Anyway, that’s the reason Leftists discovered Postmodernism. As Stephen R.C. Hicks puts it in his Explaining Postmodernism — a very useful book — Postmodernism is the only way the intelligentsia could acknowledge Marxism’s failure without losing faith in Socialism. Look at the actual behavior of any professed Socialist; it’s obvious they don’t believe a word they’re saying (Bernie Sanders says hi, from one of his four vacation homes). But they’ve built their entire lives around being Socialists — and very nice lives they are, too (the average American university professor, who pulls down something like $100K per annum, says hi).
Cognitive dissonance isn’t a thing on the Left, obviously, but that’s a bridge too far. So they went all in on Postmodernism. It’s not a fact that Socialism ends in poverty and mountains of corpses everywhere it’s implemented, comrades, because there’s no such thing as a “fact”. Those peasants eating rats, shoes, and each other on their way to the Ultimate Collectivism? Mere social constructions. And so on.
The Postmodernists have done irreparable damage to every language they’ve written in, but that’s a feature, not a bug. And the reason for that is: If you translate their gibberish into plain language, they really only have one idea, and it’s horrifying: There is nothing in this world but Power.
If that sounds like cheap knockoff Nietzsche to you, comrades, that’s because it is. It’s also the sum total of Michel Foucault’s life work, and Foucault was such a cheap Nietzsche knockoff, he should’ve been made by slave labor in Shandong and sold on Amazon. Lenin reduced all politics to two questions — “Who?” “Whom?” — and Foucault expanded that reduction to cover all of human behavior. Your “life”, on Foucault’s reading, is nothing but the sum of your power relations. Subject / object; subjection / domination; there are a million ugly polysyllabic ways to say it, but it all boils down to power relations: Either you have power over someone, or they have power over you.
That’s it. All the stuff we’d call “humanity” — love, friendship, sorrow, joy, aesthetic experience of all sorts, to say nothing of religious experience — are all meaningless. Category errors. If we appear to experience these things, comrades, it’s just because we’re seduced by the surface of things. Give it a proper “unmasking” — another favorite bit of Foucauldian jargon — and you’ll see the power relations, the false consciousness. You don’t “love” your wife and children; you just enjoy the power you have over them, your ownership of their minds and bodies (“What is happiness?” Nietzsche famously asked. “The feeling that power is growing; that resistance is overcome”). Similarly, your boss at work feels no “duty”, to either you or the company. He enjoys his power over you, but grovels to the bigger bosses who have power over him.
Submission and domination. That’s it. That’s all there is to human existence. (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Foucault was really into rough gay sex, and died of AIDS in 1984. Nor is there any cosmic irony about the year of his death).
Severian, “Power”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-02.
October 25, 2025
October 24, 2025
The future is feminine … maybe
William M. Briggs celebrates the feminine future by celebrating the end of a matriarchy in Greek mythology:
An obvious cause, but of course not the sole problem, is our anti-discrimination laws. These enforce DIE and the Great Feminization (David Stove, decades ago, saw it all coming in his essay “Jobs for the Girls“), which always choke out even hints of manliness. A solution would thus seem to be expurgating this great and terrible body of enervating law.
Alas, that would require men. Congress is unable even to decide what time it is. It will never summon the testicular fortitude to cancel the Civil Rights Act. It does not need to be so.
Perhaps you recall Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, which tells the tale of Theseus and his slaying of the Minotaur. Theseus travels to Athens to fulfill his destiny, but must first pass through Eleusis, where he finds himself in a battle to the death with the King. He wins, but discovers that King is only a ceremonial role; the occupant’s main job is to die each year. During his year-long reign, all his appetites are sated by the queen and her attendants, and he becomes weak.
Eleusis is, of course, a matriarchy. The culture enslaved to a desultory Earth Mother cult. The men soft and unable to deal with hostile neighbors. Theseus bucks tradition, gathers a group of men, the Companions, and goes out to take care of business. He then marches back into Eleusis and declares the restoration of the patriarchy. The queen, in one last defiant girl-boss move, reveals she has taken an abortifacient to kill Theseus’s child. She takes poison and sails off to die.
Theseus installs his Companions into all key positions, institutes a new religion based on knowledge instead of human sacrifice, instructs the men their time in the Longhouse is over, and that is that. The transition takes place in a day.
That is the most true-to-life part of the novel. That instant switch. After all, if the men were united, what could the women do? Women applying force and violence only happens in the movies. Women call for men to do violence on their behalf. But if men have the courage to say no, then that is that.
Now, of course, men do not say no, argues Andrews, and do not have the courage to, either. The Longhouse issues edicts and the men obey, their own appetites well enough satisfied. What next?
Our own John Carter reasons, correctly I think, that the Great Feminization is self-limiting.
It’s also probably no accident that the Trump administration seems to care a lot more about what the anons of the Online Right say than it does about the opinion of the universities or the news media. All the intelligent young men got pushed out of the institutions, and those ionized particles of free male energy then began to self-assemble online into an ad hoc competence hierarchy where prestige is measured by clout rather than professional degrees, job titles, or institutional affiliations. The anon swarm is entirely informal, meaning that its outcomes are not amenable to antidiscrimination legislation or to procedural manipulation; you can screw with the algo all you want but you can’t actually force people to care what women say just because they’re women (thereby placing women into the position of openly trading in thirst, which gets them attention but certainly doesn’t mean that anyone has to pretend to take them seriously).
All that’s happened so far is that people’s attention has been redirected away from crazy woke females and towards the influencers of the online right. The fever has broken but society is a long way from recovered. The institutions are still under the control of crazy woke females, and this is extremely bad, especially because they are — for biological reasons related to childlessness — only going to get crazier as time goes on. Fortunately no one really cares what they say anymore, so as they throw tantrums as the institutions are reclaimed over the next decade or so, their protests won’t register as anything but irrelevant toddler noise.
We still have to hurdle those “rights” laws, because they are still driving behavior of all large organizations. They can be purged or be forgotten. To purge requires Theseus-like courage. To forget requires we first suffer.
Get ready to suffer.
Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s Thatcher?
In UnHerd, Christopher Harding profiles the new Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, the first female PM who was elected to office on the 21st:
Sanae Takaichi, new Prime Minister of Japan, 21 October, 2025
Photo by the Cabinet Public Affairs Office via Wikimedia Commons.
As a teenager, Sanae Takaichi no doubt riled her parents now and again with her love of motorbikes and heavy metal. Today, poised to become Japan’s first female prime minister at the age of 64, she is polarising a nation. Some credit “Japan’s Iron Lady” with the steely resolve required to tackle the country’s domestic problems and stand up to China. Others lament the apparent fact that to succeed as a woman in Japanese politics you have to adopt the worst instincts of the men, from policies that prop up the patriarchy — men only on the imperial throne, compulsory shared surnames for married couples — to a nativist ultranationalism.
While Takaichi’s premiership will represent a milestone for modern Japan, it’s important in Japanese politics not to place too much weight on the frontman — or woman. The reality is more like one of those bands where the bassist writes the songs but, disliking the limelight, hires a series of relatively disposable vocalists to present them to the public. Alongside machinations in her own party, the LDP, where senior background figures largely decide who gets the premiership and how long they keep it, Takaichi’s fortunes may come to depend on how she deals with two intertwined issues: the economy and immigration.
First, the economy. People in Japan, and the young in particular, are furious about a combination of high taxes, low wage-growth, rising inflation and insecure job prospects. Japanese governments of the past 30 years have struggled with some or all of these problems, trying and largely failing to find solutions against the backdrop of a national debt that has now ballooned to an extraordinary 235% of GDP.
One of the reasons why Japan’s economic problems have been so intractable in recent years is the country’s rapidly declining population — now shrinking by almost a million people every year. Nearly a third of Japanese people are over the age of 65 and after years of hard graft, they expect to be looked after in old age. But that takes money and it takes carers. Japan is short on both. Nursing has long been in crisis, with just one applicant now for every four jobs advertised.
Back in the 2010s, the hope was that “care bots” might see to the needs of the elderly and infirm, freeing up younger people to increase productivity in the wider economy. But the widespread deployment of humanoid caregivers is not expected until well into the 2030s, if ever, in part because of the level of mechanical precision combined with advanced AI required of a robot designed to look after humans. Even robots that simply provide companionship have turned out to be prohibitively expensive and to require a self-defeating level of human oversight: charging them, fixing them, getting them from A to B.
Update, 26 October:
British and Irish media try to hide the crime that triggered Dublin riot
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill on the complicity of British and Irish media in trying to cover up the reasons behind the violence in Dublin outside a hotel housing migrants:
Last night, the BBC told one of the grossest lies of omission I have ever seen in the mainstream media. It published a report about the disturbances outside a migrant hotel in County Dublin and nowhere did it mention what triggered the riotous behaviour. Three hundred and eighty-seven words pumped into the gadgets of the masses, every one of them devoted to damning the “thuggery” of those who assembled at the hotel. Not one of the words – not one – addressed the thing that angered them.
What was that thing? It was the alleged sexual assault of a 10-year-old Irish girl by a failed “asylum seeker” on the grounds of the hotel. An alleged assault so serious that the girl was hospitalised. What’s more, this is a highly vulnerable girl in the care of the state. Maybe none of that matters to the BBC. Perhaps the alleged violation of a defenceless innocent by a man who was meant to have been deported from Ireland is immaterial to the aloof scribes of Britain’s public broadcaster. How else do we explain that they essentially redacted this information, one of the most salient parts of the story, from their initial dispatch on the fury gripping a community across the Irish Sea?
The irony of the BBC’s seeming indifference to the alleged horror that provoked last night’s disturbances is that it will compound the unrest on the streets. Indeed, it will confirm the sense that the media classes, in Dublin and beyond, give not one toss for the safety of people’s children or the validity of their own views on immigration. In so heartlessly erasing that girl from its early reportage, the BBC will have intensified the fiery anger of the very “thugs” it hates.
The disturbances made for unpleasant viewing. They took place outside Citywest Hotel in Saggart, a town in County Dublin about 12 miles from Dublin city. This is a hotel that just last month was sold to the state for €148million for the purposes of housing migrants. Then this week, an assault of the most appalling kind allegedly took place either on its grounds or in its vicinity. A girl was hospitalised, and a man in his thirties was arrested.
The details are distressing. The 10-year-old girl was in the care of the Irish Child and Family Agency. She reportedly absconded from staff during a recreational trip to Dublin city. She was reported missing to An Garda Siochana (the Irish police). She was later found close to Citywest Hotel and reported that she had been assaulted. As part of their investigations, the Gardaí have arrested a man who arrived in Ireland six years ago, who failed in his application for asylum, and who has been the subject of a deportation order since March.
Everyone must let the investigation take its course and the truth be ascertained. The anger of the people of Saggart is wholly understandable but riotous violence is never the answer. Cops outside Citywest were pelted with a volley of bottles. Brick walls were dismantled to turn into projectiles to hurl at the guards. At one point, Irish lads even charged the police lines with horse-drawn sulkies (carts). These were grim scenes, echoing the riot that rocked Dublin city in November 2023 following the stabbing of three children by a man from Algeria.
Not the Bee has some video clips of the scenes outside the Citywest migrant hotel.
Update, 27 October: 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.
The Picnic at the Battle of Bull Run
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 20 May 2025Nutmeg and brandy pound cake with roast beef sandwiches, lemonade, and berries
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1824In the beginning of the American Civil War, no one expected the fighting to go on for very long. Not wanting to miss out on any of the action, a crowd of spectators gathered a couple of miles from the battlefield at the First Battle of Bull Run. They enjoyed the boom of cannon fire and picnic lunches of sandwiches, pies, and cakes, before fleeing for their lives in a mad dash when the battle turned against the Union.
This pound cake is denser than modern versions because it contains no chemical leavener, but it’s not stodgy and is delicious. The nutmeg comes through and you get the flavor of the brandy without it being boozy.
To complete your picnic and recreate some simple sandwiches from 1857, butter slices of white bread, layer on sliced roast beef and Dijon mustard, then trim off the crusts. I don’t usually put butter on my sandwiches, but it was really nice.
Pound Cake.
Wash the salt from a pound of butter and rub it till it is soft as cream, have ready a pound of flour sifted, one of powdered sugar, and twelve eggs well beaten; put alternately into the butter, sugar, flour and the froth from the eggs; continuing to beat them together till all the ingredients are in, and the cake quite light; add some grated lemon peel, a nutmeg, and a gill of brandy; butter the pans and bake them.
— The Virginia House-Wife by Mary Randolph, 1824.Sandwiches for travelling may be made of the lean of cold beef, (roast or boiled,) cut very thin, seasoned with French mustard, and laid between two slices of bread and butter.
— Miss Leslie’s New Cookery Book, 1857
QotD: What airlines could learn from supermarkets
Mark Steyn, “Flight From Reality”, The Spectator, 2001-11-17.
October 23, 2025
Alberta considers rule changes to get rid of the “Longest Ballot” pranksters
The last couple of elections Pierre Poilievre has fought attracted the attention of a group of activists who claim their shenanigans are directed at effecting changes in our electoral system, by flooding the field with frivolous candidates to somehow change how we elect our members of parliament. It’s odd that these serial efforts were directed at the leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition, who has no power to change the electoral system rather than, say, the Prime Minister or his cabinet ministers who, theoretically, do:
Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the last general election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.
On Monday, Alberta Conservative House Leader Joseph Schow mentioned to reporters that the province’s government has legislation in the works to protect the Alberta electoral system from the shenanigans of the Longest Ballot Committee (LBC). That’s the protest group that has been flooding some federal election ballots with spurious candidates — most recently in the federal riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, where Elections Canada had to desperately improvise an all-new write-in system after the LBC persuaded more than 200 people to contest an August by-election.
Kieran Szuchewycz, one of the whimsical conspirators behind the committee, was the person who successfully (and without hired legal counsel) persuaded an Alberta Queen’s Bench judge in 2017 to eliminate statutory election-deposit requirements as unconstitutional. Justice Avril Inglis accepted that the purpose of deposits — which had already been made unconditionally refundable — was to deter frivolous candidates, and that this was desirable and rational.
But she concluded that “it makes little sense to suggest that the deposit requirement achieves any filter other than for those that cannot part with $1,000 for the duration of the election.” Deposits, which had been part of Canadian elections since before Confederation, had suddenly failed the Oakes test. Inglis’s ruling immediately led to an intentional explosion in openly frivolous federal candidacies, engineered by the very same gifted amateur who had talked her into it.
With deposits proclaimed unconstitutional, the only remaining defences against the Longest Ballot Committee’s DDoS attacks on democracy were the requirements for candidates to gather a hundred signatures of constituency residents on their nomination forms and to hire an official agent. The LBC skates around those by recruiting nominators who are willing to endorse anybody, using the same hundred signatures for many candidates, and by providing the same official agent, often somebody named Szuchewycz, to multiple candidates.
These days Mr. Szuchewycz’s brother Tomas is the public face of the LBC: earlier this month he appeared before the House of Commons procedure committee, which has dedicated a few meetings to the subject of LBC tomfoolery. (Kieran, the original smooth talker who got rid of election deposits, is currently listed as “on leave” from the board of electoral-reform group Fair Vote Canada.) There was a heated but unenlightening contretemps between Szuchewycz and Conservative MP Michael Cooper over whether the LBC had used unlawful techniques in their signature-harvesting efforts.
Szuchewycz explained the goals of the LBC ballot-fouling. The group’s supporters and leaders are obviously garden-variety election-reform nerds, but they now focus on the need for taking election design away from the House of Commons and delegating it to an “independent, non-partisan” body. Election reformers have an absolutely terrible track record of advancing their ideas when they’re put to direct referendum tests, and they were hilariously betrayed by Justin Trudeau in the Commons itself, so it is natural that they would seek a side door to the reforms they want. Even if that side door itself has an anti-democratic rule-by-expert character, which it absolutely does.
Update: Added missing URL to the main story.
Karine Jean-Pierre’s “tell-nothing tell-all” memoir of the Biden White House
In the free-to-cheapskates part of this post (i.e., outside the paywall), Matt Taibbi discusses the former White House Press Secretary’s book Independent as the author does the rounds of TV talk shows to boost it:
Independent, the new tell-nothing tell-all by former Joe Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, is framed in the introduction as the patriotic diatribe of a once-loyal Democrat who’s now “free to speak for myself” and “eager to say what I think”, thanks to a dramatic decision:
After being a party insider for twenty years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within it. From here on, I am politically an independent.
Just a few pages later, however, Jean-Pierre claims she only noticed something wrong with Biden once, during his infamous debate performance last June 27th. “Whoa … He must be sick,” she deadpans, then reframes Independent as an answer to a book she hasn’t even read:
CNN anchor Jake Tapper kicked off the debate. He later wrote a supposed tell-all about Biden, Original Sin … accusing [Biden] of a cover-up of his mental decline and how his aides quashed concerns. I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House.
It’s all entertaining stuff (the “technically” is hilarious). Jean-Pierre announces she’s finally free to tell the truth, but begins by declaring that Tapper’s Original Sin — another book marketed as “the full, unsettling truth … told for the first time” — was wrong not because Tapper was lying about how long it took for him to notice Biden’s problems, but because Biden never had any problems to notice.
Jean-Pierre is generating significant negative Internet wattage this week, battered everywhere for insisting she never saw anything concerning in Biden’s private behavior. In a wild exchange with Gayle King of CBS, she doubled down on a book passage claiming she didn’t even see an issue with Biden before the critical debate, even though she traveled to it with him on Air Force One (“Maybe I was too nervous … to notice whether or not he was sniffling?”). Apparently, that trip was a rare instance in which Jean-Pierre not only didn’t talk to Biden on the plane, but didn’t have conversations with anyone who did. “I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game”, she wrote, “until he began to speak at the debate”.
Independent reads like an oxygen-deprived sequel to Tapper’s book. The humorous premise of Original Sin involved Tapper’s sources insisting Biden “stole an election” because if he’d stepped aside earlier, the party might have had a “robust primary” — exactly the scenario they spent years fighting to avoid, savaging challengers like Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and smearing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. directly into the arms of Donald Trump. The CNN man insisted “insiders” who had a “much better window into Biden’s condition than the general public” saw things that “shocked them” before last June’s debate, when the awful truth finally became obvious even to news media. But according to Tapper, the problem wasn’t so much that insiders lied, but were lied to. His first chapter was titled “He totally fucked us”, a quote about Biden by Kamala Harris aide David Plouffe.
Never mind that the world could see Biden was in drool-cup mode as far back back as 2019, or that Special Counsel Robert Hur made it legal record that Biden likely couldn’t be convicted because a jury would see him as incompetent, an “elderly man with a poor memory” who couldn’t find his own underpants, let alone classified papers he was accused of mishandling. No, the problem was, “Biden fucked us”.
Jean-Pierre has now one-upped Tapper by insisting nothing was wrong with Biden and that — get this — the real problem was that the press undermined the president, and not after the debate, but all along! “Pretty much since the day he’d stepped into the White House”, Jean-Pierre wrote, “the press had taken every opportunity to imply Biden was too old or mentally unfit for the job”. She is referring to the same press corps that insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack” for four and a half years, while he was serially sternum-poking voters, staring into space, walking off set in the middle of interviews, and turning every public ceremony into a potential Chevy Chase routine
The Liberal-funded legacy media all chorus that the Conservatives are collapsing
On his Substack, Brian Lilley contrasts what the legacy media are all pushing with the actual conversation among Conservatives:
Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.
Pierre Poilievre stood before his caucus Wednesday morning and was contrite. The Conservative leader has caused himself and his party headaches since his comments about Justin Trudeau and the RCMP on the Northern Perspective podcast last week.
Will it be enough?
Time will tell but his Conservative MPs who are upset will have forgiven him long before the media will. The stories about Conservative MPs or supporters being upset have not abated and hours before Poilievre did his mea culpa, Radio-Canada, the French wing of CBC had a story with MPs sniping at Poilievre.
Of course, none of them were on the record.
Later in the day, the rumour mill started that at least one Conservative MP, most likely a Quebec MP, would cross the floor by the end of the day. I’ll tell you from experience that when rumours start on Parliament Hill, they can take on a life of their own.
Will someone cross the floor?
Perhaps, and I’ve been given names of the potential floor crossers by Liberals, but none of them have done it so far.
We wait.
It’s all part of crafting a larger narrative…
If you only consumed legacy media, you might think the Conservative Party was falling apart, that the Conservatives were falling in the polls and that fundraising had dried up. None of that is true no matter how often they tell you it is while the facts tell a different story.
Were Poilievre’s comments helpful with swing voters? Absolutely not, and while he’s not focussed on them yet, he will need to be one day so he needs to be more careful.
As I’ve stated though, Poilievre was right on the RCMP dropping the ball on SNC-Lavalin and someone should have been charged with obstruction of justice in that case.
But none of this means the Conservatives are falling apart at the seams.
Will you get people grumbling, absolutely. Will some of them turn to the media as anonymous sources, considering many turned to me months ago, sure, it’s going to happen.
I also have my own anonymous sources telling me there is no one in caucus organizing against Poilievre. Speaking to veterans of the Scheer and O’Toole palace coups, they say this is a very different feel.
People are tired, they are tired of losing, but they aren’t looking to replace Poilievre. That’s not just because there is no one waiting in the wings, they genuinely want to give him a second chance.
Given the latest Abacus poll, I’d say he’s doing okay. That poll would show a minority government if an election were held today, one that could go Liberal or Conservative.
A39 Tortoise: The Forgotten Super Heavy
The Tank Museum
Published 13 Jun 2025The A39 Tortoise. The last complete survivor of a World War Two project that arrived just a little too late. Some have called it “The British Jagdtiger” – but is that actually a fair comparison?
Tortoise was a part of the strategy the Allies would need to defeat Germany during the Second World War. It was recognised that total victory could only occur on German soil – and that meant smashing through the imposing defences of the Siegfried Line. The Allies would need a Heavy Assault tank. Many designs were put forward for this role, including the Valiant, the A33 and the T14 Assault tank.
The A39 is extremely well-armoured. Its casemate construction could withstand a hit from an 88mm gun at close ranges. But at 78-tons, this lumbering beast was both slow and heavy – and is one of the largest and heaviest vehicles in the museum’s collection. In terms of firepower, the impressive 32pdr gun was extremely effective against both concrete and enemy armour. It even has room inside for 7 crew!
In the end, the Tortoise arrived too late to see any action on the battlefield. It was intended to form a part of the 79th Armoured Division – making it one of Hobart’s Funnies. Whether Tortoise would have become the stuff of legend, or a bit of a joke – well, we’ll leave that question up to you.
00:00 | Introduction
00:39 | What is a Heavy Assault Tank?
03:45 | Why a Heavy Assault Tank?
09:24 | The A39: As Good as it Gets?
17:55 | A Solution Without a Problem
(more…)
QotD: The importance of ancestor veneration to pre-Christian cultures
And like in China, what develops out of this is an entire domestic religion, or rather a million distinct domestic religions, each with its own secret rites. In China there were numerous attempts over the millennia to standardize a notion of “correct ritual”, none of which really succeeded, until the one-two punch of communism and capitalism swept away that entire cultural universe. But for thousands of years, every family (defined as a male lineage) maintained its own doctrine, its own historical records, its own gods and hymns and holy sites. It’s this fact that makes marriage so momentous. The book has a wonderfully romantic passage about this:
Two families live side by side; but they have different gods. In one, a young daughter takes a part, from her infancy, in the religion of her father; she invokes his sacred fire; every day she offers it libations. She surrounds it with flowers and garlands on festal days. She asks its protection, and returns thanks for its favors. This paternal fire is her god. Let a young man of the neighboring family ask her in marriage, and something more is at stake than to pass from one house to the other.
She must abandon the paternal fire, and henceforth invoke that of the husband. She must abandon her religion, practice other rites, and pronounce other prayers. She must give up the god of her infancy, and put herself under the protection of a god whom she knows not. Let her not hope to remain faithful to the one while honoring the other; for in this religion it is an immutable principle that the same person cannot invoke two sacred fires or two series of ancestors. “From the hour of marriage,” says one of the ancients, “the wife has no longer anything in common with the religion of her fathers; she sacrifices at the hearth of her husband.”
Marriage is, therefore, a grave step for the young girl, and not less grave for the husband; for this religion requires that one shall have been born near the sacred fire, in order to have the right to sacrifice to it. And yet he is now about to bring a stranger to this hearth; with her he will perform the mysterious ceremonies of his worship; he will reveal the rites and formulas which are the patrimony of his family. There is nothing more precious than this heritage; these gods, these rites, these hymns which he has received from his fathers, are what protect him in this life, and promise him riches, happiness, and virtue. And yet, instead of keeping to himself this tutelary power, as the savage keeps his idol or his amulet, he is going to admit a woman to share it with him.
Naturally this reminded me of the Serbs. Whereas most practitioners of traditional Christianity have individual patron saints, Serbs de-emphasize this and instead have shared patrons for their entire “clan” (defined as a male lineage). Instead of the name day celebrations common across Eastern Europe, they instead have an annual slava, a religious feast commemorating the family patron, shared by the entire male lineage. Only men may perform the ritual of the slava, unmarried women share in the slava of their father. Upon marriage, a woman loses the heavenly patronage of her father’s clan, and adopts that of her husband, and henceforward participates in their rituals instead. It’s … eerily similar to the story Fustel de Coulanges tells. Can this really be a coincidence, or have the Serbs managed to hold onto an ancient proto-Indo-European practice?1 I tend towards the latter explanation, since that would be the most Serbian thing ever.
But I’m more interested in what all this means for us today, because with the exception of maybe a few aristocratic families, this highly self-conscious effort to build familial culture and maintain familial distinctiveness is almost totally absent in the Western world. But it’s not that hard! I said before that the patrilineal domestic worship of ancient China was annihilated in the 20th century, but perhaps that isn’t quite as true as it might at first appear. I know plenty of Chinese people with the ability to return to their ancestral village and consult a book that records the names and deeds of their male-lineage ancestors going back thousands of years. These aren’t aristocrats,2 these are normal people, because this is just what normal people do. And I also know Chinese people named according to generation poems written centuries ago, which is a level of connection with and submission to the authority of one’s ancestors that seems completely at odds with the otherwise quite deracinated and atomized nature of contemporary Chinese society.
Perhaps this is why I have an instinctive negative reaction when I encounter married couples who don’t share a name. I don’t much care whether it’s the wife who takes the husband’s name or the husband who takes the wife’s, or even both of them switching to something they just made up (yeah, I’m a lib).3 But it just seems obvious to me on a pre-rational level that a husband and a wife are a team of secret agents, a conspiracy of two against the world, the cofounders of a tiny nation, the leaders of an insurrection. Members of secret societies need codenames and special handshakes and passwords and stuff, keeping separate names feels like the opposite — a timorous refusal to go all-in.
And yet, literally the entire architecture of modern culture and society4 is designed to brainwash us into valuing our individual “autonomy” too much to discover the joy that comes from pushing all your chips into the pot. Is there any hope of being able to swim upstream on this one? What tricks can we steal from weak-chinned Habsburgs and the Chinese urban bourgeoisie?
Jane: I have a friend whose great-grandmother was one of four sisters, and to this day their descendants (five generations’ worth by now!) get together every year for a reunion with scavenger hunts and other competitions color-coded by which branch they’re from. Ever since I heard this story, one of my goals as a mother has been to make the kind of family where my grandchildren’s grandchildren will actually know each other, so I’ve thought a lot about how to do that.
On an individual level, you can get pretty far just by caring. People — children especially, but people more generally — long to know who they are and where they came from. In a world where they don’t get much of that, it doesn’t take many stories about family history and trips “home” to inculcate a sense a “fromness”: some place, some people.5 Our kids have this, I think, and it’s almost entirely a function of (1) their one great-grandparent who really cared and (2) the ancestral village of that branch of the family, which they’ve grown up visiting every year. Nothing builds familial distinctiveness like praying at the graves of your ancestors! But that doesn’t scale, because we’re a Nation of Immigrants(TM) and we mostly don’t have ancestral villages. (The closest I get is Brooklyn, a borough I have never even visited.) And even for the fraction of Americans whose ancestors were here before 1790 (or 1850, or whatever point you choose as the moment just before urbanization and technological innovation began to really dislocate us), the connection to people and place grows yearly more strained.
For the highly mobile professional-managerial class, moving for that new job, it’s even worse. You and I live where we live not because we like it particularly, or because we have roots here, but because it’s what made sense for work. And though we sometimes idly talk about moving somewhere with better weather and more landscape (not even a prettier landscape, just, you know, more), I don’t think any of the places we’d consider have a sufficiently diverse economic base that I’d bet on them being able to support four households worth of our children and grandchildren. We often think of living in your hometown in order to stay connected to your family as a sacrifice that children make — hanging out a shingle in the third largest town in Nebraska rather than heading to New York for Biglaw or something like that — but I increasingly see giving your children a hometown they can reasonably stay in as a sacrifice that we can make as parents.
Fustel de Coulanges has this beautiful, poetic passage about the relationship between the individual and the family:
To form an idea of inheritance among the ancients, we must not figure to ourselves a fortune which passes from the hands of one to those of another. The fortune is immovable, like the hearth, and the tomb to which it is attached. It is the man who passes away. It is the man who, as the family unrolls its generations, arrives at his house appointed to continue the worship, and to take care of the domain.
I love this as a metaphor. It’s generational thinking on steroids: it’s not just “plant trees for your grandchildren to enjoy”, it’s “don’t sell the timberland to pay your bills because it’s your grandchildren’s patrimony”. And there’s something to it, especially when the woods are inherited, because it’s your duty to pass along what was passed down to you. You should be bound by the past, you should be part of something greater than yourself, because the “authentic you” is an incoherent half-formed ball of mutually contradictory desires and lizard-brain instinct. It’s the job of your family and your culture (but I repeat myself) to mold “you” into something real, like the medieval bestiaries though mother bears did to their cubs. But take it literally, as Fustel de Coulanges insists the ancients did, and it feels too much like playing Crusader Kings for me to be entirely comfortable. Yeah, this time my player heir is lazy and gluttonous, but his son looks like he’s shaping up okay, maybe we’ll go after Mecklenburg in thirty years or so. The actual individual is basically incidental to the process. And the entire ancient city is built of this!
The book describes how several families (and it’s worth noting that this includes their slaves and clients; the family here is the gens, which only aristocrats have) come together to form a φρᾱτρῐ́ᾱ or curia, modeled exactly after the family worship with a heroic ancestor, sacred hearth, and cult festivals. Then later several phratries form a tribe, again with a god and rites and patterns of initiation, and then the tribes found a city, each nested intact within the next level up, so that the city isn’t just a conglomeration of people living in the same place, it’s a cult of initiates who are called citizens. And, as in the family, the individual is really only notable as the part of this vast diachronic entity that’s currently capable of walking around and performing the rites. The ancient citizen is the complete opposite of the autonomous, actualized agent our society valorizes, which makes it a useful corrective to our excesses. That image of the family unrolling, of the living man as the one tiny part that’s presently above ground, is something we deracinated moderns would do well to guard in our hearts. But that doesn’t make it true.
Almost by accident, in showing us what inheritance and family meant for the ancient world, Fustel de Coulanges illustrates why Christianity is such a revolutionary doctrine. For the ancients, the son and heir is the one who will next hold the priesthood in the cult of his sacred ancestor. In Christ, we are each adopted into sonship, each made the heir of the Creator of all things, “no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ”.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
- Speaking of ancient proto-Indo-European practices, his descriptions of the earliest Greek and Roman marriage ceremonies are also fascinating. They incorporate a stylized version of something very reminiscent of Central Asian bride kidnapping! I like to think this is also a holdover of some unfathomably old custom, rather than convergent evolution.
- IMO China never really regained a true aristocracy after Mongol rule and the upheavals preceding the establishment of the Ming dynasty.
- The trouble with hyphenation is, what do you do the following generation? I know people are bad at thinking about the future, but come on, you just have to imagine this happening one more time. In fact, the brutally patrilineal Greeks and Romans and Chinese were more advanced than us in recognizing a simple truth about exponential growth. Your ancestors grow like 2^N, which means their contribution gets diluted like 1/(2^N), unless you pick an arbitrary rule and stick with it.
- With the exception of the Crazy Rich Asians movie. Maybe the Chinese taking over Hollywood will slowly purge the toxins from our society. Lol. Lmao.
- Sometimes, as with the Habsburgs, it becomes cringe.
October 22, 2025
The Korean War Week 70: Casualties Rise For The Chinese – October 21, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Oct 2025The UN forces launch Operation Polecharge, hoping to complete Operation Commando, but they have worries away from the field, since UN pilots have violated the neutral zone and killed two young Korean boys, causing an outcry. If that weren’t enough, a new Soviet atomic bomb test has the entire world on edge.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:56 Recap
01:12 Operation Polecharge
02:37 Chinese Tactics
05:15 9th Corps Attacks
07:10 Unit Integration
10:04 B-29s Shot Down
11:06 The Mutual Security Act
12:47 Neutral Zone Violation
14:11 Summary
14:29 Conclusion
15:56 Call to Action
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The Anti-Coynist Manifesto
In a guest post at Without Diminishment, Michael Bonner takes a blowtorch to the boomer hippies and particularly to Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne. But first, the obnoxious boomers:
Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.
In their own minds, they invented rebellion; they stopped a war; and they discovered sex. The latter phenomenon, they still believe, was quite unknown in former ages. So were drug-taking, vulgarity, and poor hygiene. These, as it was believed, were the means of “finding oneself”, and there was no more important task in life. Automobiles were likewise a singular obsession, and the Good Life meant not only driving but also eating, attending films, and copulating in cars.
They were an unusually forthright lot, who were apparently well educated, but who nevertheless espoused many absurd and contradictory notions. Their parents, who had gone to war to fight Nazis, were themselves branded as fascists by their own children. They professed to revolt against money and materialism; and yet, when they came of age, these were their primary interests. They were the generation that attended Woodstock in defiance of a flu pandemic, and were later the most assiduous followers of Covid-19 restrictions.
At the frightening name of Woodstock, it will be obvious who I mean. The Boomers were born to the men and women who had endured the privations of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and everything in between. It is the Boomers who prove the adage whereby good times make weak men and weak men make hard times. They disliked the ease and prosperity into which they were born, and sought to erode them. The 20th-century fear of Soviet subversion or nuclear annihilation was therefore misplaced. For where the Soviets failed, the Boomers triumphed, leaving our culture and our politics in ruins. They are still at it, as the gravitational field of their huge demographic mass continues to distort our politics. Worst of all, the Boomers’ peculiar vision of personal freedom, norm-busting, and individualism at any cost now passes for conservatism.
And on to Mr. Coyne himself (full disclosure: I’ve met Mr. Coyne a few times at early Toronto blogger gatherings and he seemed quite a sensible chap 20 years ago):
Does this Boomer conservatism have any luminaries or pundits? In Canada, it has one and he towers over his acolytes and opponents alike as a learned giant among intellectual pygmies. Or rather, that is how Andrew Coyne undoubtedly imagines himself. So great a spokesman of the Boomer conservative mentality is Coyne that the entire movement could be named after him: Andrew Coyne-ism.
Who has not heard of Andrew Coyne? He is now a columnist with The Globe and Mail and a member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National. He wrote for the National Post and once edited its editorial and comment section, but resigned in 2015 during the federal election. The cause was a dispute with executives over the rejection of a column composed for election day, in which Coyne failed to endorse the Conservatives. Coyne described the dispute as an unwelcome intervention that threatened his editorial independence, stating on Twitter that he could not allow the precedent to stand and needed to protect his reputation as a columnist.
That incident is a microcosm of the problem. One may fairly complain, as Coyne did, that the Harper Tories failed to please every member of their coalition equally, though such a thing is rarely possible. But the rest of Coyne’s complaints concerned a “bullying, sneering culture” of “the low brow and the lower brow”. The imperfection of policy merely annoyed him, but he hated the Conservatives’ tone. They were not sufficiently respectful, they traded in insults and did not agree that “learning and science are to be valued, not derided”, apparently. In contrast, “a politics of substantive differences, civilly expressed” was “the formula that just elected Justin Trudeau”.
Trudeau: a paragon of civility? Surely some other Trudeau is meant, not the opposition MP who called the Minister of the Environment a “piece of shit“. Not the man who, at a “ladies’ night” campaign event, was asked which country he most admired and said it was China’s “basic dictatorship“. Not the man who announced that the excitement of a political campaign amounted to “pizza, sex, and all sorts of fun things“. Not the man who mused about such subjects as “making Quebec a country” if Canada were to become too conservative and the need to put Quebeckers in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda” — whatever that means. Not the man who once halted an interview with a French-Canadian journalist in order to demonstrate the right way to fall down a flight of stairs. I pass over the more lurid stories of groping a reporter’s buttocks, wearing blackface, and singing the “Banana Boat” song.
Alas, it is the same Trudeau. Nevertheless, Andrew Coyne-ism can excuse all such behaviour along with the decade of sanctimonious bullying and decline that followed it. For none of it is as bad as the wishes and worldview of the mostly rural, western, and blue-collar Conservative base. Such people are too angry and too vulgar for their own good. Including them within the benefits of Confederation must be rigorously circumscribed, and allowing them to shape public policy cannot be allowed at all.
H&K MG4: Germany’s New 5.56mm Squad Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jun 2025Heckler & Koch released the MG4, a new 5.56mm squad machine gun in 2001. It was adopted by the German army in 2005, and then by the Spanish and Portuguese armies in 2007. Alongside its sister weapon the 7.62mm MG5, it is H&K’s current export machine gun.
The MG4 fires from an open bolt, with a 2-lug rotating bolt locking system and a long stroke gas piston operating system. It uses standard M27 NATO links for feeding, and does not have a semiauto selector setting. Mechanically, the MG4 uses a front trunnion into which both the barrel and bolt lock independently — meaning that the quick-change barrel can be removed with the bolt in either the forward or rearward position.
As one would expect for a 5.56mm machine gun weighing 18 pounds, it is very easy to control.
Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this modern machine gun to film for you!
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QotD: The supposed land crisis Tiberius Gracchus wanted to solve
What they assume is taking place is that the wealthiest Romans – who have, in fact, grown fantastically wealthy from Rome’s overseas wars – have used that wealth to acquire most of the land, either buying up the small freeholds of smaller Roman farmers or getting the leases for that public land. Meanwhile, the Roman small farmer class does most of Rome’s fighting and so the assumption – by Appian – is that these guys are being ground underfoot by heavy military deployments, although as best we can tell, military deployments in the 150s, 140s and 130s are substantially lighter than those from 218-168 (but they’re also in less profitable, more difficult places like Spain, put a pin in that). Those wealthy Romans then work the land not with free laborers, but with slaves, because Roman conquests – remember, we’re at the tail end of Rome’s “iron century” of conquests from 264 to 148 – have brought enormous numbers of enslaved laborers to Italy. Those poor Romans, now displaced, have no land and flock to Rome and are no longer liable for the Roman census.
Except notice the data points being used to come up with this story: the visible population of landless men in Rome and the Roman census returns. But, as we’ve discussed, the Roman census is self-reported, and the report of a bit of wealth like a small farm is what makes an individual liable for taxes and conscription.
In short the story we have above is an interpretation of the available data but not the only one and both our sources and Tiberius Gracchus simply lack the tools necessary to gather the information they’d need to sound out if their interpretation is correct.
All of which now, at last, brings us to the scholarship of the last several decades which has, by and large, concluded that Tiberius Gracchus probably misunderstood the nature of Roman social and economic problems in the late second century and as a result applied the wrong solution.2 The initial problem is that the above model assumes a basically stagnant Italian population: you’re just shifting people around, not generating new people. But survey archaeology shows growing urban centers and new land coming under cultivation, suggesting a modestly rising population, a conclusion reinforced by demographic modeling which recognizes the likely marked decline in military mortality in the back half of the second century. Moreover, the vast expansion of villa estates we ought to be seeing in this period really only comes later, in the first century BC and the first two centuries AD; there’s some expansion (and these patterns are very regionalized) but not enough to explain what we’re being told is happening.3 Those observations, emerging in the 90s and early 2000s, provided the necessary evidence to vindicate the theory advanced by J.W. Rich in the 1980s that the problem was quite different than Tiberius Gracchus understood, in part to explain the one curious fact we could always see about Tiberius’ land reforms, which is that they happened, they went ahead as planned and also they didn’t fix the problem.
Instead what is happening is this: Roman military deployments had, for a long time, been massive. Rome had careened from the major Samnite Wars (343–341, 326–304, and 298–290) to the high-casualty Pyrrhic War (280-275) to the much higher casualty First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars. But the big wars of the early second century had involved a lot more winning and thus somewhat less dying (deaths from disease always outweighed combat losses, but Roman armies are smaller from 201-168, so less disease death too), while after the Third Macedonian War (171-168), Rome doesn’t have any more peer-opponent wars left to fight and so the number of men under arms declines again after 168 and especially after 148. Roman society was thus structured to sustain itself in a situation where military mortality for males was high. And then it dropped.
But recall the average Roman farm is small, so what you have now are suddenly a whole bunch of second and third sons who between 350 and 201 would have gone off to fight and died (or their elder brother would have) but are now alive, but can’t possibly inherit the family farm because they have a living brother and the farm is much too small to split further (or to support an entire second nuclear family unit). Where do they go? Well, to Rome, of course, where they want what Rome has done in the past to deal with this sort of problem: the foundation of new Roman communities (colonies) where they can have land. But there isn’t any Italy left to conquer (Rome controls all of it) and we aren’t yet to founding Roman colonies overseas, so not only is the mortality much lower (and so you have more of these guys) the traditional release valve is stuck. So they’re piling up in the one place that there is meaningful amount of wage labor available (the city of Rome), where they are very visible to the Roman ruling elite.
Meanwhile, Elder Brother-Who-Lived is back on the farm and should, in theory, still be eligible for call-up. But whereas in previous decades he could hope to get sent to fight in places like Greece or Italy or against Carthage where the rewards in loot from defeating wealthy enemies were substantial, in the 130s, the main problem was Numantia: a Celtiberian community perched in a particularly troublesome hillfort in a relatively poor, difficult part of Spain. Campaigns to take the place often failed (see above) but even if they succeeded, there would be little real loot. Moreover, a lack of success made the wars deeply unpopular. Elder Brother doesn’t want to get drafted to go fight in Spain, it’s just not a good bargain for him (unlike earlier wars).
But he has a solution: the census is self-reported. While his younger brothers are in Rome looking for work, he can just not report the farm on the census (or not report his military aged son), understating his wealth to drop below the qualifying requirement for military service. Because the Roman census pays functionally no attention to such men – the capite censi (those counted by their heads) – Elder Brother’s household almost seems to vanish in the census returns and the number of men liable for conscription ticks down by one.
And so you have falling census returns, combined with crowds of poor Romans in the city of Rome, but without it necessarily having anything to do with ager publicus or lost farms. And this is, we think, probably what is happening: surely there is some elite villa-estate expansion and some replacement of freeholding farmers with enslaved workers on that land but in fact the problem the Romans are facing is classic land scarcity with a growing population, but they don’t know that’s the problem because draft-resistance appears in the census as population decline and the census is all they have.
But you can see immediately the problem for Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform: while there is certainly some ager publicus to redistribute (to the great annoyance of the elites holding it), there’s not enough, because the core of this problem isn’t changing land use patterns (more villas, less small farms) but rising population creating economic strain at the bottom (while, it is true, imperial expansion creates vast almost unimaginable amounts of wealth at the top).
But we’re actually not quite done with problems, there’s one more: not all of the ager publicus was being farmed by Romans. Quite a lot of it seems, instead, to have been in the hands of local Italians – the socii. This is another convenient simplification by Appian and Plutarch, a product of them both writing in the imperial period long after citizenship had been extended across Italy. But that hasn’t happened yet. So any law to redistribute ager publicus would mean taking land from the socii who were currently using it for a land-giveaway in which only Roman citizens will be eligible.
You may well imagine that doing something like that might really damage relations with the socii and also fundamentally change the “bargain” by which the Roman alliance system functioned, as before Tiberius Gracchus, the socii seem to have been eligible to settle in Roman colonial foundations on conquered land, but they will not be eligible to get land in Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform bill.
You can quickly flip ahead to the year 91 to see how that turns out in the long run.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
- To pause for a second: for the sake of making this understandable, I am using the relatively simple category of ager publicus. However, as Gargola (op. cit.) notes, in actual Roman law, ager publicus was a messy super-category of lands governed by an exciting range of different rules and conditions (some leased, some sold, some held by the state, etc.) – ager censorius, ager quaestorius, ager occupatorius, ager diuisus et adsignatus, the ager Campanus and ager in trientabulis. Simplifying this and treating all of these lands as if they had been governed under the same rubric which Tiberius is merely now enforcing is one of Appian’s deceptive simplifications.
- For the scholarship, this reaction begins with J.W. Rich, “The Supposed Roman Manpower Shortage of the Later Second Century B.C.” Historia 32 (1983). The next major phase comes out of the high-count/low-count population debates around Roman demography because older demographic models, like those of PA Brunt (Italian Manpower (1971)) had assumed a static Roman population, but as noted we increasingly had evidence for a modestly increasing population. The implications of that get worked out in books like N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) and L. De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012). Finally, you also have a recognition that while the wars in Spain were unpopular, they didn’t have massive manpower demands, e.g. Taylor, “Goodbye to All That: The Roman Citizen Militia After the Great Wars” in A Community in Transition, eds. M. Balbo and F. Santangelo (2023).
- In Italy, I should be clear: the pervasiveness and speed with which rich Romans seem to accumulate Sicilian estates suggests a lot of the land acquisition may be happening outside of the ager Romanus.
