The public school phenomenon, which probably isn’t a euphemism but we’ll use it as one. You know, the whole “beatings and buggery” thing, and I’m going to stop now, because of course you know what I mean. Lots of Old Boys from all tiers of the public school system really did go out to run the Empire because they wanted to escape Victorian women, who were indeed as bad as that in a lot of cases (again, think “Karen on steroids”). But how much of that “to escape women” thing was because the women were awful, and how much of it was because the Old Boys were not-very-repressed homos?
This is where modern identity politics really messes up historical analysis. We probably all know that the vast majority of Victorian homosexuals were married, because the vast majority of Victorians were married. This isn’t my professional field, but because I went to grad school I’m pretty well up on it – the ivory tower finds Victorian poofters endlessly fascinating, because they are huge homo cheerleaders (obviously), but also because of the costumes.
Women and gay men love playing dress up — have you noticed? — and Victorian dress up is the best, because it’s a) expensive, and b) time consuming, but also c) flattering to just about any body type. It was socially acceptable among the upper classes to be porky (and nobody dresses up like a chimney sweep or factory hand), so both men’s and women’s fashion in the Late Victorian era can accommodate modern bodies. (Unlike the early Victorian era, which continued Regency fashion. They’d love to dress up Regency style — there’s a reason “Regency romance” is the most popular genre of light porno books for cat ladies — but it takes a specific physical type to pull off, and they don’t have it). […]
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah — lots of people in grad school really, really into Victorian queers, so if I seem extremely well informed on this topic, don’t read too much into it.
“Repressed homosexual” was redundant back then. Oscar Wilde, for instance, was sort of the ur-homo — he was so gay, just gazing too long at a picture of him at his dandiest could give you an uncomfortably strong urge to touch a penis. […] Oscar Wilde was also married, and had two children, because that’s how even the queerest of the queer rolled in Victorian London.
Given that, you’d expect one of two things to happen to public schoolboys once they got out into the bush. Either they’d totally let their freak flag fly — you know, given that everyone else in their social world was an equally repressed public schoolboy — or they’d bottle it up even further, because it was important to show nothing but the best image of Her Majesty’s servants to the wogs at all times.
As far as I know, the latter was almost universally the case. Before the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), you could have a nonstop bacchanalia over there … if you were straight. Those guys could, and did, rock the casbah with extreme prejudice. It started tapering off early in Victoria’s reign, but in the late 1700s you had British army officers converting to Islam (no, really) for the express purpose of getting even more tail, by marrying the Koranically sanctioned four wives (sometimes with all the age of consent queasiness that implies).
The repressed homos, on the other hand, got really into scholarship. It’s not generally known (because even then the vast majority of their works were of interest only to micro-specialists) but Anglo-Indians were insanely productive scholars, on every conceivable topic. You could fill a decent sized library with their five-, seven-, nine-volume works on Sanskrit philology, and the botany of the lower Himalayas, or the migratory habits of tigers, or pretty much anything. And if they weren’t the scholarly sort, the repressed homos simply threw themselves into their work, of which there was always an endless supply — take a look at a map of India, recall that there were at most 200,000 Britons in the whole place, and you’ll see what I mean.
So: Were they going out there to get away from Victorian women? Absolutely. Were they therefore going to turn the place into Studio 54? Absolutely not.
Severian, “Ruling Caste II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-10.
December 13, 2025
QotD: Victorian mores, homosexuality, and the Empire
December 12, 2025
British Columbia’s embrace of UNDRIP entails vast unintended consequences
The government of British Columbia may have downplayed or even deliberately lied about the impact of incorporating the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) into BC’s legal system, but I suspect even they are suddenly realizing just what a legal disaster they have unleashed on their province (and indirectly, on the rest of Canada):
A map showing the Cowichan title lands outlined in black. These lands were declared subject to Aboriginal title by the BC Supreme Court earlier this year, in accordance with the UNDRIP provisions added to BC law in 2019.
When the B.C. NDP introduced a 2019 act committing the province to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), they very specifically assured critics that it would not be a “veto” over existing laws.
“The UN declaration does not contain the word veto, nor does the legislation contemplate or create a veto”, Scott Fraser, the province’s then Indigenous relations minister, told the B.C. Legislative Assembly.
Fraser explained that it was not “bestowing any new laws”, it would not “create any new rights” and it certainly wouldn’t make B.C. subservient to a UN declaration.
Fraser would even explicitly assure British Columbians that there was no conceivable future in which, say, a private landowner could suddenly see their property declared Aboriginal land.
“We are not creating a bill here that is designed to have our laws struck down,” he said.
That it only took six years for all of these scenarios to take place may explain why there is so much panic in B.C. right now.
The newly appointed head of the B.C. Conservative Party is calling for an emergency Christmas session of the legislature to excise UNDRIP from provincial law, saying it has become an anti-democratic tool.
Even B.C. Premier David Eby — a onetime champion of the legislation — has said that “clearly, amendments are needed”.
And British Columbians, whose support for the UN law was already not great, are growing restless. According to an Angus Reid Institute poll released on Wednesday, Eby ranks as one of the least popular provincial leaders in the country.
What changed was a Dec. 5 B.C. Appeals Court ruling that not only struck down a B.C. law (the Mineral Tenure Act) on the grounds that it violated UNDRIP, but effectively ruled that any law or government action could similarly be overturned if it wasn’t in line with the 32-page UN declaration.
By writing UNDRIP into B.C. law, the province had adopted the Declaration as “the interpretive lens through which B.C. laws must be viewed and the minimum standards against which they should be measured”, read the majority decision.
Although UNDRIP is mostly filled with uncontroversial declarations about languages and traditional medicine, its clauses are pretty uncompromising when it comes to issues of land use or resource development.
“Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired”, reads a subsection of Article 26. It also states that Indigenous peoples “own, use, develop and control” any land that they’ve held traditionally.
Eby is saying that the courts took it too far, and that writing UNDRIP into B.C. law was only ever meant as a holistic decision-making guide, rather than a law superceding all others.
As Eby told reporters this week, by signing onto UNDRIP, B.C. wasn’t intending to put courts “in the driver’s seat”.
If You Want to Start Woodworking — Build This First
Rex Krueger
Published 10 Dec 2025Join the Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/g3rkmv
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Re-orient your map to understand China’s view of the world
CDR Salamander provides a helpful guide to seeing the world, specifically their Pacific front, by turning your map sideways. I hope you won’t look back on this from a slightly later date when the maps get all flaggy and arrow-y:
I first saw this map three years ago, and it recently resurfaced in my thoughts.
I remain convinced that a lot of the problem with trying to get everyone to fully understand the challenge in the Western Pacific is that to a large part, we think in a “north-up” orientation.
I don’t think that is all that helpful.
Just a few days ago, we had another Pearl Harbor Day anniversary and we’ve all seen the maps, usually centered on Hawaii, where the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Kidō Butai comes at the Pacific Fleet from stage left off the map. Then we fought battles in the Coral Sea, Midway, and so on.
To the lay eye — or to those who don’t have time to dig into the reasons — a traditional north-up map looks disjointed; things seem all over the place.
No, not really. Let’s bring back that first map.
[Click to embiggenate]
For both Imperial Japan in the early-mid 20th century and Communist China today, the most important part of this map is the access to the resources in or going through the bottom-right hand corner.
Today’s greatest bone of contention — not unrelated to the most important part of the map mentioned above — is Taiwan, right at the mouth of the funnel.
If we need to bring a fight there, that is one hell of a fight to get there if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to prepare a proper welcome for us.
For the PRC, the primary military threat to plan for comes across the Pacific into a funnel that terminates at its most important SLOC. It’s the United States of America, and the US has a series of islands leading right into the heart of the PRC’s. It starts in Hawaii — Midway, Wake, Guam — and then to U.S. allies: the Philippines, Japan, and Australia.
They’re planning a layered defensive fight. Their actions make that clear.
Make no mistake, we may say we are going to “defend Taiwan”, but to do that we will have to fight an aggressive war across the Pacific, into the enemy’s prepared funnel.
Update, 13 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.
Starships and Walls : Which Shall We Build?
Feral Historian
Published 25 Jul 2025While faster than light travel may be impossible, proclaiming absolutes based on the understanding of a particular time has a spotty record. But even if we are limited to sublight travel by the fundamental nature of the universe, we as a civilization have several macro-level choices to make, one of the most significant being which foundational concept do we want to build a future on: Ships? Or walls?
00:00 Intro
01:50 The Athenian Sailor
05:25 Frontiers
06:00 Assuming it’s Impossible
07:26 Picard Without Starfleet?
09:40 Culture over Economics
15:28 Founders of Worlds🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
QotD: Crime and the army
But in the Army, “crime” is capable of infinite shades of intensity. It simply means “misdemeanor”, and may range from being unshaven on parade, or making a frivolous complaint about the potatoes at dinner, to irrevocably perforating your rival in love with a bayonet. So let party politicians, when they discourse vaguely to their constituents about “the prevalence of crime in the Army under the present effete and undemocratic system”, walk warily.
Ian Hay (Major John Hay Beith), The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of “K(1)”, 1916.
December 11, 2025
US Democrats, like Canadian Liberals, love performative gestures but ghost on delivery
I’ve remarked many times that Canada’s federal Liberals love themselves some photo ops, sound bites, ribbon-cuttings, and making announcements in front of temporary stages … they can’t help themselves, they’re what happens to theatre kids who don’t have to grow up. The American Democrats seem to be falling into the same pattern of “putting on a show” rather than implementing policies that address whatever the declared problem really is:
In 2015, the City of Los Angeles announced an ambitious plan (led by the person we then referred to as Mayor Yogapants) to completely eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. It was a vision: Vision Zero, they called it. Ten years later, traffic deaths in Los Angeles have doubled. A wonderfully progressive local government announced a plan to eliminate something, so we got much more of that thing. A community group, @peoplesvisionzero, is now trying to carry out some version of the failed plan with guerilla traffic engineering, sneaking new safety infrastructure into place without city permission. Recent result:
In similar fashion, Gavin Newsom announced his ten-year plan to end California homelessness in 2008. I struggle with the math, but there’s a possibility that we’ve passed the ten-year mark since then. […]
Theater-kid governance is the empty-to-the-point-of-ruin declaration of a symbol-desire, a performance about what we want and don’t want. It doesn’t do anything; it’s a posture, not an action. To the extent that it does do any actual thing in physical reality, it creates pots of money to be looted by NGOs and metastasizing government bureaucracies.
Infamously, when California audited $24 billion in state homelessness spending last year, auditors couldn’t track where a bunch of the spending went, or figure out what it had paid for. See also the growing scandal over Somalian immigrant social services fraud in Minnesota. Facial expressions are made. Symbols are invoked. Money goes … somewhere. It’s a show, with a rich loot bucket, not an actionable set of policies that produce positive trends toward declared goals. By the way, it’s been fifteen years since the Obama administration and a Democratic-majority Congress made healthcare affordable.
California infrastructure is a persistent disaster, because the California legislature and our sociopathic idiot governor are deeply invested in signaling about warm and wonderful trans kids and standing up to Mean Orange Hitler. They don’t stoop to highways and bridges — they’re much too progressive. Related, the increasingly sharp near-term projected decline of fuel production in California is becoming a national security problem in a state that needs to gas up a lot of military traffic. The state performs constantly against Big Oil and its mean climate change agenda, and somehow keeps losing refineries. The endless symbol-gestures cause the loss of real things.
Lines of Fire: Operation Market Garden Part 2 of 2 – WW2 in Animated Maps
TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 10 Dec 2025September 17, 1944. A slight morning fog over Britain gives way to clear skies, as the first of hundreds of Allied aircraft leave the ground to execute the largest airborne operation ever attempted. Will Montgomery’s gamble pay off? Or are the Germans in the Netherlands far less beaten than he believes? Last time out we covered the planning, rationale, and logistics of the idea. Now, watch it unfold from beginning to end, map by map.
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Your words are violence to an astounding 91% of US college students surveyed
J.D. Tuccille presents some depressing poll results from American college students who have massively bought into the illogical position that words can be the same as actual violence:
Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former. After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.
Most Believe Words Can Be Violence
“Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] and College Pulse”, FIRE announced last week. “The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.”
The survey posed questions about speech and political violence to undergraduate students at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was murdered, and at colleges elsewhere — 2,028 students overall. FIRE and College Pulse compared the student responses to those of members of the general public who were separately polled.
Specifically, one question asked how much “words can be violence” described respondents’ thoughts. Twenty-two percent of college undergraduates answered that the sentiment “describes my thoughts completely”, 25 percent said it “mostly” described their thoughts, 28 percent put it at “somewhat”, and 15 percent answered “slightly”. Only 9 percent answered that the “words can be violence” sentiment “does not describe my thoughts at all”.
It’s difficult to get too worked up about those who “slightly” believe words can be violence, but that still leaves us at 75 percent of the student population. And almost half of students “completely” or “mostly” see words and violence as essentially the same thing. That’s a lot of young people who struggle to distinguish between an unwelcome expression and a punch to the nose.
Depressingly, 34 percent of the general public “completely” or “mostly” agree. Fifty-nine percent at least “somewhat” believe words can be violence.
In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that “growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers” and that the rise in mental health issues “is better understood as a crisis of resilience”.
Conflating Words and Violence Encourages Violence
Telling young people who haven’t been raised to be resilient and to deal with the certainty of encountering debate, disagreement, and rude or hateful expressions in an intellectually and ideologically diverse world plays into problems with anxiety and depression. It teaches that the world is more dangerous than it actually is rather than a place that requires a certain degree of toughness. Worse, if words are violence it implies that responding “in kind” is justified.
“At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence,” Haidt and Lukianoff added.
Britain’s Top 10 UGLIEST Aircraft
Rex’s Hangar
Published 13 Aug 2022Today we take a look at the top 10 ugliest aircraft every to grace the skies of the United Kingdom. Some were failures, some were hugely successful, but all were lacking in the good looks department, lets check out these ugly planes!
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QotD: Being a bore
My problem is that I have two modes of socializing: to be silent or boring. I cannot make small talk, for when I try to do so my words turn to dust in my mouth, as it were, before I have even uttered them. I can talk only on matters of impersonal interest.
My problem is that I am a serial monomaniac, with one subject occupying the foreground of my mind for up to a few months. In the midst of my enthusiasm, I cannot imagine that other people are not as fascinated by the subject as I. The subject of my monomanias are various: Haitian history; the disappearance of the cuckoo from the English countryside; the life of Caradoc Evans, the Welsh writer of the early part of the 20th century; etc. I never stick with anything long enough to be a scholar of it.
When my wife kicks me under the table, it is usually in mid-anecdote. I cannot stop straightaway, abruptly, for that would look peculiar, as if I were having a fit or a stroke. But I have to bring it to a quicker end than I had anticipated, omitting details that to me had seemed choice and amusing. Often, I have to admit, my wife has heard them before.
Of course, I don’t agree that I am being, or have ever been, boring. Bores don’t know that they are boring, just as people with halitosis don’t know that their breath smells. I look at the people around the dinner table and think they are glued to what I am saying. The fact that I don’t really give them any alternative doesn’t occur to me. How, in any case, could anyone be uninterested in the story of le Roi Christophe who built, or had built, one of the wonders of the world, La Citadelle, near Cap-Haitien, or of how people threw bricks through Caradoc Evans’ windows, so disgusted were they by his literary portrayal of his countrymen? In those days, literature was important.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Full Bore”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-05-29.
December 10, 2025
Fantasy or Sci-Fi? I Pick …
Jill Bearup
Published 28 Jul 2025Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, what have you done this time?
Let us stop lying to children about the world they’ll have to face
Recommendations for good books intended for young readers is pretty far from my usual bailiwick, so I’ll let John Carter step in with his suggestion that Fables for Young Wolves is worth your attention:
“You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.” – Sicario (2015)
Children’s literature has gotten soft. Disney turned every woodland creature into a cute little forest friend, and tacked a happy ending onto every dark fairy tale. The bloodstains were scrubbed out, death was swept under the rug, and the moral lessons became saccharine platitudes about being kind and sharing … a helpful aid to management of kindergarten classrooms, perhaps, but worse than useless for the moral instruction of the young, who will one day need to navigate a world where the shadows of the human soul conceal sharpened knives, and the truth is not always what well-meaning young women with associates degrees in early childhood education might wish. Children go along with it, but deep down they know that they’re being lied to, that the adult are keeping something from them when they pretend that every story has a happy ending, that everyone can be friends and get along if they’re just sufficiently nice to one another.
Contemporary children’s literature has gotten even worse under the pressure of politics, with bookshelves filling with stories about antiracist babies who grow up to become boys who become girls, and girls who save themselves from dragons and therefore don’t need help from the boys who foolishly refused to become girls. This is less moral instruction than moral inversion, literature meant to turn children against their own natures, stories that deliberately deceive developing minds in order to neuter them, soften them, make them malleable and unthreatening for a managerial culture in which the socially acceptable lie is always preferable to the uncomfortable truth.
Fables For Young Wolves is not that sort of book.
Triumph of the Wolves by Ernest Thompson Seton (1892)
The stories in Fables For Young Wolves are true fables in the Aesopian tradition: tales in which animals are used as symbols for particular facets of human character, or for particular kinds of humans. Foxes are wily, crows are wise but conniving, pigs are greedy and vulgar, asses are stupid, sheep are conformist and dull, dogs are loyal but credulous.
For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of the several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent. – Apollonius, on Aesop (quoted in the foreword).
The titular wolves around whom the fables revolve are true wolves: noble, cruel, cunning, vicious enemies to their foes but faithful to a fault to their friends, playing roles of villain, victim, and hero as each tale requires. As the most psychologically complex of the animals, they stand for everything that is highest in the human soul, and so are also suited to plumb the depths. These are not Disneyfied vegan wolves that make friends with rabbits: these wolves are hunters and killers, and unashamed of it.
Illustration by Monachvs.
Thomas O. Bethlehem‘s fables are intended, as all fables should be, to impart lessons about human nature and about the world, not as we might wish it to be but as it is, with the intent that the young reader will be guided away from bad decisions and towards the good. Many of the stories are anecdotes of a couple of pages, which communicate simple ideas about controlling your base impulses, having your friend’s back, knowing who your real friends are, the consequences of helping those who cannot be helped, and so on. Interspersed between these are longer and more psychologically complex tales which build upon well-known folk-tales such as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, “The Three Little Pigs”, “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”, and “Little Red Riding Hood”.
The Korean War Week 77: The Korean Winter Bites Hard – December 9, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 9 Dec 2025Now that they’ve agreed on a Demarcation Line, the talk this week at the Panmunjom peace talks has turned to whether there will be restrictions or not after the signing of an armistice. Also, how would inspections work to make sure the other side is complying with the armistice terms? Perhaps a group of representatives from neutral nations? Meanwhile the troops are digging in to their winter defenses, as the frozen Korean winter descends upon them.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:48 Recap
01:16 Two New Points
08:42 Korean Winter
11:47 Communist Defenses
13:20 Summary
13:33 Conclusion
14:28 Call to Action
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Murmurs of dissent from within Canada’s supply management cartel
At Juno News, Sylvain Charlebois shares a sign of internal dissent inside the supply management system that prioritizes protecting producers at the cost of significantly higher prices and reduced choice for Canadian consumers — not to mention getting Trump’s attention (and anger) for shutting out American competitors:
Every once in a while, someone inside a tightly protected system decides to say the quiet part out loud. That is what Joel Fox, a dairy farmer from the Trenton, Ontario area, did recently in the Ontario Farmer newspaper. In a candid open letter, Fox questioned why established dairy farmers like himself continue to receive increasingly large government payouts — even though the sector is not shrinking, but expanding. His piece, titled “We continue to privatize gains, socialize losses“, did not come from an economist or a critic of supply management. It came from someone who benefits from it. And yet his message was unmistakable: the numbers no longer add up.
Fox’s letter marks something we have not seen in years — a rare moment of internal dissent from a system that usually speaks with one voice. It is the first meaningful crack since the viral milk-dumping video by Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen, who filmed himself being forced to dump thousands of litres of perfectly good milk because of quota rules. Huigen’s video exposed contradictions inside supply management, but the system quickly closed ranks. Until now. Fox has reopened a conversation that has been dormant for far too long.
In his letter, Fox admitted he would cash his latest $14,000 Dairy Direct Payment Program (DDPP) cheque, despite believing the program wastes taxpayer money. The DDPP was created to offset supposed losses from trade agreements like CETA, CPTPP, and CUSMA. These deals were expected to reduce Canada’s dairy market. But those “losses” are theoretical — based on models and assumptions about future erosion in market share. Meanwhile, domestic dairy demand has strengthened.
Which raises the obvious question: why are we compensating dairy farmers for producing less when they are, in fact, producing more?
This month, dairy farmers received another 1% quota increase, on top of several increases totalling 4% to 5% in recent years. Quota — the right to produce milk — only increases when more supply is needed. If trade deals had truly devastated the sector, quota would be falling, not rising. Instead, Canada’s population has grown by nearly six million since 2015, processors have expanded, and consumption remains stable. The market is expanding.
Understanding what quota is makes the contradiction clearer. Quota is a government-created financial asset worth $24,000 to $27,000 per kilogram of butterfat. A mid-sized dairy farm may hold $2.5 million in quota. Over the past few years, cumulative quota increases of 5% or more have automatically added $120,000 to $135,000 to the value of a typical farm’s quota — entirely free. Larger farms see even greater windfalls. Across the entire dairy system, these increases represent hundreds of millions of dollars in newly created quota value, likely exceeding $500 million in added wealth — generated not through innovation or productivity, but by regulatory decision.
