Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Dec 2025The CBJ-MS is a submachine gun designed by Swedish arms developed Carl Bertil Johansson, perhaps better known for his remarkable armor-piercing 6.5x25mm CBJ cartridge. He developed the gun at about the same time as the cartridge, on his own time while working at the Carl Gustafs factory in Eskilstuna. While it bears a lot of visual similarities to the Uzi, and it is an open-bolt simple blowback action, it has a unique and clever fire control system — and several other creative features as well.
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May 13, 2026
Between SMG and PDW: Sweden’s CBJ-MS
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QotD: The advertising business
Television is the great propaganda weapon of the liberal democratic state, so it is a useful window into the thinking of the oligarchs. Movies and television shows still have to attract an audience, so they are usually the trailing edge of whatever the oligarchs are trying to impose on society, but the ads are a different matter. They are the leading edge of the latest Progressive fads. They know people will not abandon a show or movie just because the ads are offensive.
That’s what makes the ads a useful window into the black soul of our rulers. The ad makers are all from the ruling class. Look at the team photo of an ad agency and it looks like the faculty of an Ivy League college. There may be a little color in there for show, but otherwise it is all men with small hats and people who still write “Episcopalian” when asked about their religion. The advertising agencies that produce these ads are the special forces of the Judeo-Puritan ruling class.
The Z Man, “Turn Off, Tune Out and Drop Out”, The Z Blog, 2020-09-04.
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May 12, 2026
First One Nation party MP elected in Australian by-election
After the surge in support for populist Reform Party candidates in the British local elections, Australia’s populist One Nation party achieved their first member of the House of Representatives in a by-election in Farrer, with David Farley receiving 57% of the votes:
Australia’s One Nation party has won its first lower-house seat in a moment that’s been described as a political earthquake. As with Reform’s success in the council elections here, its significance is already being argued over.
The fact remains that One Nation candidate David Farley won over 57 per cent of the tally in Farrer, a vast regional constituency in New South Wales, a weathervane election that was triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley after she was ousted as leader of the opposition conservative Liberal Party.
Saturday’s poll was the first federal test of One Nation’s support after the party recorded the second-highest number of votes out of any political party in the South Australian state election in March and, importantly, since the change of leadership of the Liberal Coalition opposition. With it, as I predicted a week or two ago, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party broke through Australia’s political glass ceiling.
Why and how? Well, for one significant reason. In response to her rise in the Australian polls, for the first time Ms Hanson and her party were endorsed by the opposition Liberal and Country (National) Party coalition. Blessed with two new leaders – two men prepared to defy the woke establishment and media – they “preferenced” the One Party candidate ensuring One Nation won the seat. Don’t forget Pauline Hanson has been far more of a persona non grata to the Australian establishment elite than Nigel Farage has to ours. I can’t see him having the chutzpah to turn up to Parliament wearing a full burqa!
Far better than anything I can write to capture the significance of the moment is David Flint’s account in Spectator Australia, titled “The Farrer earthquake: how the commentariat got it wrong“.
It is so good that I feel sure that Editor Rowan Dean will forgive me for quoting big chunks from it:
The political establishment is in a state of shock … When Sky News Australia took the unprecedented step of calling the Farrer by-election for One Nation at an extraordinarily early hour, it wasn’t just calling a seat; it was announcing the end of an era. For the first time in Australian history, One Nation has captured a House of Representatives seat at an election, and if the current opinion polls are any indication, it is merely the first of many.
And that is the point. He goes on:
The “commentariat” – that insulated class of pundits and pollsters – has spent years repeating the tired myth that One Nation is a party of complaint but not of policy …
Farrer has proven that the commentariat’s “no-policies” narrative was a delusion. Australians are not merely “protesting”; they are voting for a platform of common sense, consistently put forward by Pauline Hanson and Senator Malcolm Roberts – one that the major parties have long since abandoned.
Flint argues that it presages the death of the major party monopoly: “The result reflects a deep-seated exhaustion with the status quo. Labor is no longer the party of the worker; it has become the party of the inner-city elite. The Greens, far from being environmentalists, seem content to see our landscape ruined by industrial ‘renewables’ to enrich foreign interests – propping up what Donald Trump rightly called the ‘world’s biggest fraud’. In contrast, voters have responded to a leader who tells the simple truth.”
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Something something hoist, something something petard
The Liberal party, both federally and provincially, have been massive fans of immigration for decades. Any kind of restriction on foreigners being allowed into the country was seen as tantamount to treason, in Liberal eyes. This resulted in a lot of votes for Liberal candidates in election after election, as most immigrants associated their welcome in Canada with the party most associated with pro-immigration policies. On the weekend, this happy little virtuous circle suddenly broke in the Toronto-area provincial riding of Scarborough Southwest, and the party is left wondering what is going on:
AI-generated image from Upper Canadian Cavalier
There is a particular flavour of humiliation reserved for the courtier who discovers, too late, that the rules he wrote for everyone else now apply to him. On Saturday afternoon in Scarborough Southwest, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith tasted it. The former federal Minister of Housing, the man Mark Carney himself had blessed to retain his Beaches–East York seat while parachuting into a provincial nomination as a launchpad for the Ontario Liberal leadership, lost. He lost to a man named Ahsanul Hafiz, a Bangladeshi immigrant who had arrived as an international student two decades ago, who had been forced during the campaign to answer for old social media posts of himself posing with firearms and calling for the death penalty of a Bangladeshi politician. Hafiz won not because he was a more accomplished man, not because he had a deeper grasp of public policy, not because he carried the gravitas of a former Crown minister of the Dominion. He won because he could deliver more bodies to a high school gymnasium on a Saturday afternoon than the Oxford-trained lawyer with the cabinet pedigree could.
This is the open secret of Liberal politics in Canada in the year 2026. The white Liberal cannot win his own nomination battles anymore. Not on the merits. Not on the organisation. Not on the strength of his name or the depth of his rolodex. He can only win when the party machinery he himself built bends the rules in his favour, locks the gate behind him, and quietly disqualifies the rivals who would otherwise eat him alive. When the machinery fails, as it failed in Scarborough Southwest, the result is what we saw on the weekend: the dauphin of the Carney court, the heir presumptive, sent home with a participation ribbon and a press release about how concerned he is of the democratic process.
The democratic process. We shall return to that phrase, because it has done a great deal of work for the Liberal Party of Canada these past sixty years, and it deserves the close inspection of an honest mind.
The Scarborough Lesson
Consider the bare arithmetic of what happened. Erskine-Smith is, by every measure the Laurentian establishment recognises, the kind of man the Liberal Party manufactures for leadership. Queen’s University, then Oxford for the BCL. A successful federal MP since 2015. A cabinet minister under both Trudeau and Carney. The blessing of the Prime Minister himself to remain a sitting federal MP while contesting a provincial nomination, an arrangement of breathtaking entitlement that would have been denied to anyone of lesser standing. He had every advantage the system can confer on a chosen son.
And yet the Bangladeshi grocer down the street had more votes.
Three thousand five hundred members were on the final voting list. The Bangladeshi community of Scarborough Southwest, organised through its mosques, its community associations, its weekly newspaper the Weekly Bangla Mail, its television station NRB TV, had decided some time ago that this riding belonged to them. Doly Begum, the former NDP MPP turned federal Liberal, had won the by-election three weeks earlier as the first Bangladeshi-Canadian elected to Parliament. The provincial nomination was the next obvious prize. Three of the four candidates running were of Bangladeshi origin. The fourth was Erskine-Smith.
You can imagine the scene at the high school. The folding tables, the volunteer scrutineers, families arriving in groups of six and eight, elderly grandmothers helped to their seats by grandsons. And against this, the dispersed and atomised liberal professionals of the riding, the kind of people who attend brunches in the Beaches and write earnest letters to the Toronto Star about housing policy. There was no contest. The grandmothers won. They will always win. They were always going to win. Anyone who has spent five minutes thinking honestly about what mass non-European immigration into a Westminster system actually means could have told you so.
This is not a scandal, it is not foreign interference. It is not even when properly understood, a failure of the Liberal Party. It is what democracy looks like when you transplant a foreign communal politics into a parliamentary system that was built for atomised individuals voting their conscience as Englishmen. The system the Liberals constructed across two generations, the system of mass importation without integration, of multiculturalism as official ideology, of the ethnic vote as the quiet hydraulic engine of every Liberal majority, has finally arrived at its terminal stage. The body has now grown larger than the head, and the head has noticed.
At Without Diminishment, Dakota Jeffery-Petts, who once worked as a volunteer on Erskine-Smith’s 2015 campaign, writes:
In Canada, the nomination process remains a glaring national security loophole. These contests are treated as private club matters rather than public democratic exercises. They lack the oversight of a neutral authority. This creates a low-cost, and at times entirely cost-free, environment providing a high-reward entry point for foreign interference.
All you need to do is speak sweet lies to members and constituents. In doing so, you create a motivated interest group that can effectively hand-pick a representative in a safe seat, bypassing the general electorate entirely.
When 3,580 memberships appear overnight in a single riding, we must ask: whose interests are being served? Are they Canadian interests, or diaspora interests?
The primary duty of an elected official, after all, is to the national and public interest. But when a candidate’s mandate is derived from a narrow, diaspora-specific recruitment drive, often centred on grievances or political movements from the old country, that candidate becomes a delegate for a foreign interest rather than a representative of Ontario and the Ontarians in that riding.
The result illustrates the danger of fragmented national and local loyalties.
Multiculturalism, when left without a strong framework of national identity, allows for the importation of foreign conflicts into our legislative halls. We are seeing the rise of a political class that views a seat in a Canadian legislature as a platform for foreign advocacy, rather than a tool for national or provincial governance.
This capture of our nomination process by diaspora activism is the ultimate sign of a hollowed-out democracy. If the gates to our legislatures are guarded by whoever can mobilise the largest bloc of unintegrated interests, then the concept of a Canadian mandate becomes meaningless.
We are effectively outsourcing our leadership selection to the highest bidder, or to the most aggressive foreign-aligned organiser. The decision by the Ontario Liberal Party to allow this surge, and the subsequent defeat of one of the more prominent politicians in the province, shows a party that has lost its way.
By prioritising raw numbers over the quality and loyalty of its candidates, the Ontario Liberals have signalled that they are comfortable being a vessel for proxies acting on behalf of foreign interests, despite the hardships facing so many Ontarians.
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What happened to the people who took Joe Biden’s advice and learned to code?
It was only a few years ago that snooty media personalities were constantly echoing President Joe Biden’s advice to unemployed workers: “Learn to code”. Then, of course, the media hit hard times and the advice was then being snarkily offered to newly unemployed media folks. But what about the (few) who actually did “learn to code”, only to be swept away again as the clankers surged in to eliminate a lot of basic coding jobs?
How to Understand What AI Just Did to People Who Took Joe Biden’s Advice and Learned to Code.
A simple, concrete example.
Oddly enough, I have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. This means I know 7 algorithms for sorting a list into alphabetical order. I understand the tradeoffs between their execution time, code complexity, and memory demand. I learned the specialized lingo for describing execution time.
The algorithms are surprisingly complex and subtle. I spent months learning to code them.
Now that hard-won knowledge has been replaced by, “Claude, write a module to sort this list. Optimize for execution time.”
Millions of good people just lost their professions and must now invest in a new one.
Right now, knowing how to sort a list probably gives me a small advantage when I code with AI. But I will soon lose even that tiny return on my investment, as AI improves.
Certainly AI will create some new opportunities, probably a lot of them.
But count your blessings, if you did not spend years learning to code like I did.
And:
Here is the counterpoint: Learning to code gave coders an advantage when relearning to code with AI.
That advantage is their ticket to a seat in the new AI world.
The big question now is how many seats exist.
To which ESR responded:
Your position is reasonable, but wrong.
Having learned to code is still valuable in the new world of AI, not because you’re wrong about coding itself having become disposable, but because of the capabilities and mindset you developed while learning to code, some of which are difficult to learn in any other way.
You didn’t become a professional programmer. But I’m willing to bet that your intuition about how to design software is far better because you wrestled with code. And that is *not* a skill that LLMs are replacing — ignore the noisy hype about this.
I’m also willing to bet that some of what you learned as a programmer in training translated into problem-decomposition skills that have served you well as an economist.
If one is not a complete dullard (and you are certainly not a complete dullard) learning to code teaches not just craft skills but a mindset — a set of heuristics for carving reality at its joints. There are other ways to get this — I think for example of Richard Feynman who got there by thinking very hard about physics. And it is not guaranteed that every programmer will develop this right mindset.
But many of us do. And most of the other ways to develop it seem also to produce it only as a side effect, but less reliably than learning to code does.
So don’t write off learning to code. Maybe someday we’ll develop educational methods that can teach those higher-level skills more directly. That would be an excellent thing, if it’s possible. But until it gets here, learning to code will still have value that is not easy to duplicate in any other way.
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Indian Pudding – America’s Forgotten Dessert
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 18 Nov 2025Rather unattractive, but delicious, molasses and cornmeal baked pudding with whipped cream
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1829Indian pudding, a perfect marriage of new world and old world cooking, resulted from British colonists making familiar foods with the ingredients that were available to them in America. Without access to wheat flour, they used cornmeal to make their beloved boiled puddings, and by the time this recipe came around in 1829, there were baked versions as well.
While an admittedly unattractive dish, it is absolutely delicious. The molasses really comes through, but it has none of the bitterness, leaving an almost caramelly flavor.
This dish has fallen out of favor and can usually only be found in New England, but I think it should make a comeback. If you’re planning on serving it for Thanksgiving (which I plan on doing), then I recommend presenting it dressed up with whipped cream to make it, if not pretty, then more palatable-looking.
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QotD: “… this pattern will be immune to all but the most draconian interventions, such as legally-imposed quotas”
[…] the achievement of social status and some degree of success in culturally-important domains are more strongly related to men’s than women’s reproductive prospects and success. The sex difference here is found in hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural societies, as well as in early empires, developing nations, and the modern world. One result is that men have an evolved motivation to increase their social status and to attempt to gain control of culturally-important resources, whether these resources are cows or cash. Women of course also benefit from improved status and resource control, but the evolutionary costs and benefits differ for each sex and have resulted in stronger status-related motivations and behaviors (e.g., long work hours) in men than women.
The expression of men’s status striving strongly contributes to the sex difference in occupational attainment that continually frustrates gender activists and thwarts policy edicts aimed at equality of outcomes. […] sex differences in status striving manifest in modern contexts and […] these are entirely consistent with broader patterns found across human cultures, human history, and in most species.
David C. Geary, “Sex Differences in Occupational Attainment are Here to Stay”, Quillette, 2020-11-02.
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May 11, 2026
Were the Nazis socialists?
If you’re ever bored and want to kick off an argument online, you can take either side of this statement and watch the signal-to-noise ratio drop precipitously. The NSDAP, the Nazis, began as one of the many, many groups of angry young Germans in the days after the end of the First World War. The full name of the party — the National Socialist German Worker’s Party — indicates who the original party founders thought would be the engine of their political rise. They were explicitly anti-communist, as the spectre of the Russian Revolution terrified many Germans, but German socialism was still within the Overton Window of political debate.
Lots of arguments about this one.
Many people assume Nazis could not have been socialists, despite all the time and energy they devoted to jumping up and down screaming “We are socialists!”, because they were “right-wing” and socialism is supposed to be “left-wing”.
Except “right-wing” and “left-wing” don’t have rigid definitions outside the context of the French revolution. In any other context, they’re just a metaphor.
So why did the NATIONAL Socialist German Workers’ Party and the INTERNATIONAL Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers’ Movement hate each other so much?
It’s pretty obvious when you look at the names.
National.
International.
To Nazis, the race and culture of a people are everything. They are what the state is supposed to represent. Ein Volk, as they would say. The purpose of Nazi socialism is to control capital assets, subordinating them to the will and welfare of the ethnostate.
But Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish all ethnostates. They are a globalist movement, seeking to place all capital assets under the control of a universal proletariat in theory, which is in practice represented by one world government.
Thus, Nazis sought to use socialist policies for the welfare of the German people and Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish “German” as a meaningful distinction, along with all other cultures.
The antipathy between Nazis and communists was a sectarian struggle within socialism. Same methods, but different sacred groups.
Since the defeat of National Socialism by International Socialism in WW2, all modern socialism is pretty much of the international variety.
This does, however, suggest that there is a contrast between National Capitalism and International Capitalism as well.
Which is the source of the current sectarian struggle between elements of the American right wing.
Update, 12 May: 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.
“We’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle”
You have to have noticed that progressives all seem to have recently decide en masse that we need to liquidate eliminate expropriate the billionaire class. It’s been done in the past, and modern progressives seem to be unable to spot the pattern, even as they work hard to bring it back to life by constantly scapegoating the wealthy (machine translated from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post):
Lydia is putting her finger on something that no one wants to name clearly: we’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle.
The script is documented, archived, and it repeats itself identically for a century. Before every mass massacre carried out in the name of Marxism, there are always 5 to 15 years of public designation of a category of people as “the enemy to be taken down”. Not a debate on public policies. Not a critique of inequalities. A methodical dehumanization of an entire class.
In the USSR in the 1920s, it was the kulaks. Lenin wrote as early as 1918 that it was necessary to “exterminate the kulaks as a class”, an expression repeated word for word by Stalin ten years later. Result: 4 million peasants deported, several million dead in the Holodomor.
In Maoist China, it was the landlords and “class enemies”. Mao orchestrates public “struggle sessions” where neighbors, children, former employees are forced to denounce, humiliate, and beat. Tally from the land reform alone: 1 to 2 million executions, not counting what follows.
In Cambodia, it was the “new people”: city dwellers, intellectuals, people wearing glasses. Khmer Rouge propaganda designated them for years as parasites before massacring them. 1.7 million dead in 4 years.
Now look at what’s happening in the United States in 2026.
Hasan Piker, who reaches millions of young men on Twitch, speaks openly of the “blood of f***ing capitalists”. Not in 1968 in a Trotskyist cell, in 2026 on the platform most watched by 18-25 year olds.
Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York, films viral videos in front of billionaires’ buildings, exactly where Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated last year by Luigi Mangione. The latter was turned into a pop icon by a part of the American left in less than 48 hours. T-shirts, fan art, romanticization of the murderer.
This isn’t “political passion”. It’s phase 1 of the protocol. The public designation of a category of humans as legitimately hateable, followed by the valorization of those who take action.
The “normal” reaction of a healthy democracy should be the immediate social and professional isolation of these voices. What’s happening: they top podcast charts, they’re elected officials, and they get favorable media coverage.
History doesn’t stutter. It copy-pastes. And the first victims are always surprised to discover, too late, that the speech they found “a bit excessive but oh well” was actually the clear warning that a pit was being dug for them.
Lydia is right to say it. And she’ll be even more right in five years when we reread these tweets.
And more:
And if you’re reading this thinking, “This doesn’t concern me, I’m not a billionaire”, stop for two seconds and really think about it.
Because that’s exactly what the Russian peasants told themselves in 1918 when people started talking about the “bourgeois”. They applauded, or they looked the other way. It wasn’t their problem. They weren’t rich.
Ten years later, they were called kulaks. And “kulak“, in Stalinist practice, meant any peasant who owned one more cow than his neighbor, who had dared to hire a seasonal worker, who had a slightly better-kept barn. 4 million deported. Several million dead.
That’s exactly what the small Chinese shopkeepers told themselves in 1949, when Mao went after the “great landowners”. Not their problem. They just ran a little store. Five years later, they too were classified as “class enemies”, stripped of everything, publicly humiliated, sometimes beaten to death by their own neighbors.
That’s exactly what the Cambodian schoolteachers told themselves in 1970, when the Khmer Rouge talked about “urban exploiters”. Not their problem. They barely earned enough to live on. In 1975, knowing how to read was enough to sign your death warrant.
The communist mechanism NEVER stops at the ultra-rich. Never. It’s a historical law as solid as gravity.
Why? Because fundamentally, the communist doesn’t hate wealth. He hates individual emancipation. He hates the very idea that a man can build something that belongs to him, decide his own life, refuse the collective. Private property isn’t an economic detail to him — it’s the metaphysical enemy. Because someone who owns something is someone who can say no.
So if you have an apartment you spent 15 years paying off, you’re concerned. If you have a small business, a shop, a sole proprietorship, you’re concerned. If you have a savings plan, a bank book, stocks, you’re concerned. If you have a family home in the provinces, you’re concerned. If you work hard to pass something on to your kids, you’re at the top of the next lists.
Billionaires are just the first course. Always. Because there are few of them and they’re easy to point out. They’re the appetizers for the machine. The main course, historically, is you.
And meanwhile, a lot of people read threads like this, nod their heads, and don’t share. Don’t comment. Don’t take a stand. Out of fear of being labeled “right-wing”, “reactionary”, “too political on LinkedIn”. Out of comfort. Out of social cowardice.
Know that this silence has a precise historical cost. Every time a society has tipped into this madness, it did so because the reasonable majority stayed silent too long, thinking it would all blow over on its own.
It never blows over on its own.
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A tale of how the people lost faith in the Oracle
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Keneinan tells a story about a people who once depended on the words of the Oracle and why they eventually stopped listening:
Once upon a time, the people of a certain land were blessed with an oracle of uncanny precision and depth in its predictions and information.
The people rose to prominence and prosperity thanks to consulting the oracle.
However, the people were never allowed to consult the oracle directly, but only through the priests that carried their questions to it, and brought the oracle’s responses back to them.
Eventually, the priests began to confuse the virtues and gifts of the oracle as their own, and began no longer to bother asking the oracle questions before deciding on what “its” answers would be.
Thus it transpired that, while the oracles was a reliable and beneficial as it ever was, since its true answers no longer reached the people, but merely the false and self-serving answers of the priests, the act of “consulting the oracle” became no longer beneficial.
So people stopped consulting the oracle.
The priests were mystified by this.
“The oracle is as reliable as ever,” they said amongst themselves. “Why do the people then no longer trust it?”
And yet they had done it themselves.
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The History of SPI: Part 1 / Simulations Publications Inc. / Wargaming History
Legendary Tactics
Published 18 Dec 2025Remember the golden age of wargaming? This is THE definitive history of SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), one of the most influential publishers in tabletop gaming. From its groundbreaking magazine Strategy & Tactics to iconic titles like War in the East, StarForce, and Terrible Swift Sword, SPI reshaped what board wargames could be — and built a passionate community along the way.
This is Part 1, where we delve into the origins of SPI and Strategy & Tactics Magazine, and the people and games that were part of it.
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QotD: The cultural importance of the church in early Medieval Europe
The very first thing to note is that the Church (in this case, both the Latin West and the Greek East) pre-dated the Middle Ages themselves. The Church arrived in the Middle Ages as relic of the Roman Imperial past. It inherited Roman Imperial organization – the diocese, for instance, derived from the boundaries of Roman super-provinces called dioceses (Greek: διοίκησις). Unlike the new medieval aristocracy, which tended to rule from fortified estates in the countryside, the Church remained centered in towns and cities, many of which had been major centers under the Romans. As the Roman provincial administration collapsed, it largely fell to the Church – as one of the few surviving literate institutions – to replace some of the core functions, like record keeping and the preservation of literature and learning. This was less true [in] Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, places where the Church was a relative late-comer, but for most of Western Europe, the Church was not some new institution grafted on to a pre-existing society (as it had been under the Romans), but rather part of the bedrock cultural foundation upon which that new society was constructed (fellow pedants! – please note carefully the phrase part of in the previous sentence; I am aware there were other things).
That said, the institutional power of the Church (and here we really do mean what would be the Roman Catholic Church) begins to change dramatically in the 11th century, right as we enter the High Middle Ages, and continues for the next several centuries (keeping in mind that Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire really evoke the High and Late Middle Ages, rather than the Early period). In short, the institutional heft of the Church grows dramatically. Quite a few things begin happening which are linked together: the Popes begin trying to wrest control over the Church’s hierarchy (specifically, the investiture of bishops) from secular rulers. Clerical celibacy was more stringently enforced. The Church intruded into warfare (as we’ve discussed with the Peace of God / Truce of God movements). It began to more directly attempt to regulate marriage, especially among the powerful (marriage was a made a sacrament in 1184). By the 1300s, this included keeping detailed records in many parts of France about births, deaths and marriages, in part to ensure no one married a close relative.
(And, of course, for those of you thinking, “wait, isn’t this also the period of the Crusades – military expeditions called by and at least nominally (but not in practice) under the auspices of the Pope?” Yes, it is, and that’s not an accident either).
In my experience teaching this, it is the next step that baffles my students the most. This vast increase in the institutional power of the Church was made possible, not by armies or shrewd real-politic (though both were involved), but by belief. The primary weapon wielded by Popes in this effort was the threat of excommunication, which (under Catholic doctrine) cut off the excommunicated individual or community from salvation, potentially damning them for all eternity. But of course that threat is only real if you believe the Pope has that power. And therein is the key point: most of Europe did believe. As I tell my students, it is safe to assume, as a general matter, that people in the past believed their own religion. Of course there are exceptions, but the general rule remains.
In the conflicts that arose – because, as you might imagine, secular rulers were unwilling to give up their prerogatives – it did not actually much matter if the king or emperor believed in the power of excommunication, because no one rules alone. Thus when the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII in 1076, the audience for this act wasn’t Henry himself (who had already declared Gregory illegitimate anyway). It was directed at all of Henry’s vassals and supporters, releasing them from their oaths of allegiance and essentially saying, “stick with this guy, and he’ll take you to hell with him”. It worked, sparking a major rebellion and forcing Henry to humiliatingly apologize the following year.
(History note: this would be “round 1” in a multi-round fight that wasn’t settled until 1122 with the Concordat of Worms; in the end the Papacy mostly won, sharply limiting the Holy Roman Emperors’ power over their bishops).
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.
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May 10, 2026
Quotulatiousness at year twenty-two
In 2004, my friend and co-worker Jon installed some blogging software on his site and asked if I’d like to set up my own blog there. (Hard though it may be to believe, blogs weren’t free to operate back in the dark ages of 22 years ago … free blogging sites started to pop up, but didn’t really take off for several years, and most of them were ad-supported.) I named my new blog by patterning it on Jon’s Blogulatiousness. Jon soon decided that blogging wasn’t for him, so it wasn’t long before he shuttered it, leaving mine the only active blog on the server. If I had any inkling I’d still be blogging in 2026, I assure you I’d have put a bit more thought into naming — and ease of pronunciation. But I didn’t, so we’re both stuck with my silly choice of name.
I’d been collecting online and offline quotations since the mid-80s, so I naturally thought it would make sense to focus my blogging efforts on sharing at least a few of those quotes. Some bloggers just naturally churn out brilliant and incisive essays on the issues of the day. Others post quick-hitting news or funny comments with links to other resources. I’m neither witty nor incisive, so I settled on the laziest way to fill the page: linking to a lot of those other sites run by far better writers, but including at least a few paragraphs from the linked article to entice my reader (or readers, on a good day) to click on the link and go read the entire original post.
Initially, the blog was kind of an adjunct to my quotation collection, but the blog soon ate the original quotes site … I’m ashamed to admit just how rarely I edit anything there these days.
Typical blog content is really an online incarnation of what used to be called “commonplace books” where a writer would collect information of interest that didn’t necessarily relate to the writer’s main interests or to anything else added to the book, as this summary explains:
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
“Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós) which means “a general or common topic”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton’s example. Scholars now understand them to include manuscripts in which an individual collects material which have a common theme, such as ethics, or exploring several themes in one volume. Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.
I think that’s a pretty good description of most blogs, and certainly is true of Quotulatiousness.
Earlier anniversary postings:
- Twenty-one years of Quotulatiousness
- Twentieth anniversary
- Nineteenth anniversary
- Eighteenth anniversary
- Seventeenth anniversary
- Sixteenth anniversary
- Fifteenth anniversary
- Fourteenth anniversary
- Thirteenth anniversary
- Twelfth anniversary
- Eleventh anniversary
- Tenth anniversary
- Ninth anniversary
- Eighth anniversary
- Seventh anniversary
- Sixth anniversary
Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon’s site — aren’t accessible any more. With the move to my own site, I switched from MovableType to self-hosted WordPress (currently running version 6.9.4).
The state of Britain – “Where did it all go wrong?”
Reposted from Samizdata with Patrick Crozier’s kind permission. Parallels to the same period of history here in Canada or in Australia or New Zealand should be fully evident to my fellow former colonials:
The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak.
So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates:
2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis.
Had the banks just been allowed to go bust and the banking regulation that reduced their numbers abolished we would not be looking at 20 lost years.1997. Opening the borders.
Allowing the establishment of hostile communities in your country is not a good idea.1987. Leaving the NHS untouched.
By 1987, the Thatcher government had privatised just about everything. Only the NHS and education were left. And they flunked it. Mind you it would probably have been electoral suicide.1969. Failure to defeat the IRA.
If you reward terrorism you get more of it.
[NR: Canada did defeat the FLQ‘s campaign of terrorism and murder … and then basically conceded everything short of full independence that the FLQ had demanded. This is a classic example of winning the war but losing the peace.]1965. Race Relations Act.
Keir Starmer is wrong. Britain does not have a “proud tradition of free speech”. But it did have some free speech. This act along with various successors outlawed some forms of speech. Those successors progressively outlawed freedom of association which might have gone a long way to taking the sting out of the Integration Crisis.
[NR: Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech seems ever more relevant to the daily lives of everyone in the west …]1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty.
I appreciate libertarians tended to be divided on this issue. We may have a lot to say about what the law should be but very little about what should happen when it is broken. But if you are going to end a long-standing tradition it had better work. It didn’t.
[NR: I used to be fully against capital punishment. I’m much less doctrinaire about it now. Some people cannot be rehabilitated, and capital punishment is a better solution than life in prison.]1963. Robbins Committee.
This led to the subsidisation of higher education and the subsidisation of student living costs. Where you get subsidy you get communism.
[NR: Universities have always been hotbeds of progressive thought. From the 1920s onward, they’ve been taken over by ideologues who want to utterly destroy western civilization … and we’ve been handing them ever more money to indoctrinate our young in their beliefs.]c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm.
I got this from the late Brian Micklethwait but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Brian’s point was that if you couldn’t use guns to defend yourself there was very little point in having one and so it became easy for the state to ban them.
[NR: Canada is in the middle of yet another spasm of anti-gun hysteria triggered (you saw what I did there) by events in the United States. There are hopeful signs that Canadian gun owners may yet indulge in peaceful civil disobedience over the the latest attempts to disarm us.]1948. Nationalisation of rail.
Along with coal, steel and many others along the way. Losses, strikes, decline, waste, unemployment.
[NR: Patrick and I began communicating a few years ago when I asked him for additional information about both the 1920s forced consolidation of British railway companies into the “Big Four” and the subsequent full nationalization into British Railways. We clearly agree that this was, whatever its intentions, a bad move for both the railway companies and the nation at large.]1947. Town & Country Planning Act.
Pretty much stopped building anywhere where people might want to live. A huge contributor to putting home ownership out of the reach of millions.
[NR: I heard much more about the zoning issue from American libertarians, but the Town and Country Planning Act was a major leap in bringing government regulation into everyday life in Britain.]1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard.
Inflation and boom and bust became the order of the day.
[NR: In retrospect, this may have been Winston Churchill’s biggest blunder: putting Britain back on the Gold standard at the pre-WW1 rate of exchange.]1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law.
I mean to write about this one day but TL;DR while the Poor Law had many shortcomings it did at least keep people alive while keeping the costs down.
[NR: Orwell’s eloquent writing about the plight of the poor between the wars illustrate a lot of the negatives for the jobless poor of the interwar era. Far be it from me to claim Orwell was wrong … but he didn’t show the entire picture.]1922. Creation of the BBC.
A monopoly communist propaganda organisation using the most powerful media then in existence which non-communists were forced to pay for. What could go wrong?
[NR: The BBC was for a long time constrained in its advocacy for socialist ends, but they kicked off the traces at some point. Canadians will be more familiar with the power of state-sponsored media now that the Canadian government will be paying one-third of the salaries of all the mainstream print and broadcast media outlets … and the media have already transformed into sad parodies of Nazi German or North Korean state media.]1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs.
Other than the crime and changes to the drugs themselves (making them more dangerous than ever), the persistent failure of the War on Drugs gave the state the excuse for ever greater assaults on civil liberties.1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise.
This meant that people could vote themselves other people’s money. It very quickly led to the replacement of the (not very) Liberal Party by the (not-at-all liberal) Labour Party. Mind you, it should be pointed out that a lot of the damage was done well before.1910. People’s Budget et al.
In introducing the state pension, a state GP service and unemployment benefit this laid the foundations of the Welfare State that is currently doing such a good job of bankrupting the country.1910. Payment of MPs.
I put this one in tentatively. I would like to say it meant Members of Parliament no longer had to have made something of themselves but given that a large number of them came from rich families that is not quite true.1906. Taff Vale Judgement.
This effectively put trade unions above the law leading to endless strikes, uncompetitiveness, industrial decline and unemployment.
[NR: This was an understandable concession when unions were all in the private sector. Now that the plurality, if not outright majority of union members are government workers …]1890s. Death Duties.
Bit by bit this destroyed the aristocracy by forcing a fire sale every time the head of the household died. [And that did what exactly, Patrick? Summat! It did summat!]1875. Trade Union Act.
This allowed picketting or the intimidation of non-striking workers by trade unionists. I have to thank Paul Marks for bringing this one to my attention.1870. Forster Act.
This established state education along with all that went along with it such as indoctrination, poor quality education and the opportunity costs involved in children not being able to earn money or learn a trade.1845. Banking Act.
This began the extension of the Bank of England’s monopoly to the whole of the country.Anything I’ve missed?
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How to Make Nazi Germany Look Normal – Death of Democracy 15 – Q4 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 9 May 2026How did Hitler use the 1936 Berlin Olympics to make Nazi Germany look peaceful — while preparing the country for war?
Berlin, September 30, 1936. Under the Olympic flame, Nazi Germany staged one of the most successful propaganda spectacles of the twentieth century. Foreign visitors saw order, ceremony, technology, pageantry, and athletic triumph. But behind the facade, the regime hid antisemitic persecution, rounded up Sinti and Roma, intensified police repression, intervened in the Spanish Civil War, and moved toward a massive new war economy.
In this episode, Spartacus Olsson looks back at the third quarter of 1936: the Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens’ victories, Hitler’s secret war memorandum, the Four-Year Plan, Nazi propaganda, Germany’s growing involvement in Spain, and the dictatorship’s attempt to sell peace to the world while preparing for conquest.
The Olympics gave Hitler international validation. The Four-Year Plan revealed what he truly intended.
In this episode:
– How Nazi Germany sanitized Berlin before the Olympic Games
– How the regime temporarily hid antisemitic violence from foreign visitors
– How Sinti and Roma were forced out of sight before the Games
– How Jesse Owens challenged Nazi racial mythology on the track
– How Hitler moved Germany toward a war economy
– How the Four-Year Plan tied German recovery to rearmament
– How Germany’s intervention in Spain marked a new stage of escalation
– How propaganda, spectacle, and controlled media helped normalize dictatorshipThis is not just a story about the 1936 Olympics. It is a story about how authoritarian regimes use spectacle, national pride, media control, and international complacency to hide what they are becoming.
Never Forget.
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