telling you about a book on how to do things by hand that you can do far more quickly and efficiently with a machine?

Well.

Langlands frames his book around the concept of cræft, which (as you can probably guess from that æsc) is the Old English origin of our modern “craft”. The ancestral word is richer and more complicated than the modern one, though, pointing to far more than handmade tchotchkes and beer with too much hops. The Dictionary of Old English explains:

    “Skill” may be the single most useful translation for cræft, but the senses of the word reach out to “strength”, “resources”, “virtue”, and other meanings in such a way that it is often not possible to assign an occurrence to one sense in [modern English] without arbitrariness and loss of semantic richness.

Like the modern “craft”, it does convey a sense of ability, especially when it comes to one’s livelihood: the students in Ælfric’s Colloquy use cræft as well as weorc when discussing what they do all day. But it can also mean might or power: when the Old English Orosius tells us that the strength of the Medes failed them in battle, for example, it’s Meða cræft that gefeoll,1 and when Judah Maccabee’s foes join the fray, they begin to fight mid cræfte. Of course, there are semantic connections among these varied meanings: the ideas of physical strength and physical skill blend into one another at the edges, and a word for a thing you’re good at doing with your hands can also be used for a thing you’re good at doing with your mind. (After all, we still refer to writing as a “craft”.) And ideally you’re fairly talented at whatever set of things provide your livelihood! So we can say that Old English cræft broadly means something like “a person’s ability to bring his will to bear on the world, and his skill in doing so”.

There’s one more meaning, though, and it appears more or less exclusively in the writings of Alfred the Great: cræft as spiritual or mental excellence.2 Anglo-Saxon scholars had mostly used cræft as a way of rendering Latin ars, but when King Alfred translated Boethius into Old English he used cræft for Latin virtus, virtue as in moral excellence.3 A contemporary reader might be tempted to see this as merely an extension of the “mental skill” sense of the word (a virtuous person is one who is good at being good), but that would be misleading; the general meaning of cræft leaves the word freighted with powerful and inescapably physical implications. (Remember, too, that before the Reformation the Christian image of spiritual excellence universally emphasized asceticism, which necessarily involves the body a great deal.) Cræft as virtue is not an internal moral condition, it’s an internal activity, a kind of doing or making of the soul.

Or, as Langlands glosses his title, cræft is “a hand-eye-head-heart-body coordination that furnishes us with a meaningful understanding of the materiality of our world”.

Langlands is now a professor of archaeology at Swansea University, but he got his professional start as a circuit digger, the kind of “hired trowel” real estate developers pay to quickly catalog all the ancient remains they’re about to turn into the foundation of a new Tesco. It was not a fulfilling job — “crude and expedient” is the line he uses for his commercial excavations — and he was beginning to grow disillusioned with archaeology as a field. So naturally he did what any sensible person would do if he didn’t like his job: he applied to be on a TV show. This was in 2003, and BBC Two was advertising for people to spend a year in 1620, living on and running a historical farm using reconstructed period techniques and equipment. Langlands got the gig (along with Ruth Goodman and another archaeologist whose book I haven’t read), and had a wild year in the Stuart era and then a few more in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

The shift from examining the archaeological record to experiencing how it was made was an eye-opener, and the success of that first program took him by surprise: “I’d often wondered to myself who on earth would want to watch a bunch of cranky, oddball re-enactors and archaeologists bimbling around in costume, pretending to be in the past”, he writes. “But I didn’t care too much because I was spending nearly every single hour of every day immersed in historical farming. I was tending, ploughing, scything, chopping, sweeping, hedging, sowing, walling, slicing, chiselling, digging, sharpening, thatching, shoveling; the list was almost endless.” And the longer he spent doing all these things (he was on three more shows), the more he realized that the skills, and the knowledge they required, were slipping away.

True cræft, in Langlands’s version, is a combination of know-how and make-do. It’s when you live on the Outer Hebrides and don’t have any trees, so you use whatever driftwood washes up as the ridgebeam for your roof. No timber for the rafters? No problem — a sufficiently strong rope, drawn tightly enough over the ridgeline and secured on both sides, makes something like a giant net on which you can lay your thatch. The straw left in the fields after harvest will do nicely for making both rope and thatch, but if (say) it’s the early twentieth century and you’ve abandoned cereal crops because cheap North American grain knocked the bottom out of the market, then you can make rope from heather and thatch with bunches of bracken. (On the Danish coast, they use seaweed.)

Or it’s when you’re an early Anglo-Saxon who wants to boil some water. A few generations ago, some Romano-Briton on the same spot would simply have bought a beautifully thrown pot from any one of a dozen proto-industrial centers across the Empire, but these days that production has slowed or stopped and the trade networks that would’ve brought them to you are kaput anyway. All you’ve got is some lousy local clay, too weathered to be easily worked. You don’t even have the fuel to fire it hot. So you add organic tempers like grass or chaff (or even dung) to make the clay more plastic, you shape it by hand without a wheel, and when you fire your pot the chaff burns away and leaves tiny voids in the ceramic. Your pot is soft, it’s brittle, it’s kind of lumpy, and fifteen hundred years from now Bryan Ward-Perkins is going to point to it as evidence that civilization collapsed when Rome fell — but it’s still a pot, and it still holds water. You’ve made ingenious use of the world around you to solve your problem. You are, in a word, cræfty.

So when Langlands says cræft, he means the way people behave under conditions of scarcity and resource constraint. And when you’re in that kind of situation, of course you have to be intimately familiar with all your materials — you have to squeeze every last drop of performance out of them! And while Langlands is interested in preindustrial techniques, this isn’t just a matter for drystone wallers and skep-making beekeepers; you can also be cræfty with machines or computers. Cræft is the Havana mechanics who keep 1950s cars running on an income of $40/month, or the engineers who fit all the computer code for the Apollo Guidance Computer into 80 kilobytes. It’s the defining feature of the Real Programmer who “tuck[ed] a pattern matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter”. We rightly admire these cræfty solutions for their elegance and their makers’ skills, but aside from a few weird hobbyists we don’t imitate them. You don’t spend days hauling rocks and building a wall to keep your sheep in when you have wire fencing. You don’t learn the skies so you can time your haymaking for clement weather when you can just wrap your machine-mown grass in plastic and make silage instead. And you don’t work in unreal mode when you have 64-bit processor. Technological advances have freed up our time precisely because they’ve freed us from the need for clever, thoughtful, material-aware solutions to our problems. No one is cræfty in the midst of abundance, because they don’t have to be.

Your reaction to that last paragraph reveals where you fall in the Wizard/Prophet divide: are you pumping your fist for humanity, or are you a little sad that a kind of mastery has been lost? Is our ability to simply throw more resources at the problem and go on with our day a blessed liberation from the bonds of brute necessity, or is it a tragic separation of our thinking, making, doing selves from our world? Are our practical limitations something to be defeated or innovated around, or are they something to embrace because they are, in some sense, good for us?

Langlands is, unsurprisingly, well over on the Prophet side. He warns that “while some machines are clever, the net result of our using them is that we become lazy, stupid, desensitized, and disengaged” — it’s not that a thing made by hand is better as an object than its mass-produced counterpart (although in some cases it is, and a stone wall does last longer than a wire fence), it’s that the making changes the maker. And while he likes to warn that climate change or Peak Oil or the fragility of international supply chains make our uncræftiness a serious survival risk (think of those poor imported-pot-dependent Britons when Rome withdrew!), that’s not really the point. Even if our technological society never falters — even if we soar to greater and greater heights of prosperity and can afford to automate and mechanize more and more of our interface with the world — Langlands argues that would just mean more missing out.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Cræft, by Alexander Langlands”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-03-24.

  1. As in modern German and Dutch, Old English used the ge– prefix for past participles.
  2. For more on Old English cræft, especially in the Alfredian corpus, see here. Langlands quotes from the late Peter Clemoes, who wrote extensively on the topic, but no obliging Kazakh has put that online for me.
  3. This is a fascinating word choice, because virtus is also a complicated and interesting word; it’s derived from the Latin word for man, vir, and means things like “force” but also “manliness” or “bravery” (like Greek ἀνδρεία). In the classical world, it came to mean something like moral worth or excellence in a particularly masculine way, and though it was adopted as a western Christian term for something like spiritual ἀρετή, it retained some of those echoes.

May 14, 2026

“Trust is the most scarce thing in the media landscape right now”

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

As with a lot of cultural upheavals, I’m a bit behind the curve on this one, so let Ted Gioia give you the state of play in “Rick Beato Versus the NY Times“:

Fifteen days ago, the New York Times published its list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Since then, all hell has broken loose in the music world. And in the last 48 hours, that Hades just got a lot hotter.

I’d been one of the 250 “music insiders” surveyed by the Times for the article — so the day after the list was published I shared my ballot here.

I was unhappy with the results, as were many other music fans. But that might have been the end of the story. Surveys are always a bit dodgy — but what can you do about it?

Then I took time to learn about the Times methodology and was even more dismayed. In fact, I was miffed.

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally — the insiders made the final call. But the way they explained it to their readers was intentionally vague.

In small print, readers were told that industry experts “weighed in” — whatever that means.

Readers were invited to click on a link to learn “how we made the list”. But even here, the Times served up fuzzy language.

If you kept on reading, you eventually learned the truth. The Times took the verdict of the “experts” and then “ran it through a filter”. The survey was just a “starting point”. The actual top thirty was decided via a “conversation” among its internal team.

Huh?

The Times did share a few ballots, and even this small sample made clear how different the final list was from the survey of experts. That would be embarrassing for the Times under the best of circumstances, but especially so in the current environment — when that same newspaper has repeatedly expressed outrage about voter suppression and attempts to subvert democracy.

If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List“.

Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic laughs at a comment from a reader — simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor.

This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel. For a serious critic at the Times, that is apparently very funny.

The Humble Wood that Built Great Furniture

Filed under: History, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 13 May 2026

Lynching

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Kratman shares some thoughts on lynching:

“1930 Lynching” by e-strategyblog.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

So, in honor of the white liberal idiots (Lord, forgive us our redundancies) and black race grifters, who seem to infest X, some old thoughts on lynching:

So I was musing on lynching. It occurred to me that merely because someone was lynched it does not necessarily follow that they were either innocent, nor that the lynching was improper or wrong. Of course, we think of it, or most of us do, today, as being a purely racist phenom, applied entirely to innocent black folks. Neither of those is true.

I think we can divide lynching into several different levels and levels of legitimacy.

1. In a place of high crime where the law does not exist. In this case, yes, of course, do what you must to preserve life, liberty, and property, to protect your friends, neighbors, and family.

2. In a place of high crime where the law exists but has become purely notional, where criminals are not generally pursued, tried, convicted, or punished, and where this is no real hope for improvement. In this case, too, lynching is likely legitimate, for two reasons, the ones set out above and, further, to humiliate the arms of the law and the political branches into doing their jobs.

3. In a place where the law exists, where criminals are pursued, tried, and convicted, things become murkier. Note that I left off “punished”. In this case, I would argue, the law has become as ineffective as #2, above. Parts of California under Soros-supported prosecutors, I am looking at you. On the whole, in these places, I would suggest that lynching has at least some legitimacy.

4. Illegitimate lynching starts where the law is operative, and largely works, but where people — and this is where black folks tend to come in — are both impatient and want to terrorize some folks into general acquiescence. I am thinking here of people dragged from jail, after conviction, and put to death. It’s been done to both whites and blacks, but more to blacks.

This is wrong both because of the terrorizing aspect AND because you have just, from the perspective of those same black folks, changed matters into something highly analogous to #1, above, the law doesn’t apply to or defend them, so of course they can legitimately engage in self-help.

5. The least legitimate form, indeed, it is totally illegitimate, is when the law works, but people just want to engage in self-help, largely for the reasons in #4, and without there ever being an indictment, presentation of evidence, conviction, or anything but a mob operating with a mob’s IQ, which is roughly that of a none-too-bright earthworm.

There are some odd nuances here. For example, take someone with diplomatic immunity who kills your child. I have no answer, yet, for this, but, as a practical and personal matter, have to say that I would personally hunt the son of a bitch down and have lumber and nails handy.

Why did the Romans defeat the Macedonians and Seleucids so easily?

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 19 Nov 2025

Today I try to answer several questions about the confrontation between Rome and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Eastern Mediterranean — espcially the Macedonians and Seleucids. In contrast to the monumental struggle between Rome and Carthage, where Hannibal in particular inflicted very costly defeats on the Romans, the wars with the “sophisticated” military powers of the east seem much more one sided — brief and decided by a single pitched battle. How fair is the sense that these conflicts were “easier” for the Romans to win, and if they were — why was this?

QotD: Marx was right about “alienation”

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, too, with alienation. Marx was talking about physical commodities — the guys who work in the widget factories can’t afford the widgets they make. Indeed, they never even see the finished widget as it rolls off the line — they are just a small cog in a big machine. But alienation is so much more profound than that, and more pervasive. Again, consider the laptop class. What are they connected to, other than their tiny social media bubbles? They have no real relationship even to their own physical body — just look at them, for pete’s sake. They’ve never done anything with their hands but type. And as for social relations, they’re so disconnected from other people that they will text people who are in the same room.

No shit, I’ve seen it happen. And it’s even worse than that, because they think they’re being socially savvy. “Oh, Jayden is in the middle of a conversation with Brayden; I’ll just text him, so as not to interrupt.” But since people under forty are physically incapable of not checking their phone the minute it beeps at them, it’s not just an interruption, it’s an especially obnoxious one … and they have no idea. What we used to call the “soft skills” — the ability to come up to Jayden and Brayden, assess where the conversation’s going, and steer it in such a way as to get Jayden the info he needs organically — are totally gone.

You can test this for yourself. Just don’t answer the phone. Or a text. Seriously, try it. It’s tough, isn’t it? No matter where you are, the fucking thing dings, and you immediately grab for it. It takes real physical effort not to. It’s much, much easier to simply turn it off, and while I’m all for that — indeed, I’m for dropping it overboard in the Marianas Trench, or shooting it into deep space — try leaving it on, and only checking your text messages at a set time. It’ll keep until 3pm (your designated “check message” time), I promise. Or if it won’t — if it’s the wife asking you to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home — then you’ll learn a different lesson, the one about how we use crutches for some reason when we’ve got perfectly good legs.

That’s alienation, in the broadest and most significant sense. Since you are constantly available — since your time is now a commodity, that you’re constantly selling to the lowest bidder — your personal worth is zilch. You’re a message-answerer and milk-fetcher and all-purpose Guy Friday, to everyone, all the time. Even to — make that especially to — the people who supposedly love you, and respect you. Because who cares what you’re doing right now? The important thing is that milk, no?

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

May 13, 2026

A quick look at the race to be the next governor of California

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Chris Bray somehow seems to find the election coverage by a multi-decade veteran Los Angeles Times political reporter to be, dare I say, lacking just a little objectivity and honest analysis:

Robin Abcarian has been a professional journalist for four decades, mostly at the Los Angeles Times. She’s spent her adult life writing about politics. So go read her column about the last gubernatorial debate in California. Here’s how it opens:

    What am I looking for in a new California governor?

    Like a big chunk of the state’s voters, I’m not exactly sure.

You can already tell you’re in the hands of an experienced professional. There aren’t really any big issues or anything in California right now, so how would you zero in on something you would want from someone who wants to lead the state’s executive branch, right? It’s all just a shrug and a guess.

Then she recites: This candidate said X, and this other candidate said Y. And she tells you which of the recited things she likes: I like X. I do not like Y. She doesn’t analyze or argue or contextualize: she just says I like that one and I do not like that one. The effect is that you’re watching someone wander barefoot through a field of statements and either make “ooooh, pretty” sounds or “ick, yucky” sounds with a kind of vibration from her brain stem. Billy likes blue balloons, they are pretty. Becky loves pink balloons, they are even prettier! She can’t explain any of it, though she attempts some explainy noises, and then it gets worse:

    I know who I don’t like, though.

    Every time I see Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, with his Tom Selleck mustache, I can’t help thinking he should play a lawman on TV.

  1. Should Chad Bianco become the governor of California?
  2. He has a mustache

CHAD BIANCO WISHES TO BE THE GOVERNOR BUT ACTUALLY HE APPEARS TO BE VERY MASCULINE THINK ABOUT IT

Have I mentioned that Robin Abcarian has a graduate degree in journalism? You can see how her education sharpened her mind.

She adds that Bianco has said some deeply disturbing and disqualifying things, and then she gives an example: “A lack of affordable housing has nothing to do with homelessness, Bianco has said repeatedly”. Gasp!

Instead, outrageously, he claims that homelessness has something to do with “drugs and mental illness”.

It is very bad to say this. Why is it very bad to say this? She doesn’t explain, but it’s very bad to say it. Homeless people are all just fine, and they would immediately be okay if you just gave them a house, because the whole crisis is just affordability. Drugs and homelessness!?!? In CALIFORNIA!?!?!? What are you even talking about!?!?

This woman is a journalist in Los Angeles, where you can experience psychotic episodes in the street next to an encampment by driving to lunch.

By the way, this video of homeless people on Skid Row smoking fentanyl right next to the LAPD’s Central Division station? I drove over there this afternoon, and yes. Open drug dealing, drug overdoses, ambulances running day and night, bodies in the street, police station.

Let’s have a look at Abcarian’s analysis of Katie Porter, whose marriage quite notoriously ended with her husband accusing her of once expressing an (apparently frequent) rage by dumping a boiled pot of mashed potatoes on his head, part of a pattern of what he described as an abusive relationship. Abcarian:

“I’ve always liked Porter and her famous white board. I don’t believe snapping at your staff or a reporter is disqualifying, and I’m glad she’s been able to joke about the leaked video that damaged her campaign.”

I like Katie Porter. She is nice. People say she yells a lot, but that is okay. She makes jokes about when she yells at people who work for her. That is funny! She is funny and nice.

Decades on the payroll of a major American newspaper. Will a candidate be an effective governor? “I’ve always liked Porter.” Thanks for your analysis, Robin.

And then finally, big finish, watch how aggressively obtuse this person is. Just watch. It’s a gold medal performance.

First she discusses the attacks on Democratic frontrunner Xavier Becerra. The other candidates are criticizing him because “on his watch at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement lost track of 85,000 migrant children”. Abcarian acknowledges what happened next, when “many of the minors, mostly teenage boys, were exploited by sponsors, who illegally put them to work in various factories, food processing plants and as roofers”. So she has explicitly discussed migration as a source of human trafficking and exploitation.

Then she says that Tom Steyer won her heart by promising to shut down ICE and prosecute ICE agents. Here’s Abcarian’s complete discussion of the way she feels about Steyer promising not to enforce immigration laws: “Could it be I’m falling in love?”

  1. Unmanaged migration across borders is human trafficking and exploitation, often of children
  2. My uterus is a little gushy over this candidate who says he’ll block the enforcement of immigration laws and shut down the agency that enforces immigration laws

Does she notice that she did this? Does she notice the one-two punch of talking about tens of thousands of minors trafficked across the border to be exploited and then the immediate wine aunt pivot to this ooh-he’s-so-cute swooning about Dreamy Tom Steyer promising to not let anyone enforce immigration laws?

My position regarding the high-cultural-status AWFL and biologically male pseudo-AWFL, in media and politics and academia and NGOs, is that none of them notice themselves at all. They have noises that they’re been trained to make, and they make the noises. Warm and wonderful unhoused neighbors. Warm and wonderful trans kids. Warm and wonderful immigrants. They have categories that they purr about, because one purrs about those categories or else one is a Trump person who belongs in a trailer park. It’s been purely automatic for years and years.

“Electoral authoritarian” regimes

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

eugyppius points out that the reflexive descriptions of the former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government as “electoral authoritarian” fail to note just how authoritarian the rest of the EU’s national governments have become:

this description of an “electoral authoritarian” regime applies far more aptly to Germany than to Hungary. What did Orbán do, defund a few NGOs? meanwhile our police, intelligence agencies & state media have all collaborated for years to keep the opposition out of power.

And after some harumphing from the cheap seats, he followed up with:

Various people are clapping back at this, so let me tell you what is happen in liberal democratic non-authoritarian Germany:

– Getting raided by police, charged with speech crimes, etc. because you post online is a professional risk, I personally know various people to whom this has happened and I live my life with a bunch of opsec annoyances for the day it happens to me.

– State media coordinates with intelligence agencies to smear and harass not only the political opposition but their prominent supporters, for example by doxxing them, getting them fired, subjecting them to harassment.

– The state funds a vast “civil society” network of violent street thugs to intimidate the political opposition and also anybody identified by state-sanctioned ops like those detailed in the above item. Opposition party congresses, other events routinely disrupted by coordinated civil society protests, where the local population is sympathetic (as in many east German venues) they bus in protesters from the west and the big cities to create the necessary atmosphere.

– Domestic intelligence agencies use espionage methods to surveil and compromise the political opposition; among other things they pay informants, tap telephones, read emails, and so on. We’ve had various indications that materials gathered in these operations are then used for state media smear campaigns.

– Yes, domestic intelligence openly coordinates with state media and certain private media elements too. Various aspects of political coverage in Germany are staged by secretive unelected bureaucrats.

– Procedural rules, other laws are routinely changed in ad hoc ways to disadvantage political opposition, though we haven’t had any outright gerrymandering like in the US so that means Our Democracy is safe. 👍

And:

I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. I’ve spent years documenting this shit on my blog and literally none of the present Hungary hyperventilators have ever given the slightest shit. Orbán was a guy who observed the Euro freak show as it is manifested in countries like Germany and tried in a kind of inept half-hearted way to imitate this machine from the right, the results were ridiculous and transparent and like 25% as effective as what the German state gets up to but nevertheless all these clowns confronted with a hint of their own methods started shrieking about FaSciSm.

The Korean War Week 99: The War’s Most Humiliating Crisis – May 12, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 12 May 2026

The world turns it’s eyes to the UN POW camp at Koje-Do island when the Communist POWs in one of the compounds kidnap the Camp Commandant, an American General no less, and issue demands that they say must be met before his release. Can this be settled diplomatically, or is the army going in in force?

00:00 Intro
00:54 General Dodd Kidnapped
04:09 Koje-Do Phase Two
07:04 Dodd on Trial
13:18 The POWs Demands
18:30 Summary
19:03 Conclusion
19:54 Call to Action

“The dark genius of bureaucracy”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Auto-translation on the social media site formerly known as Twitter has brought some posts from Brivael Le Pogam to my attention, like this one:

The Invisible Cemetery

Milton Friedman said a phrase that should haunt every European legislator for the rest of their life. On the FDA, he said this: there is overwhelming evidence that they have caused more deaths through delayed approvals than they have saved through early approvals.

Read it twice. More deaths from excessive caution than lives saved by caution.

And no one sees it. That’s the dark genius of bureaucracy.

Bastiat theorized the principle 175 years ago. “What is seen and what is not seen.” The economist, he said, is not distinguished from the bad economist by the ability to see the immediate effect of a decision. Everyone sees that. He is distinguished by the ability to see the invisible effects, the delayed ones, the ones diffused across the entire population.

The self-driving car is the perfect example. And it’s playing out right before our eyes.

Tesla publishes the numbers. One accident every 7 million miles in Autopilot. One accident every 700,000 miles in the average American human. Autopilot is, at this stage, ten times safer than a human. And it’s only getting better, with every release.

Now France. 3,200 deaths on the roads in 2024. 91% involve human error. Speed, alcohol, fatigue, distraction. If we deployed a self-driving car ten times safer tomorrow, we’d divide the carnage by ten. We’re talking about 2,800 lives a year. Over ten years, 28,000 people. The equivalent of an average French town that disappears, because no one pressed the right button in Brussels.

You’ll never see them. No newspaper will headline: “Today, 8 people died because the self-driving car is banned in Europe”. No parliamentary commission will investigate. No bureaucrat will be fired. Those deaths will go in the “road fatality” box. We’ll run moving campaigns with their photos on 4×3 billboards. We’ll say it’s sad, that’s life.

Meanwhile, the first accident of a self-driving car will be front-page news in every paper for three weeks. The regulator will summon the manufacturers. NGOs will call for preventive bans. Deputies will write op-eds. The minister will decree a moratorium.

Five visible deaths will outweigh, in the media and political balance, five thousand invisible deaths. That’s the iron law of bureaucracy. The bureaucrat who authorizes something that goes wrong loses their career. The bureaucrat who bans something that would have saved thousands of lives is never troubled. No one holds them accountable for the deaths they could have prevented. They don’t exist in their statistics. They don’t exist in their trial.

Friedman had identified the exact mechanism: when a regulator errs on the side of laxity, their victims have names, faces, families, lawyers. When they err on the side of caution, their victims are anonymous, scattered, statistical, ghosts. The structure of incentives makes over-regulation rationally inevitable. And the invisible cemetery grows, generation after generation.

Europe is going to sit out 10 years on the self-driving car, just as it sat out on AI, as it sat out on genetic engineering, as it sat out on fourth-generation nuclear. Every time, the same playbook. Precaution, moratorium, ethics committee, white paper, directive, transposition. And every time, behind the curtain of words, deaths that appear in no official statistics.

These are deaths. Not opportunity costs. Not “economic losses”. Human beings who were alive and who died because an innovation that could have saved them was delayed by people whose literal job it is.

That’s what needs to be built, and it’s probably the most important political project of the century that’s opening. A system for accounting for invisible deaths. A registry of the cemetery that no one sees.

For every regulation, every moratorium, every preventive ban, we should be able to produce a signed, dated, quantified estimate of the human cost in lives of the decision. Not direct effects. Delayed effects, indirect ones, statistical ones. How many deaths per year caused by banning a technology that works elsewhere.

Imagine. On the desk of the European commissioner about to sign a moratorium on the self-driving car, a document: “Central estimate, 2,800 deaths per year for the duration of the moratorium. High-end range, 4,100. Low-end range, 1,900. Source: comparative analysis Tesla Autopilot vs. human average, NHTSA and ONISR data, public and audited method.”

On the desk of the European deputy who will vote on the AI Act: “Central estimate, 38 billion euros in lost GDP, 240,000 jobs not created, X deaths per year due to delays in AI medical diagnostics, Y deaths per year due to delays in deploying autonomous drones for medical delivery in rural areas.”

Today, we sign blindly. We sign without cost. We sign with a clear conscience because the deaths we cause are anonymous and the lives we protect have faces. That’s what needs to be broken.

A bureaucracy is an institution that operates without being held accountable for the invisible consequences of its decisions. As long as invisible deaths are not counted, bureaucracy is mechanically, structurally, inevitably a machine for producing deaths it will never see.

Europe isn’t losing a technological battle. It’s filling a cemetery. Year after year. And no one wears mourning. No one lays flowers. No one knows they’re there.

Friedman saw them before everyone else. Bastiat before him. Williams after him. And each posed the same question, which echoes like an accusation through the centuries: who weeps for the deaths we didn’t see coming?

That’s the work ahead of us. Making the invisible cemetery visible. Accounting for it. Auditing it. Publishing it. Confronting every bureaucrat, every day, with the exact list of lives that their signature takes with it.

Before the list becomes ours.

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