Rome’s popular assemblies – for unlike most poleis, Rome has not one but four major assemblies, three of which matter – are the subject of something of a paradox in Roman political history which has in turn served as the hub around which a fairly active debate on the nature of Roman politics has rotated now for decades. The paradox is this: on the one hand, legally the Roman assemblies are sovereign. Their decisions, once rendered, are final and cannot be overridden by any other part of the res publica. That would seem to make Rome quite democratic, but to the contrary: apart from a few very notable exceptional moments, the assemblies are largely the dog that did not bark. They have vast power, but in part because of the traditional conventions of Roman politics (the mos maiorum, the “customs of the ancestors”) and in part because of how they are structured, the power of the assemblies often sleeps.
And today we’re going to look at why it is that the assemblies never roar quite so often as you’d expect and in the process begin developing the arguments of perhaps the central scholarly debate currently about the Roman Republic: how democratic was it really?
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part II: Romans, Assemble!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-07-28.
October 4, 2025
QotD: Roman … democracy?
October 3, 2025
Women and credit card access … another “just so” story
Janice Fiamengo debunks a common “just so” story about women only gaining the right to hold a credit card in the 1970s:
A few years ago, I started hearing that women, before feminism, couldn’t have their own credit cards. Or they couldn’t get one without a man’s signature. Or married women couldn’t have one in their own name. Divorced women, apparently, couldn’t get credit at all. Men conspired to keep women powerless and dependent.
THANK THE GODDESS FOR FEMINISM!
Just last June, on the podcast Diary of a CEO (in an episode viewed by nearly two million people), three feminists debating feminism agreed that, in the words of one of the panelists, “None of us could get a credit card a few decades ago … We couldn’t have anything …” (see 1:50:37).
Before correcting herself, in fact, the panelist had started to say, “None of us could get a credit card a couple of decades ago …”
The statement struck me with the full force of the ludicrous. I started school in 1970. My teachers were nearly all women, at least half of them unmarried. They certainly seemed to live full, normal lives in obeisance to no man. They were paid a salary; they had bank accounts; they owned cars; they bought things and went on vacations.
My mother had worked in an insurance office for years both before and after she married my father in 1956. She had purchased appliances and paid her own rent, helped my father buy his first commercial fishing boat, and handled all the household expenses when my dad was away fishing for months every summer.
My friends’ mothers were similarly active and self-determining. Were all these women actually hobbled by the patriarchy, cut off from the economy?
Received knowledge would have us believe so. Last year, The Globe and Mail published a paid advertisement for Women’s History Month titled “50 Years Ago: Women Got the Right to Have Credit Cards”. Written by a financial services company seeking to drum up business, the article repeated the popular story that women in North America could not get their own credit cards until 1974.
Credit cards were one of the growth areas for banks and other financial service companies in the 1960s and 70s … from something only relatively wealthy travellers and business executives used, they expanded to become widely used by ordinary consumers for all kinds of purchases. Consumers benefitted from access to useful financial tools, while banks enjoyed the profits from the widespread use of credit cards. So where did the idea that they were male-only come from?
The reality is that from the 1950s on, credit cards were a new invention being aggressively marketed to both men and women. Advertising from the era shows how keen credit card companies were to target female customers, how eager to tap into women’s spending power.
Originally introduced as a convenience for travelers on business, credit cards began to expand their purview in the late 1950s. Bank Americard (later Visa) became the first consumer credit card in 1958. A network of banks formed the Interbank Card Association, originally named Master Charge (later Mastercard), in 1966.
Yet we are somehow to believe that half the population was deliberately excluded from this new consumer venture for no other reason than that they were female?
“It wasn’t until 1974 that women were allowed to open a credit card under their own name,” the Globe article states emphatically. “Before 1974, if women wanted to open a credit card, they would be asked a bunch of intrusive questions, like if they were married or whether they planned to have children. If a woman was married, she could (hopefully) get a credit card with her husband. But single, divorced, or widowed women weren’t allowed to get a credit card of their own — they had to have a man cosign for the credit application.”
The explanation is dramatic and incoherent, undoing its own logic from the beginning. It backtracks to allege that women were in fact “allowed” to have a credit card so long as they answered “a bunch of intrusive questions” or found a co-signer. Even this lesser claim is false, but it is rather different from the prior assertion about women “not having the right” to a card.
At a time when many married women either did not work outside the home or worked only part-time and on a temporary basis, there would have been nothing unreasonable about a woman’s husband co-signing her credit card application. Many married women were happy to purchase what they wanted on the assurance that their husbands would pay the bill when it came in, and credit card issuers saw joint accounts as a way of ensuring payment.
Update, 4 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please 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.
Adding digital ID to the pocket moloch … what could possibly go wrong?
On Substack, Andrew Doyle explains why it’s a terrible idea to trust the government — any government — in forcing digital ID on everyone:
An illustration of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison.
Drawing by Willey Reveley, 1791.
During a trip to Russia in 1785, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham sketched an outline for a new prison design. The cells were arranged around the circular perimeter and, at the centre, he placed his “panopticon”: a watchtower which afforded a view of any of the cells at all times. The prisoners might not always be being observed, but they could never be sure that they weren’t.
Bentham’s design was never directly used, but the idea took hold as a symbol of state overreach and control, most famously in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). Foucault was alert to the political ramifications of such a concept, and how surveillance might become an internalised experience. With Keir Starmer now pledging to introduce a digital ID system as a mandatory condition for the right to work, are we seeing the first step towards the realisation of Bentham’s vision?
I suppose we are already there. I have seen friends switch off their phones before discussing politically sensitive issues, genuinely convinced that digital eavesdropping is the norm. Many people are mistrustful of the “Alexa” voice assistant, which they are persuaded is recording their every word. While this all seems terribly conspiratorial, I’m sure most of us remember those reports a few years ago about the Pegasus spyware which had been covertly installed on the phones of journalists and government figures, turning the devices into pocket spies.
[…]
Few will be surprised to hear that public trust in political institutions has plummeted. The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of successive governments, our two-tier policing system, public manipulation as embodied in the “nudge unit”, and the corrupt prioritisation of the interests of the political class over the people they serve – perhaps best demonstrated by parliament’s flagrant efforts to overturn the Brexit vote – have all contributed to this climate of mistrust. The bizarre overreach of police during the lockdowns – in which dog walkers were publicly shamed with drone footage, and shopping trolleys were probed for “non-essential items” – has hardly helped matters.
To many of us, it is baffling that anyone at all would support the prospect of the government keeping track of our movements and holding our private details in a database. Starmer claims that the scheme will curb illegal immigration, but we are talking about criminals who already work outside the system and will doubtless continue to do so. Besides, identity cards have been a reality on the continent for years, and have done precisely nothing to resolve the problem. Employers in the UK are already legally obliged to insist on proof of immigration status from workers.
Labour’s digital ID scheme seems more about control than anything else. The possibility of fraud is also a major concern. It’s not as though the government has an unblemished track record of preventing data breaches. We all recall the massive leak of official MOD data regarding Afghans who had worked with the British government during the UK’s military campaigns. And who could forget the senior civil servant who, in 2008, left top-secret documents concerning al-Qaeda and Iraq’s security forces on a train from London Waterloo? Are we really to suppose that the creation of an all-encompassing centralised database will not leave the public open to risk from hackers and hostile foreign powers?
Tim Worstall adds that “they c’n fuck off ‘n’ all”:
So we’ve that wet dream of Tony Blair raising its ugly head again. There should be a national ID system. Actually, it’s not just Blair, T — the bureaucracy has been right pissed at the erasure of the wartime system since the 50s when it was abolished.
For there are two ways of looking at, thinking about, the whole governance thing. One is — the Blair, bureaucrats’, version — that the population are cattle, kine, to be managed. For the benefit of the bureaucracy of course — or at very least to be forced into doing what the bureaucracy thinks they — we — should be doing.
Then there’s that stout Englishman, the Anglo Saxon, version, which is that government are just the slaves we communally hire to make sure the bins get emptied. Well, OK, maybe raise a bit of tax for a Royal Navy to sink the Frenchies. But even then, not too much of that — the Civil War was, after all, triggered by Ship Money. Did the people who would not be slaughtered by the first wave of invading Frenchies — because they had the silly excuse of living 25 miles inland — have to pay the tax to run the Royal Navy to keep the Frenchies at bay or not? The King said yes — the King was right — and not for the first nor last time in British political history the guy who was right had his head cut off for being so.
Digital ID, so which version should we have? That one beloved of Froggie-type bureaucrats who view La Profonde as kine to be corralled? Or the Anglo Saxon version where we just devolve the scut work to a few slaves?
[…]
The reason this never will be proposed is that it doesn’t fit the reasons why our rulers wish to have an ID system. They’re insistent that we be their kine rather than they our. So, the Hell w’ ’em.
But it could be done. Government simply publishes an interface — an API — which says that proof of identity needs to be presented in this format. We’re done as far as whose kine is whose.
Update 4 October: From Samizdata, another illustration of just how toxic Two Tier Keir has become to British voters:
The Guardian reports:
“Reverse Midas touch”: Starmer plan prompts collapse in support for digital IDs
Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.
Net support for digital ID cards fell from 35% in the early summer to -14% at the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common.
The findings suggest that the proposal has suffered considerably from its association with an unpopular government. In June, 53% of voters surveyed said they were in favour of digital ID cards for all Britons, while 19% were opposed.
Mulligan “Hobo” Stew from the Great Depression
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Apr 2025Soup with canned peas, canned corned beef, onion, and ketchup
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1940Today the word “hobo” is usually used in a derogatory manner, but back in the time between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Great Depression, it referred to a specific group of migrant workers and their culture.
Part of that culture was mulligan stew, which was basically a stew of any meat and vegetables that were thrown together. The ingredients would be made up of things that keep well, mostly food that was canned or bottled.
The flavor of this soup is surprisingly good, but it’s maybe a little too sweet, even for me. The prodigious amount of ketchup is the dominant flavor, and maybe 1940 ketchup was less sweet than modern versions.
Mulligan Stew (Serves 6)
1 medium size can corned beef — minced
1 onion — minced fine
1 No. 2 can peas with liquid
1 medium size bottle tomato catsup
1 cup water
Salt and pepper to tastePut all ingredients in saucepan and simmer gently over low flame for about one hour. The flavor improves with the length of cooking time.
— The Brookshire Times, August 2, 1940
QotD: The role of the True Believer
Anon @Greynxgga69
Abolish The Family.
Abolish Religion.
Abolish Wage Labour.
Abolish Money.
Abolish Work.
Abolish Commodity Production.
Abolish the State.
Abolish Class.
Abolish Private Property.
Abolish the Nation.
Abolish Patriarchy.
Abolish Gender.
Abolish Town and Country.The True Believers imagine they will live in Utopia after the Revolution.
They will instead be sent to the gulag, or lined up against the wall and shot.
Why?
Because the function of the True Believer is to make the Revolution. And the purpose of the Revolution is to replace The Regime.
Once the Revolution is made, and The Regime has been replaced, no further Revolutions are wanted. Therefore the True Believer serves no purpose.
He is a liability, because he has been promised Utopia, and Utopia is hard, even perhaps impossible, to deliver. If he does not receive the promised Utopia, he is apt to make Revolution again.
The Regime does not want this. It does not wish to be replaced in the same fashion that it replaced The Regime. So the True Believer must be disposed of. He must be replaced with the Opportunist.
The Opportunist can be relied upon, because he does not want Utopia. He wants to have more than his comrades. So long as he receives more than his comrades, he will serve The Regime.
As above, so below.
As before, so after.
Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter , 2025-07-01.
October 2, 2025
The signature politics of the unaccountable classes
On his substack, Lorenzo Warby considers the origins of what we now call “woke” politics and how they became the predominant set of beliefs of the people who can’t be held accountable:
Western civilisation, over the last two centuries, has gone through the Emancipation Sequence whereby — taking the Anglosphere pattern — free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men to get rid of exclusions on women, straights to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. We live in free societies of mass prosperity, yet we have highly motivated political networks that think nothing of casting our societies as marked by layers of oppression.
Yes, this is based on a monstrous (and self-serving) inflation of the concept of oppression. It also functions to channel the rage of downwardly mobile children of Western elites.
More important still, it is the signature politics of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up — as distinct from the accountable classes whose income depends directly on their performance. The dominant politics of the unaccountable classes has acquired a name: it is woke politics, the politics of wokery or of being woke.
The technical name for wokery is Critical Constructivism. It is the popularisation of Critical Theory. I have labelled it Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, as it rests on critiques of The Enlightenment, and rejection of Enlightenment values, while orienting itself towards an imagined future — one where it is no longer true, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848), that society is based:
on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
That is, of oppression as they define it.
Wokery is the currently dominant form of left-progressivism. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann defines “wokery” as:
making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual minorities.
That is how the Oppressor/Oppressed template that Critical Theory takes from Marxism is popularised in a post civil rights world, using any differences in outcomes between groups as markers of oppression. The Oppressor/Oppressed template requires oppression to be pervasive in contemporary societies, hence psychologist Steven Pinker’s observation about progressives hating progress.1
What wokery also is, is lazy self-righteousness. The self-righteousness is obvious and pervasive. These folk really do act as if they own morality; as if they can withhold the moral grace of their presence from the wicked, from wrongthinkers; as if wrongthinkers are purveyors of moral pollution. This has much to do with the dwindling of the culture of public debate.
But it is also lazy, in that it massively economises on the use of information and intellectual effort. Much of the appeal of “wokery” comes from how remarkably little accurate knowledge it demands. All one has to do is to master the lingo, the linguistic signalling, involved; the pre-set talking points; which terms of moral abuse apply and when; and be willing to engage in any required level of rationalisation and mental gymnastics. Once you do so, the moralised status game of lazy self-righteousness is open for you, with approved positions lined up for one to adopt, all based on semblances of knowing.
This dynamic has much to do with why one side of US politics is far more conformist in its political opinions than the other.
The underlying blank slate views about humans means you don’t have to accept any constraints from evolutionary biology. If we are all blank slates, if there are no inherent differences between groups, then all inequalities between groups can be classed as malicious — as signs of oppression — so you do not have to bother exploring differences in traits, cultures, life-strategies, etc.
Lazy self-righteousness does not require any thinking about successful and unsuccessful life strategies, about what makes things work, or not work. It does not require much in the way of statistical or mathematical understanding. The most mathematical it gets is whether social outcomes are proportional to a group’s population share or not.
If a group is doing better than average, they are oppressors. If they are doing worse, they are oppressed. Viewing society through the oppressed/oppressor mindset always ends up looking for (and finding) kulaks.
It is a simple metric to adopt, with the self-righteous status game built-in of opposing oppression and supporting the marginalised. No further intellectual effort is required.
- Pinker’s observation that populism is a phenomenon of older voters has not worn well. Also, it is a sign how reflexive future-orientated judgements have become, that the voters with the most experience of the EU were most likely to vote against it in the 2016 Brexit referendum passes people by.
UNshittifying the internet
In The Line, Matt Gurney asks if we can go back to when the internet (and by extension, all the other tech toys and gadgets we see everywhere) was … good?
Have you heard about enshittification? It’s not just a potty word. It’s actually a pretty fascinating concept, and you read about it mostly in tech circles. Enshittification is the process by which something becomes worse over time, instead of better, normally as people try to squeeze more efficiency and revenue value out of it. Through that process of squeezing, the thing becomes enshittified.
If you want a proper definition …
Enshittification: The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
There are lots of examples. My favourite example? My video doorbell has an annual service fee. Another great example? Cars that now require payments to access certain features, like heated seats. You own the device. But you need to pay a recurring fee to use it. That’s enshittification.
It’s everywhere. And it’s getting worse, especially online. And, perversely, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it’s going to force us to stop, rethink how we use the digital realm, and, basically, try again. Start over. And get it right this time.
Noah Smith is an American economics writer whose work I enjoy. Smith noted on Twitter recently that we are rapidly getting to the point where we should declare social media a failure. It’s passé to criticize social media on social media, but Smith wasn’t making the usual warmed-over moral argument. He wasn’t saying that it was bad because people are mean there or that they fall down dark rabbit holes and end up believing insane things. Those are problems! But Smith’s concern was the extent to which AI-generated content and bots have simply flooded all the social media channels. Even a responsible user trying to use these platforms for the good is going to find it increasingly difficult to derive any value from them. They’re being rapidly enshittified.
I share his view of the trajectory. I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t. But Smith’s comment led me to ponder what value I actually derive from them — what I would miss if they were gone. I came up with four broad use cases.
The ritual humiliation of ordinary Canadians through “land acknowledgements”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo explains his objections to the ever-expanding use of “land acknowledgements”:
Let me break this down clearly so you can better understand why these mandated Land Acknowledgements are offensive to me.
They imply inherited guilt
A Land Acknowledgement usually frames the land I live and work on as “stolen”. Even if it does not say the words directly, the message is that I am benefiting from a theft. I served my country for 25 years, I have paid my taxes, raised my family responsibly, and built a life honestly. It cuts against my sense of fairness and justice to be told I must carry guilt for actions taken by people hundreds of years ago. I will not accept accountability for the past when I had no part in it.They ignore my contribution
I have invested decades of service in the military, in my education, in my community, and in my family. These acknowledgements do not recognize those sacrifices, nor those of my ancestors who also built and defended this country. Instead, they imply my very presence is illegitimate. That denies the legitimacy of my life’s work and my family’s role in helping build this nation.They make reconciliation into a ritual of shame
A healthy society should face the past with honesty. But what I see is not dialogue or shared responsibility. It is a scripted performance that demands I accept a label like “colonizer”, whether or not it reflects who I am. Rather than bringing people together, it divides by assigning one group permanent guilt and another permanent victimhood. That is not reconciliation. It is coerced shame.They erase complexity
History in Canada is complicated. Many settlers and Indigenous peoples lived, worked, and fought together. There were injustices, but also cooperation, intermarriage, and shared struggles. Long before Europeans arrived, Indigenous groups also fought among themselves, sometimes brutally, with violence and cruelty toward rival tribes. No group in history is free from wrongdoing. Yet the Land Acknowledgement format reduces this reality to a one-sided story of “oppressors vs. oppressed”, which is neither fair nor accurate.They are being mandated
Perhaps the strongest reason I find them offensive is that these acknowledgements are not voluntary. They are imposed in workplaces, schools, and public events as if they were civic duties or loyalty oaths. Refusing to participate often brings social or professional penalties. That strips away personal agency and turns what could have been a gesture of respect into a forced confession.So my reaction is not irrational. These acknowledgements conflict with my principles of fairness, personal responsibility, and earned legitimacy. They demand I accept guilt I do not bear, while ignoring the contributions my family and I have made. They also erase the truth that no people, Indigenous or otherwise, lived without conflict or wrongdoing in the past.
The first time I encountered a “land acknowledgement” in person was at my son’s university graduation ceremony. I assumed, as the university had a major First Nations study program, that this was something only done there … but now it’s hard to find any public gathering in Canada that doesn’t have the opening cultural cringe and ritual humiliation ceremony to start the event.
How “Roman” is Times New Roman?
toldinstone
Published 24 May 2025Today’s video explores the long history of “Roman” fonts.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:42 The Latin Alphabet
1:53 Rustic capitals
2:21 Uncial
2:50 Carolingian miniscule
3:32 Gothic
4:24 The Book
5:26 The first fonts
6:05 Littera Antiqua
6:46 Aldus Manutius and his successors
7:40 Times New Roman
8:07 How Roman?
QotD: The gap between the author and the reader
The Psellus book was a memoir, and so its author was presenting himself fairly directly to his audience, if in a self-edited fashion. Fiction adds a layer of veiling between creator and reader, ranging from a thin gauze to a thick stage curtain. People are naturally curious about anything hidden by a curtain, and always want to peek. (When thinking about this as a shy writer, I always channel that famous line from the Wizard at the climax of the movie The Wizard of Oz — “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”) But if readers can’t get an actual look, they will make up the writer in their heads, constructed from their own knowledge and expectations much as they mentally construct the fictional characters they’re reading about.
I got an accidental peek at this process many years ago at a science fiction convention, where I fell into a conversation in the booksellers’ room with a (male) reader who was very surprised to discover I was a woman — by whatever assumptions, he had not processed my name on the cover as female. (This, I later discovered, is not uncommon in my foreign-language translations, where the genders of English names are less recognizable.) Quickly, before his mental image was overwritten by our encounter, I got him to describe the author whom he had imagined had written the books he’d enjoyed (Vorkosigan Saga science fiction stories, at the time.) It included some odd details — male, mid-thirties, dark-haired, East Coast upper class — rather like my fictional character Ivan Vorpatril, really. Nothing at all like the beleaguered (if also mid-thirties) Midwestern housewife and mother I actually was. Yay curtain.
Lois McMaster Bujold, introduction to the Taiwanese edition of The Curse of Chalion by Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing, 2020-03-25.
October 1, 2025
“Sean Fraser, the current minister of justice and attorney general, has made two major mistakes of late”
If you’re at all interested in Canadian affairs, you should subscribe to The Line … even a free subscription will definitely provide you with some excellent non-propagandistic coverage of what is happening in the dysfunctional dominion. For instance, last weekend’s weekly post from the editors included this segment about Sean Fraser, who is perhaps the worst of Mark Carney’s cabinet (and that takes some doing):
Sean Fraser, as Minister of Immigration, Refugees & Citizenship, during day one of Collision 2023 at Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada.
Photo by Vaughn Ridley via Wikimedia Commons
We at The Line contend that Sean Fraser, the current minister of justice and attorney general, has made two major mistakes of late.
The first was in deciding not to rescind his decision to spend more time with his friends and family when it became clear that Justin Trudeau was no longer an anchor on his electoral chances. After failing to fix Canada’s housing problem and proving himself integral to blowing apart a pan-partisan consensus on immigration that was once the envy of the world, the man had a real opportunity to leave office on a high note. But, no.
Instead, after hitching his bloated baggage to Mark Carney’s trunk, Fraser decided that Canada needed more of him.
And so, as justice minister, instead of addressing petty stuff like, oh, bail reform, or fixing prisons, or getting crime under control, he turned his attention to … Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The notwithstanding clause.
You may recall that Quebec’s contentious Bill 21 — which prohibits public-service employees in positions of authority, and teachers, from wearing religious symbols while on the job — is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada. Despite numerous mixed rulings on the law, Quebec moved forward with its stance on secularism by invoking Section 33, which allows parliaments to temporarily override judicial rulings.
Section 33 was placed in the Charter for precisely this kind of situation; one in which the courts and parliament disagree about governance. As we still live in a democracy, and are still nominally governed by representatives we elect, the clause was always a bit of a compromise gesture intended to preserve parliamentary supremacy after granting the courts broad powers to basically reinterpret law according to an expansive and ever-expanding understanding of both their jurisdiction, and of the concept of “rights” writ large.
Section 33, nonetheless, has maintained a heavy odour about it, which has generally limited its application, especially outside Quebec. Among the Sean Fraser set, and the largely Liberal collection of lawyers who will insist that the Supreme Court isn’t remotely political, and how dare we entertain the thought, Section 33 was only ever intended as a symbolic right.
But as the definitely-not-political Supreme Court has edged ever deeper into the territory of override and governance, so too have provincial parliaments responded with a very not-symbolic application of the clause.
We do think there’s some blame to be placed at everyone’s door, here. But we also never really took much issue with Section 33. That’s because, at heart, we at The Line believe in, well, democracy. We believe that the people we elect should be able to decide our laws; and we believe that while the Supreme Court of Canada serves as an important check on Parliamentary power, that power doesn’t and should never override the will of the people.
And that’s basically where we part ways with Fraser and many of his — dare we say it? — Laurentian Consensus ilk. Because the unstated critique of the use of Section 33 is basically always the same: these people dislike the application of the clause because they think politics is icky, and that politicians fundamentally cannot be trusted.
In other words, these people don’t actually want a democracy.
They want a technocracy. One in which the smartest and ablest individuals (as defined by them, of course) are the ones who actually get to set the rules and guardrails for society writ large. One in which parliament really is as theatrical, symbolic and pointless as it often regards itself.
There’s an obvious illogical inconsistency here — Fraser and his colleagues are politicians. We aren’t sure if this desire to go out and limit the ability of he and his fellow parliamentarians to do the best jobs they can for the citizens reflects mere self-loathing, or a particular brand of Liberal blindspot, one that leads them to believe that they alone among politicians are exempt from anything as crass political considerations and/or motivations. Those moral failures are apparently for the other guys. But in any case, we have an elected official making the case that unelected courts should have the ability to override legislators, and that the legislators should have no recourse. However Fraser rationalizes this to himself, it’s where we are.
We think the people who have issues with Section 33 are generally not being honest with themselves in that regard; we also think that their instinctual aversion to politics (or their exemption of themselves from it) tends to make them naive. If you vest all the real power of governance in a “non-partisan” Supreme Court, what you’ll get is not a dispassionate government, but rather a heavily politicized Supreme Court. We need only look at what has happened in the U.S. over the past 30 years to see how that pans out in the long run.
Look, we at The Line don’t like Bill 21. It’s a bad law. It needlessly tramples on minority rights. But there’s a very obvious way to get that law repealed that doesn’t involve flirting with a full-blown constitutional crisis in the midst of, you know, all of the other crises going on right now.
Elect a government that will repeal that law.
That’s what democracies do.
To me, one of the most puzzling things about the Carney government’s recent actions is the overall incoherence of them. They are going ahead with one of the worst policies inherited from the Trudeau years with the “gun buyback” program that the minister responsible has openly admitted is almost completely a sop to voters in Quebec. Okay, that makes cynical sense as the Liberal vote is about as “efficient” as it possibly can be so losing just a few seats in Quebec would make it impossible for the Liberals to get re-elected. Fine. Scummy as hell, but fine. Yet the challenge to Section 33 is guaranteed to piss off far more Quebec voters — and stir up controversy across the country to boot — and you’re going to stage a pitched battle against pretty much all the provinces before the Supreme Court? Are you sure about that?
The Korean War Week 67: Ridgway Questions Truman’s Resolve – September 30, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 30 Sep 2025There’s worry and chaos in Washington when UN Commander Matt Ridgway indicates that there is one order that if given from above, he will not obey. That order concerns the possible resumption of peace talks with the Communists at Kaesong. Meanwhile in the field, the bloody Battle of Heartbreak Ridge continues, though US 2nd Division has a new commander who has new plans for how to bring about victory.
Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:53 Recap
01:07 Heartbreak Ridge
04:04 Replacement Troops
06:30 Operation Commando
09:25 Ridgway Refuses
12:52 Summary
13:11 Conclusion
(more…)
The Battle of Actium – We can at least agree ships were involved!
Drachinifel
Published 12 Oct 2022Today we take a look at the battle that decided if Rome was to be a Republic or an Empire, and also examine why its incredibly hard to work out just exactly what happened between the start and the end!
Sources:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Battle-Actiu…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Actium-31-BC…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-That-Mad…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Roman-Histor…
http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/10452/
(more…)
QotD: The Indian Mutiny of 1857
This is a near-perfect synecdoche for the Raj’s problems. British Army officers weren’t stupid — lots of them commented on the issue. But they were isolated. For one thing, lots of them weren’t regular army — they were attached to the East India Company army, a separate formation, and within the Company’s army were different formations with different service requirements. And the army — whichever army — was deeply isolated from the civilian administration. For one thing, India’s huge, and there were never more than about 200,000 British in the whole place. The army was mostly on the frontier; the Government hung around primarily in a few big cities: Bombay, Calcutta, the summer capital at Simla (way up in the Himalayas).
So stop me if this sounds familiar: The civilian administration didn’t really know anything about the group upon which their peace, their security, their very lives depended. Actively despised them, in fact — oh, those wogs and their silly customs. But also look at it from the bottom up: What could the civilian administration really have done, with the best will and deepest knowledge in the world? […]
What could the leadership really have done at that point? Send a select group of brahmins and imams to tour the grease factory? The rumor would be that the British set up a Potemkin factory just for them; the real factory was using cow and pig fat. Reissue the old rifle? Recall that they already changed their drill — a pretty big deal in any army; a huge deal in a mid-19th century one — and that just added to the paranoia. Anyone who has ever been on the Internet knows how these things work once they get started: Evidence of an evil conspiracy is evidence of an evil conspiracy, but no evidence of an evil conspiracy is even more evidence of an evil conspiracy!
The root cause of the Mutiny, in other words, wasn’t political or economic (despite what Karl Marx said). It wasn’t even “cultural” in a lot of senses, and you can tell by the actions of the mutineers — or, rather, the non-actions. They simply had no idea what to do. They had no leadership (though some of them tried to install one of the remaining Mughal rulers in Delhi as an expedient; there’s a great book about it). The “Mutiny” was really just generalized beefing and score-settling on a continent-wide scale. They all had grief with the British, of course, and that was a convenient rallying cry. Once the British were gone — and see above, there were never very many of them — the guys down south quickly realized they had nothing in common with the guys up north. Ditto the guys on the east coast, the west coast, the hill country, the jungles …
Again, stop me if this sounds familiar: Stuffing a bunch of alien groups together inside artificial boundaries under a capricious, purposefully out-of-touch “government” that obviously hates every single one of those alien groups more than each one of the groups hates all the others, is kind of a bad idea. With the exception, of course, of that capricious government’s goon squad, the one group they obviously favor because that group can be counted on to knock heads on all the other groups whenever the government lets them off the chain (I’m talking about the Sikhs, obviously).
It doesn’t matter, in other words, what the rifle cartridges were greased with, or if they were greased at all. In this historical timeline, the precipitating cause of the Sepoy Rebellion was “the Enfield Rifle”. In the next timeline over, it’s something else — something equally minor — but the rebellion still happens, at pretty much the same time and in pretty much the same way.
In other words: It’s not that the British were alien to their subjects. Most groups in most places have been ruled by aliens, and trust me, the brahmin caste is far, far more alien to the castes below it than the British were to all of them combined. Nor was it that the British were high-handed administrators, as incompetent as they were arrogant. They were actually pretty good administrators, all things considered — “government competence” is always one of life’s lower bars, but the Raj cleared it easily. The guys running the “princely states” that made up the majority of the “British” Raj were every bit as alien to “their” people as the British, and in general spectacularly incompetent too.
Severian, “The Ruling Caste”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-09.
September 30, 2025
When your prime minister is addicted to photo ops
You might think, from my headline, that I’m referring to former prime minister Justin Trudeau — who really, really did love him some gushing media coverage accompanied by advertising-agency-quality visual effects. But it’s actually our current prime minister who has somehow managed to show even more love for the photogenic backdrop and the appealing props in media coverage:
Twice in four days, Prime Minister Mark Carney scheduled official photo ops in front of environments that weren’t entirely real.
During a Sept. 19 visit to Mexico, Carney led cameras through a railyard stocked with pallets of artfully arranged sacks decorated with a maple leaf and the words “product of Canada”.
The site was the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ferrovalle train yard, located outside Mexico City.
The yard is indeed equipped to process incoming railcars of Canadian wheat, but that’s all done in bulk. Hopper cars are positioned over large tanks to disgorge their loads, multiple tonnes at a time.
If any sacks ever enter into the equation, it’s long after Canadian producers have exited the process.
“Canadian grain farmers haven’t shipped wheat in sacks for over a century!” read a reaction by Chris Warkentin, Conservative MP for the heavily wheat-growing riding of Grande Prairie, Alta.
Sylvain Charlebois, a food scientist at Dalhousie University, wrote in a column this week that “bagged wheat is a relic of less mechanized economies”.
“We are among the most efficient bulk grain exporters in the world, shipping millions of tonnes through rail networks and ocean vessels designed for efficiency, safety, and traceability,” he wrote.
But it was a housing announcement just outside Ottawa where Carney would run into more direct accusations of being deliberately deceptive with his photo backdrop.
On Sept. 14, just before the opening of the fall session of Parliament, Carney stood in front of two under-construction homes in the Ottawa area and announced the official launch of Build Canada Homes, a new federal agency tasked with developing subdivisions of manufactured homes on federal land.
“The two sets of homes behind me were manufactured in two days, assembled on site in one,” Carney said to applause.
“We wanted to keep the townhouses open; we held back the workers from finishing it so you could see how things fit together,” he said, adding that one of the homes was being shipped “to Nunavut”.
Once the press conference was over, both homes were dismantled, and the site returned to what it had been before: A patch of fallow government land located near the Ottawa airport.
The land is a right-of-way for high-voltage power lines, which is why it currently doesn’t contain any development.
At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies congratulates Brian Passifume for being one of the only legacy media reporters to look past the literal Potemkin Village structure Carney had assembled for his photo op:
Our Orwellian theme continues but, this time, it’s to credit Brian Passifume of the Toronto Sun for his work digging into how our prime minister and his staff work to create fantasy settings for their announcements. Canadian Press and others were happy to play government propagandist by captioning a photo taken at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Builds launch by stating “Workers from Caivan Homes look on from a modular home under construction in Ottawa during Prime Minister Carney’s announcement for the new agency.”
Near as I can tell, most other media were happy to play along. Except Passifume who broke from the pack and pointed out the whole scene was, essentially, a movie set.
After one X user pointed out that the entire scene was fake, Passifume jumped in with “Dude I was there, that’s exactly what happened. It was a freshly-graded gravel lot with no utilities or services run. I was discussing this very topic with other reporters covering it — they didn’t even move the crane or remove the lifting apparatus, they just repurposed it to hold a gigantic Canadian flag.”
I expect some in the trade will say “hey, everyone does it” and no doubt that is true. But when people with power and those who crave it misrepresent reality, journalists are obliged to point that out. It doesn’t even have to be aggressive, just “Carney said in front of a set created for the announcement”.
Journalism isn’t actually that complicated. You just have to subscribe to its principles.
