Opus Dei means “God’s work”, and while I don’t expect everyone to go out and join, that’s THE principle — work! Everything, no matter how small, contributes to final victory. You are the message. You are the work. Everybody, no matter how old or infirm or weak or poor or whatever, can do something. Dress well. Stand up straight. Sit down in a public park and read a book, a real physical book, not some glowing screen. If you’re walking and you see trash, pick it up. Set some great art as your computer’s background at work. Listen to some classical music. Put a quote from a Dead White Male on your email auto-signature.
Something, anything. Why? Because fuck them, that’s why. They’re ugly and stupid and base, because all those things — ugliness and stupidity and baseness — are just a degraded version of contemptus mundi, contempt for the world. That’s what nihilism IS, at bottom — fake and gay contemptus mundi. “This world is all there is; this world is awful; therefore the only thing to do is wallow in awfulness. We choose ugliness and stupidity and baseness for their own sake, because we choose to wallow.”
The world isn’t awful. It’s beautiful. Even if you don’t believe your Creator made it just for you — and He did, but you can choose not to believe that — just listen to the “Ode to Joy”. There’s at least as much beauty as ugliness in the world, however it got here and whatever its purpose. Maybe it really IS all meaningless, just atoms and void. Even so, why wallow? Choose what’s beautiful while you can enjoy it. And even if you can’t enjoy it for its own sake, choose it because the Left will hate you for it.
Stick a thumb in their eye at every opportunity. Make that your number one scruple, because seriously: Fuck them, that’s why.
Severian, “The Way Ch. 10: Scruples”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-10.
October 30, 2026
QotD: Opus Dei
October 29, 2026
“A rumor got going recently that Donald J. Trump was dying”
I should note up front that I’m not Catholic and I don’t know much about the theological inner workings of the Catholic church, so I’m going on faith (sorry) that Carlyn Beccia is giving a fair interpretation of these details:
“The Devil Presenting St. Augustine with the Book of Vices”
Michael Pacher, c. 1455 – Public Domain
A rumor got going recently that Donald J. Trump was dying. Like really dying. And once I explain how this rumor grew legs, it will all make perfect sense. Sort of.
But first, you need a little Catholic education. Don’t worry. I will make this slightly less painful than kneeling for 2 hours.
In the Catholic religion, a priest doesn’t put his hands on you just because he likes you. There are rules for holy touching. (I promised my Italian aunts no priest/pedo wise cracks. Resisting …)
Typically, the laying on of hands occurs ONLY during specific sacramental moments. A bishop does it at Confirmation and during Holy Orders — the ritual that turns a man into a priest. Confession once had it too. And of course, a priest lays his hands upon a sick or dying person during Last Rites or what is now called the Anointing of the Sick. (The Catholic Church used to wait until you were dying to offer divine intervention, but they loosened the rules for sick people after they realized you might need help surviving the American healthcare system.)
If you grew up evangelical, this tacit rule may sound strange. Evangelicals are constantly laying hands on people. Somebody gets a promotion, has a headache, can’t find their car keys, and … boom. Suddenly, six people are standing around them with their eyes closed, calling upon the Holy Spirit.
Sure, a Catholic priest can occasionally bless you outside the sacraments, but the Vatican has put that on a short leash. Denver’s previous archbishop, Samuel Aquila, said these blessings should be done preferably in private and must never become a “semi-liturgical act”. Under Fiducia Supplicans, a spontaneous blessing must be brief and simple, with no ritual that creates confusion.
Which is why one might be understandably confused after the White House circulated this picture of Catholic bishops huddled around Donald Trump in what appears to be a holy circle jerk.
Trump getting blessed during his naptime. Video posted on X Oct. 22, 2026, by the administration’s communications staff
Photo and caption from The Grim HistorianYep. Confusing.
Now, as you can imagine, the Pope’s PR team was very busy after this photo made the rounds. Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob issued a public apology three days later. He said the bishops expected a private discussion and had not consented to publicly distributing the images.
In other words, this Oval Office blessing was supposed to be a secret.
Naturally, Catholics wanted to know — what sacrament were they performing? Which is why many Catholics just assumed Trump was dying.
I have some theories about what is going on in this picture, and it is not thoughts and prayers for their desired midterm result. Let’s just say if James Madison had seen this photograph, his head would have spun around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist.
So let’s start there.
October 26, 2026
“Christofascism” seen as harmful
I must not hang out in the progressive cool kids’ areas of the internet, as I’d only occasionally heard the term “Christofascism” and I’d never encountered even a vague definition of what the pejorative might mean. Copernican to the rescue with an extended discussion on that very thing (it’s a long piece, these excerpts just skim the surface):
Image from Seeking Always the Horizon
Long has the progressive movement decried “ChristoFascism”, representing it as the greatest threat to Western civilization. The alphabet-soup squad has mostly moved on. Like most words uttered by the progressive mind, the term is used entirely for the reaction it elicits, and has nothing to do with describing the real world. Christofascism was just another word in their toolbox, like “nazism” or “racist” or (now) the ever-popular “if you date a girl two years younger than you, you’re a pedophile”.
All these are words uttered merely to enforce the progressive’s bizarre form of destructive totalitarian thought-control.1
While the [CURRENT THING] horde has moved on from accusations of Christofascism, I have not. There’s something archaically elegant in that formulation of words and the compound thought-form they represent. Hiding in the spiteful accusation is a memetic complex that deserves further investigation. Christofascism was a mere combination of “bad things” that the Left hates … but that doesn’t mean it should be taken as mere braindead progressive gurgling.
It may well be far more than that. There’s a new cultural theology hidden in there.
[…]
ChristoFascism
Individuals like Kulak identify modern (what I’d call “liberal”) Christianity as a fundamental inhibitor to the people of the West.2 That analysis is not entirely wrong. Christianity in its modern incarnation developed alongside the fall of Rome, the High Medieval Period, and then through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Christianity was a governance apparatus for regional tribal conflicts and the occasional crusade. It was the centerpiece of the Holy Roman Empire, but the theological framework has a great deal of trouble squaring with modernity.
Simultaneously, all of the alternatives, the materialist religions of the 20th century, have been absolute disasters ending in nihilism, hedonism, or cruelty. The human collective unconscious is not a static thing.3 It’s frothing with new ideas, particularly during times of great change and turmoil. The Hegelian dialectic.
Notably, the Hegelian dialectic ends in the creation of a new thesis. The original Thesis is the Universalist heritage of the West. That would be Christianity from 300 AD up until the 19th century. Then there is the antithesis, the materialist religions that seized the zeitgeist in the 20th.
[…]
A Christofascist cultural foundation must express:
- The moral recognition of a higher power and that it is the duty of the state to nurture a heroic righteousness in its own people, granting Duties, and Guidance in addition to liberty.4
- A masculine Will to Power in the development of its own practices, heritage, and promotion of its own cultural ideals to the exclusion of hostile, foreign, or corrosive ones.
- That the State, and the individuals who make up the State, are responsible for adhering to higher moral standards. One cannot simply blame “the voters” for the evil actions of the state. The leadership of the state holds personal responsibility for imposed policies.
- An intense sense of national exceptionalism, particularly in the eyes of God. As a spiritually exceptional state, the people of the nation uphold a higher scientific and spiritual ideal as individuals, families, and citizens.
- A recognition of other similar nations as being siblings seeking the same ultimate goals through alternative means, rather than pawns in a game of Great Powers.
- Paternalism with God as father to the nation’s people, and the nation’s people not beholden to the operational state but being the actuators of it. A father that expresses temperance in governance.
- I think that John Carter wrote the best analysis of this phenomenon in his work on “Homo Umbrans“. The product of man willingly handing over sapience in exchange for the reprieve from intellectual rigor. To very roughly summarize one of the best articles on Substack: if you feel like you’re under psychic attack when trying to communicate with a progressive, it’s because you are. The Leftist attempts to annul the meaning of words required for thought to render sapient cognition and abstract reasoning impossible.
- Here’s a direct link to some of the work that Kulak has done. This one is of particular interest to those in the proverbial Pagan camp. Here’s an article that was written by Millennial Woes on the same topic. A great article that I would recommend regarding this perpetual confrontation within the Spiritual Right.
- Here’s my own article on how best to conceptualize the collective unconscious.
- We will assume a Christian higher power, it’s in the name after all.
October 23, 2026
Quebec is to Canada as Scotland is to the United Kingdom
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax explores the idea that Quebec’s relationship to the rest of the Demented Dominion closely resembles the sometimes awkward relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK (but primarily England):
People have often compared the relationship between Anglo Canada and Quebec to that of England and Ireland, and while there are some similarities there particularly in the visceral emotions during the Cold War, I’d actually argue that Quebec is closer to Canada’s Scotland.
Scotland entered the British union in 1707 as an established kingdom with its own institutions and national consciousness. Québec entered Confederation in 1867 as the homeland of French Canadians, whose institutions and identity predated the Dominion.
Scotland and Quebec became elements of a larger political order while retaining separate identities. Both the English and Scottish can be British, both Anglo and French Canadians can be “Canadian”.
Scotland preserved its legal system and established church under the Union of 1707. Québec retained its civil law tradition, while the Quebec Act of 1774 protected Catholic religious practice and established important foundations for institutional continuity
Scottish identity has historically coexisted with British identity, just as French Canadian identity has coexisted with Canadian identity. In both cases, nationalists have disagreed over whether their distinctive peoplehood is best expressed through political independence or continued participation in a multinational union.
Scots were disproportionately involved in, and benefited enormously from, the British Empire, particularly through commerce, banking, industry, trade, colonial administration, and the military.
French Canadians likewise disproportionately participated in and benefited from the expansion of British North America and the Canadian economy, establishing banks, credit unions, grocery enterprises, factories, and steamship companies. They helped establish the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company, explored vast swathes of the continent, contributed four Fathers of Confederation, and produced six prime ministers
Fast forward to 2026, certain Scottish and Québécois nationalists are suddenly smol wittle itty bitty decolonial Third World beans who dindu nuffin, possessed absolutely no historical agency, and were apparently dragged kicking and screaming into the imperial projects their ancestors helped build.
October 21, 2026
QotD: Religious institutions in the late western Roman Empire
The emperors and the Roman state had also taken an active role beginning in the fourth century in defining exactly what the “right” sort of Christianity was. In response to a dispute over the ordination of bishops in North Africa (the “Donatist” schism), Constantine called a council of bishops to convene in Arles in 314 to resolve the matter (it didn’t work and Constantine began persecuting the remaining Donatists). But that council would hardly be the last – Constantine convoked the first ecumenical council (one that in theory reflected the entire Christian Church) in Nicaea in 325 in order to create a single universal Christian doctrine and resolve a number of internal disputes (having grown as a religion in secret and facing persecution, as you might imagine Christianity had a lot of significant local variations). The emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) convened the next major council at Constantinople in 381; after that it was the emperor Theodosius II (r. 402-450) who convened the next at Ephesus in 431 and then the emperor Marcian (r. 450-457) who convened the next at Chalcedon in 451. All of these councils served to define what the “right” Christianity was (“Chalcedonian” Christianity, named after the council), putting some belief systems outside of the doctrine of the Roman Church.
But whereas other Roman institutions didn’t survive the collapse of Roman political authority, the Church as an institution very much did. It was perhaps not obvious that it would – many of the “barbarians” had embraced a non-Chalcedonian Christianity, Arianism, and so might have been hostile to the Church as it existed in Rome. But in practice the need to consolidate the loyalty of their Roman Chalcedonian Christian subjects (on this, note Brown, op. cit. 2nd ed., 105-6, 133-8) and the prestige that the institutional Church held led the rulers of Rome’s successor states to convert to Chalcedonian Christianity; the last of the major Arian Christian kings was Garibald, King of the Lombards in 671.
Indeed, the institutional Church was in some ways a lifeboat in which other elements of the Late Roman world were carried through the storm of the fifth century into the Middle Ages. We’ve already talked about the Church’s role in preserving a fair chunk of the Latin literary tradition. Much of this was done through the spread and then perseverance of monasticism. The first communities of monks emerged in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fourth century and spread through the failing Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Western monastic tradition builds from this with the foundation of Monte Cassino in 529 by Benedict of Nursia and the promulgation of the Rule of Saint Benedict.
Meanwhile, the Church also emerged as one of the central institutions in the cities of the Roman world, with the bishop, the religious head of the Church in a given city, emerging as a key figure in civic governance. While the figure of the bishop rose to importance in both the east and the west, in the east, bishops largely did not move into becoming secular leaders alongside religious figures, in part presumably because the central Roman authority still existed to handle those functions. But in the west, the decline of both civic and centralized government left bishops in the breach. This in turn often preserved older Roman political geography as Liebeschuetz notes, with the civitas surviving as an administrative unit in the form of the diocese of a bishop, precisely because those bishoprics were originally established along Roman administrative lines and remained so even after Roman administration vanished. Bishops ended up taking up some of the tasks that in the past would have fallen to a Roman governor and since they had their seats in the embattled Roman cities, many of those cities survived the difficult fifth and sixth centuries precisely because they were the seat of a bishop.
And in order to run the institution of the Church, its bishoprics and their diocese, it needed both educated clergy who could read the Bible but also administrators who had learned the law – by which they meant Roman law. Secular learning had largely collapsed with the Roman Empire in the west – it had existed to provide training for wealthy men to become secular administrators for the central imperial government and so when the demand for that kind of training vanished, so too did the schools that trained the administrators and jurists. And so the Church had to train them itself, setting up episcopal and monastic schools which trained theology, but also law and administration (and of course provided the context for that survival of Latin literature as a teaching tool). As levels of education and literacy among the secular elite declined, it made sense for kings to employ bishops and other members of the clergy as members of their own administration, leading to this distinctly Roman religious institution having a key place within the secular “barbarian” kingdoms that followed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.
October 12, 2026
The Great Game for Asia 1894-1905
Real Time History
Published 15 May 2026The 19th century is a time of violent global imperial competition. The Scramble for Africa and the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires over influence in Central Asia are among the best-known examples. But the 2nd half of the century also involved another Great Game – the Great Game for Asia.
00:00 Intro
05:35 1st Sino-Japanese War 1894-95
30:02 Boxer War 1900-01
55:40 Russo-Japanese War 1904-05
01:22:14 Conclusion
(more…)
October 10, 2026
“The Catholic Church has always struggled with its relationship to nation-states”
In the New English Review, Bruce Gilley wonders when — or even whether — Pope Leo XIV will realize his pastoral duties extend to defending western civilization:
Pope Leo XIV in the library of the Vatican, 13 October, 2025.
Photo by Ricardo Stuckert via Wikimedia Commons.
In the Middle Ages, they would have kicked a few cardinals in the ass, elected a new pope, and declared this one an anti-pope.
So says the French president in Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, in which a fleet of 100 ships carrying 1 million illegal migrants from Calcutta disgorges its wretched cargo onto the beaches of the Côte d’Azur.
The outburst is occasioned by the insistence of the pope in the novel that Europe should open its borders to all Third-World migrants in the name of charity and solidarity, beginning with this Calcutta fleet. In the novel, His Holiness has sold off all the Vatican art and treasures to raise funds for the migrants, and he is badgering the French president to similarly raise funds to pay for needs of this influx.
“What else can you expect from a Brazilian pope?” the president asks an aide. “The cardinals wanted an innovator as pope, in the name of the universal church, and they certainly got one.”
This fictional scene has obvious parallels to real-life events we’re all experiencing under the current and previous pope, both drawn from service in Latin America, in weakening rather than strengthening the defenses of Europe against a migrant invasion and other anti-Western ills.
During a day trip to the Italian island of Lampedusa in July, Pope Leo took a page out of The Camp of the Saints in requesting European governments create a “a long-term strategic plan capable of receiving, protecting, supporting and integrating migrants”. He also praised the locals “for the solidarity that so many of you have shown”. The United States, he said, should likewise be “welcoming, protecting, and assisting immigrants” as “an act of charity”.
In 2025, before he was chosen as pope, then-Cardinal Prevost had taken up a similar cudgel by openly rejecting U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s invocation of St. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris (the ordering of love) which allows that human limits mean we must prioritize those closest to us first and those afar second. To be frank, the hillbilly has a better grasp of Augustine than the man who became pope.
Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis was even more radical, calling for “open humanitarian corridors” for all and sundry who felt they had a right to waltz into the West. People should be “free to choose whether to migrate or stay” and national borders should be transformed into “privileged places of encounter”. Anyone who resisted, according to that logic, was a racist.
In 2023, the former editor of a Vatican newsletter insert, Lucetta Scaraffia, said that Francis “hates the values of the West” and was more interested in climate change than he was in condemning anti-Semitism or defending Christians from persecution around the globe. “He forgets that the West is the lone part of the world that’s tried, even in limited and insufficient ways, to realize the values of the Church”, she said.
The uncanny similarities between this outlook of Francis, an Argentinian, and that of Leo, whose career was spent in Peru, to the fictional Latin American pope in The Camp of the Saints is tragedy more than farce. Because if the Catholic Church cannot understand the problem that mass Third-World migration poses for Christendom, then the game — for Europe, at least — is surely up.
October 6, 2026
The insanity of the Kamloops Residential School allegations
For whatever reason, the Canadian government decided to not challenge the claims that 215 First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves (media often changed that detail to a “mass grave”) at the former Kamloops Residential School in BC. On X, Tristin Hopper outlines the story as it was relayed to the public:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
I still don’t think Canadians appreciate just how crazy the unmarked grave allegations at Kamloops were. So I tried to sum it up as best as I could …
The unmarked graves at Indian residential schools mentioned by the Truth and Reconciliation predominantly refer to students who died of disease, usually tuberculosis and usually before 1930. They were then buried in onsite cemeteries with wooden markers, with the result that the grave location was lost when the marker rotted away. When you hear about graves being excavated at IRS sites, it’s usually something like this.
The Kamloops 215, from the start, was an entirely different thing. It purported to provide evidence of an insane blood libel that the Catholic Church was secretly murdering Indigenous children en masse as late as the 1960s. The specific “knowing” was that staff were disappearing Kamloops Indian Residential School students and burying them in the school’s apple orchard in the middle of the night. This was despite the fact that nobody could actually name a specific student that had been disappeared in this fashion.
What Kamloops did was equivalent to claiming that we finally had physical evidence of the Satanic ritual abuse panic. So, think of it like a Canadian hospital publicly claiming that they’d found an onsite mass grave filled with babies murdered by Satanists in the 1980s.
Actual residential school deaths were employed as cover for an utterly bananas urban legend. And that’s why, in 2021, Canada was thrown into a profoundly destructive cultural revolution from which we may never recover.
September 13, 2026
The Devils by Ken Russell
On her Substack, kulak explains why The Devils is the “greatest film of all time”:
What if the 1990s Berserk anime, Warhammer 40k, A Man for All Seasons, The Wickerman (1972), Cromwell, 1984, The Gulag Archipelago, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the chronically underrated 2012 horror masterpiece Compliance … were all the same horrifying movie?
What if Mel Gibson made a film like Apocalypto, exploring the nightmarish depths of political/religious sacrifice rituals … But about Early-Modern Shakespeare-era Europe?
I’m constantly asked for my “Greatest Film of all Time” … A torturous question for someone who’s seen as many movies as me … And doubly torturous because maybe the best true answer is one its really hard to name:
Ken Russel’s The Devils might be it.
Certainly the best 30 Years War film ever made.
And the Greatest goth movie ever made.
And the Greatest witch hunt movie ever made.
And the Greatest “MeToo” movie ever made.
And the Greatest “insane asylum” movie ever made.
And CERTAINLY the Greatest Exorcist movie ever made.
Yes, I said that. And I mean it. Did I stutter?And maybe the Greatest “Dark Fantasy” film ever made … Except for the fact that the whole thing is true.
And its being rereleased, the full remastered director’s cut in 4K, this October in Cinemas.
(The strobe effect is only in the trailer)
Ken Russel’s The Devil, adapted from Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon and the play The Devils by Dan Whiting, is one of my top five films of all time. And certainly one of the biggest films of all time in it’s own weird way. It does things as impressive for the spiritual, psychological horrifying, and historical on film as Sergei Bonderchuk’s Waterloo does for warfare or Akira for Scifi and Animation.
Indeed I think I might be the only one who could give that answer, given I might be one of like 10 people who know 17th Century History/Literature and obscure extreme Horror Cinema well enough to INSIST on its OVERWHELMING historical accuracy.
Indeed I’d struggle to think of a film which captures the Insane deadly hypersexual kaleidoscopic character of the 17th century better.
I’ve been doing this a lot recently … But I feel I need to lay out my qualifications here to talk about this … My two areas of focus in university were 17th and 18th century English Literature (Shakespeare through to Jane Austin), and 17th and 18th century Political theory (specifically the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hugo Grotius and other natural law theorists … Yes, I took the BoomerCons seriously when they said natural law was the basis of our society, Like an idiot) … I’m by no means an expert, but the broad flavor of this era: Culturally, religiously, politically, historically, militarily, theoretically, theologically, poetically … Was what I immersed myself in during the years when I should have been drinking and partying more and repeating nonsense to people in power, and other things that actually advance your career.
I need to establish that off the bat because I feel as if a huge part of the reason this film is not regarded as a contender for “Greatest film ever made” is the simply the fact that audiences and critics do not believe it, and certainly do not GET it.
That it is SO Bizarre, and SO weird, and SO horrifyingly violent, and SO hypersexual, and SO saturated in its colors, and SO religiously discordant … That it has to be a bizarre psychedelic hellscape of Ken Russel’s perverse drug-addled imagination …
They especially had to think this because if they accepted that it was indeed historically accurate, and not a bizarre sexual/psychedelic story of the American 1960s and 70s reading themselves back into history … Suddenly they’d have to accept that the same thing done to Loudon in 1634 was what was being done to America in the middle of the 20th century, and has been done to the west more or less ever since …
That the yo-yo between state-enforced debauchery one the one hand, and moral panic witch-hunts on the other, is not a schizophrenic attribute of mass media or “Moral Progress” or American Culture … But a highly historically precedented and calculated attack meant to destroy and enslave a people without fighting them.
That “Free Love”, “Feminist Criticism”, “Queer Theory”, “No Fault Divorce”, and “Hostile Work Environment lawsuits” rock society between the extremes of sexual license and socio-sexual moral-panic for the same reason one might rapidly rock a boat between it’s port and starboard sides … To capsize it into the devouring abyss.
That we are indeed living through Loudon at scale.
August 30, 2026
The unspoken dividing line between “BCE” and “CE”
I’m not a trained historian, so I don’t know if it’s a guild requirement for modern historians to ostentatiously avoid using traditional “BC” and “AD” to denote historical dates or if it’s just another sop to the easily offended like so many other things:
An Olmec head, By Marshall Astor (Life on the Edge), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19349056
Although I work primarily as a computer programmer, my college degree is in History. Over the years, I have retained a high level of interest in history, both recent and ancient.
A few months ago I listened to a Great Courses presentation about the Olmecs — one of the lesser known Central American civilizations — given by Dr. Ed Barnhart. The course lived up to its name and taught much about the history and society, as well as the giant heads, of the Olmecs. However, one thing bothered me about Dr. Barnhart’s presentation.
Dr. Barnhart generally uses CE and BCE for dates. CE stands for “common era” and BCE stands for “before common era”. Other than that fact, CE perfectly coincides with the previous AD and BCE perfectly coincides with BC.
Perhaps Dr. Barnhart should not be singled out. He is not alone in the use of these terms. In fact, the majority of historical presentations these days employ CE and BCE. And it may be that using these terms is not a personal decision; rather, it may be that a department-wide or even university-wide convention.
However, in my view, using CE and BCE instead of AD and BC is not okay. As an (amateur) historian, I believe that it’s bad for history. And as a Christian, I find it a bit offensive. I will probably never have the opportunity to tell Dr. Barnhart why he should not use CE/BCE, but if I did, here’s what I would tell him:
1) The prime commitment of a historian should be to history. A historian should be careful that the information presented is the most accurate, the most complete, and most contextually grounded. CE/BCE fails to be most accurate because it takes an obviously true historical fact — that the currently used Julian/Gregorian calendar is based on the birth of Christ — and obscures that fact. It is not the most complete because there is no way on its own to understand that CE/BCE means to present the same system as AD/BC. To truly understand the system, the AD/BC system would need to be explained. The AD/BC system can stand on its own, but the CE/BCE can only be understood along with AD/BC.
And it lacks context because the terms “common era” and “before common era” give no indication as to what exactly is the demarcation between the two eras. Since CE/BCE gives no referent, a student could reasonably conclude that the dating system is entirely arbitrary. For these reasons, using CE/BCE leaves students or listeners knowing less than they should and perhaps even having a wrong understanding of the dating system. AD/BC preserves important historical information. CE/BCE does not. On the basis of that alone, CE/BCE should not be used by historians who want to be as accurate and complete as possible.
2) Using AD/BC does not require anyone to profess Christianity. Some might say that AD/BC unfairly burdens non-Christians, but the terms Anno Domini and Before Christ are clearly not confessional statements. There is no serious historical dispute that Jesus Christ existed in approximately the time and place given in the Scriptures, and AD/BC merely recognizes that this is the basis for the year numbering system. Anno Domini, or year of the Lord, doesn’t require the user to say “my Lord” or otherwise confess Christianity, just to recognize that the calendar was created by people who did confess Christianity. That is an important fact, not something to be hidden.
The fact is that every calendar starts dating from something, generally from an important event. Some examples are:
- Roman dating: years counted from the traditional founding of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, conventionally placed in 753 BC.
- Hebrew calendar: years are traditionally counted from a calculated date for the creation of the world.
- Islamic calendar: years are counted from the Hijra, Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina in AD 622.
- French Republican calendar: years were counted from the establishment of the French Republic in AD 1792.
To use a particular calendar says nothing about one’s religious beliefs.
August 25, 2026
QotD: “… and called it macaroni”
I don’t know whether you need much in the way of background, but since some of you seem to enjoy the “inside baseball” stuff … History, as an academic discipline, has always suffered from a “source base” problem. We deal with artifacts; more specifically with documents. If it ain’t written down … see what I mean? This is why whoever-it-was wasn’t wrong when he said that History is just the biographies of Great Men. It’s the biographies of the best-documented men, anyway. I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, but you see what I mean.
So when, in the Seventies, we had the “cultural turn“, a whole new series of techniques had to be developed to expand the source base. Some of those were good and necessary. Others … well, Wiki quotes Frederic Jameson, one of the most prominent early-90s obfuscators (Indie band name?):
The very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but it is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the image of culture.
Translated from the PoMo, it’s your standard, tiresome stuff about “critique”. Culture just IS Capitalism, which IS Consumerism, blah blah blah, you know the drill. It’s tedious, but it’s not entirely wrong — what people “consume” (in the egghead sense, not the biomechanical sense) can give us important clues about their world. So long as you avoid the teleological temptation (didn’t they tour with EVC?) of attributing everything to “Capitalism”, you can do good work.
The “problem” with recent history is that the “centers of cultural production” do seem to be identifiable, and so are their motives. They are “Madison Avenue” and “to make money”, respectively, and so it’s easy — and profitable!! — to do the tiresome PoMo CultMarx thing. The further back into The Past you go, though … well, consider this:
As you can see from the caption, that style is called “macaroni” — like from the old song “Yankee Doodle,” which the Colonials appropriated in an early example of “owning the insult.” Wiki sez:
Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually epicene and androgynous manner. The term “macaroni” pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his British nature …
… The macaronis became seen in stereotyped terms in Britain, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality – which was then legally viewed as sodomy. At the time, homosexuality was frowned upon, and was even punishable by death. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th-century British society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification, and consumer capitalism.
You see the typical “critical” blah blah blah there at the end, and it’s not wrong, just tedious, predictable, and tediously predictable. It’s also much harder to find a “purpose” for this behavior. It’s easy to do for the modern analogue of the macaroni, the hipster […] which Wiki documents extensively, because of course they do, it’s right there underneath “macaroni”. But the whole “culture industry” thing wasn’t there yet in the 18th century, so it might actually be down to an individual person. It’d be theoretically possible to find “the first macaroni” — it was the Marquis de Whatever, and he decided to dress like that because reasons, and all the best people decided to copy him, also because reasons, and that’s pretty much all your “cultural turn” can do, because that’s the only documentation we have.
Since we here are not bound by the canons of scholarship, however, we can speculate. I want to focus on this bit about macaronis:
In the 18th century, wealthy young British men traditionally took a trip around Europe upon their coming of age, known as the Grand Tour. Italy was a key destination of these tours. During their trip, many developed a taste for maccaroni, a type of pasta little known in Britain then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 by those returning from the Grand Tour. They would refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as “very maccaroni”.
That’s Information Velocity, preindustrial-style. They had to go there personally — or, at the very least, have access to the in-house journals of those who did:
The song “Yankee Doodle” from the time of the American Revolutionary War mentions a man who “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. Dr. Richard Shuckburgh was a British surgeon and also the author of the song’s lyrics; the joke which he was making was that the Yankees were naive and unsophisticated enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a macaroni.
In America, only a select few persons would have access to that kind of thing, because only a few would move in those circles.
Go back a bit further, and cultural trends are far less traceable, but “centers of cultural production” are much easier to find, in one specific sense: They’re monasteries. And there you have a group which speaks a common language — extremely rare in the Middle Ages — is literate (ditto), and has something close to, if not caloric surplus, then at least “chronic caloric sufficiency”, I guess we’ll have to call it. Monks worked hard in the Middle Ages, by our standards, but not as hard as the peasantry. They were well-fed, or at least consistently fed, in a way the peasantry weren’t.
In other words, whatever Information Velocity existed in the Middle Ages, they had it. They made a virtue out of circulating books, and all those books were in a common tongue. Since they also produced books — indeed, were pretty much the only ones who did — they were also, by definition, au courant with whatever the high fashions were, because they illustrated the books that were such a crucial part of the aristocracy’s gift-giving culture.
Severian, “Monastic Vices”, Founding Questions, 2026-01-13.
August 21, 2026
QotD: The Amish
The basic organizational unit of Amish society — after the extended family, which is vital and often includes three generations under one roof — is the “church district”, a community of twenty-five to forty families who live within a short buggy-ride of one another. The leaders of the district are chosen by lot from among the married men, and each is governed by an Ordnung, an unwritten set of rules laying down expectations for behavior. It’s this Ordnung that contains the restrictions on technology and lifestyle that we typically associate with the Amish, covering everything from what color you can paint your barn (one group insists on red because white would be too worldly) to whether you can use mechanical milking machines. The church revisits their Ordnung every six months or so to see if it needs updating — one group had originally approved walkie-talkies for communication while hunting, but then discovered boys were using them to flirt with girls and decided to ban them. Church districts with similar Ordnungs are “in fellowship”, and a cluster of districts in full fellowship with one another are an “affiliation”. (A “settlement”, like the Holmes County Settlement, is a cluster of geographically contiguous districts regardless of affiliation.)
Importantly, few of these restrictions are based on the idea that the banned technology or behavior is wrong in and of itself: for instance, every Ordnung forbids a baptized Amish adult to own a car, but boys from some Amish families have cars for a while in their teens and all but the most conservative affiliations will pay someone else to drive them if they need to go farther than their buggy can take them. Or to put it another way, nobody thinks the English are bad people for driving cars — they just think we’re not Amish.
So if an Ordnung mostly isn’t meant to keep you from doing intrinsically evil things, like murder and adultery and blasphemy, what is it for? How do you decide what to allow? What are you optimizing for when you design it?
Two things, mainly, though they’re not neatly separated. The first and most important role of the Ordnung is engendering the virtue the Amish call Gelassenheit. There’s not a perfect English translation for the German,1 but Hurst and McConnell describe it as a spirit of “selflessness, humility, or meekness”, a subordination of self to community. Amish scholar2 Donald Kraybill wrote that Gelassenheit is meant to develop a “yielded self” that “stands in contrast to the bold, aggressive individualism of modern [English] culture”. Thinking too highly of yourself, or trying to outdo others, are failures of Gelassenheit, but they’re hard to avoid when you have to market your personal #brand or compete in the marketplace. Unmechanized agriculture, on the other hand, was very good at nurturing Gelassenheit: a farmer is necessarily aware of his dependence on natural forces beyond his control, which keeps him humble. Nowadays the Amish worry that shifts way from their traditional lifestyle will “foster the notion that the worker controls his or her work and life”, which might “breed an attitude of self-sufficiency, even arrogance” that is antithetical to their values.
The concern for Gelassenheit shows up particularly in Amish approaches to childrearing. Where English society values self-expression, intellectual curiosity, and individual accomplishment, Amish parents rank obedience and self-control as the most desirable qualities in children. (More than half of the parents the authors surveyed put “being interested in how and why things happen” at the bottom of their list.) They also report that teachers at Amish schools tend to be “preoccupied (to our eyes) with minor aspects of misbehavior that signaled nonparticipation in the group or lack of obedience to authority”. All of this carries through into the workplace, too: the Amish generally think white collar workers are “out to make the big bucks” and that their jobs are be difficult or impossible to undertake with a “meek spirit”. So if you can’t farm (and increasingly you can’t), the Amish think your work should be something near home that uses your hands, allows your family to participate, and contributes directly to your community. No arguments here that building dashboards to give executives deeper insight into critical business functions leads to the more efficient allocation of global capital and lifts all boats; they want you to make food or furniture or something.
The Ordnung‘s second goal is to separate believers from the broader world. This is partly a legacy of the Anabaptist experience of persecution, partly a response to Biblical passages like Romans 12:2’s warning not to “be conformed to this world”, and partly a protective measure against a world that isn’t interested in Gelassenheit, but the dualism between Amish and “English” is a vital part of what it means to be Amish. Of course, it’s impossible to clearly differentiate between things that promote a particular mindset/virtue and things that mark you out as different: the distinctive Amish “plain dress“, for instance, both limits opportunities for vanity and marks out the wearer as, well, kind of a weirdo. (There’s sometimes also a sub-goal of separation from other Amish affiliations — one Amish man is quoted saying, “The only reason the Old Order doesn’t have rubber wheels [on their buggies] is because the New Order did it first”.)
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: An Amish Paradox, by Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-15.
- And they mean something different by it than Heidegger does!
- Okay, this one is a Mennonite scholar of the Amish.
July 30, 2026
Intramural conflict in the progressive “big tent”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies some of the major fault lines among the temporary coalition-of-convenience on “the left”:
“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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The modern woke worldview keeps colliding with reality because it sorts people into fixed moral categories: oppressed people are presumed good, while designated oppressors are presumed guilty. Once that framework takes hold, facts become secondary.
That is why some progressives can condemn “Christian nationalism” before breakfast, then struggle to name radical Islam when an Islamist attacks the very people they claim to defend.
The contradiction is obvious. Radical Islam is deeply hostile to homosexuality, women’s equality, free expression and secular liberalism. Pretending otherwise does not make anyone tolerant. It makes society dishonest and vulnerable.
This does not mean every Muslim is dangerous, nor does it justify collective blame. It means an ideology should be judged by what it teaches, what its extremists do, and whether its institutions openly confront the problem. The same standard should apply to every religion and political movement.
The woke response is usually predictable: redirect attention toward the far right, blame Western society, or accuse anyone raising the issue of hatred.
That protects the ideology, but it does nothing to protect ordinary people. Compassion without boundaries becomes negligence.
A healthy society needs openness, but openness is not the absence of judgment. Immigration, asylum and multiculturalism require enforceable limits, cultural confidence and a clear expectation that newcomers accept the laws and basic freedoms of the country receiving them.
You cannot build social trust by demanding that citizens ignore obvious conflicts. You cannot defend gay people while excusing movements that despise them. You cannot defend women while tolerating misogyny from politically protected groups.
Reality does not care which side has the approved slogans. Eventually, contradictions collect a human cost.
July 27, 2026
The shambolic Fifth Crusade, or “Waiting for Fredot”
In The Critic, Anatoly Grablevsky reviews a new book on one of the less well-known attempts to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Islamic conquerors:
By the early 13th century, the military and geopolitical situation of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem was dire. After the Third Crusade (1189-92) had failed to retake Jerusalem, the Frankish realm in the Holy Land was reduced to a thin coastal strip centred on the heavily fortified city of Acre. The rest of the Near East was in the hands of the Ayyubids, the successors of Saladin.
In response to Ayyubid encroachment, in 1213 Pope Innocent III called for a new holy war to reinforce the Kingdom of Jerusalem and reclaim the Holy City for Christendom. The bulk of the expedition was recruited in the Holy Roman Empire, whose young emperor, Frederick II, the wonder of the world himself, ostentatiously took up the cross. He was, however, in no hurry to join his countrymen in the east.
Learning from their bitter past experiences, this time around the Crusaders adopted a novel strategy. Instead of focusing their efforts on the Holy Land, the Christians targeted Egypt, the political and economic heartland of the Ayyubids.
The Crusader army’s first port of call was the coastal city of Damietta, which, after a lengthy siege, fell in 1219. This was a major victory for Christendom: Crusaders had not captured a city of Damietta’s size, wealth and strategic importance since the fall of Jerusalem in 1099.
The Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil, under pressure from Mongol attacks at the rear, now offered attractive peace terms that included the return of Jerusalem to the Christians. The Crusaders, overconfident and under orders from the absentee emperor, rebuffed Al-Kamil and instead decided to march on the Ayyubid capital of Cairo.
Here, the crusade took a shambolic turn. The Christians wasted precious months awaiting the arrival of Frederick II, but the emperor never bothered to show up (Smith might have called his book “Waiting for Fredot”). By the time the Crusaders finally began the march south, Al-Kamil had gathered his strength, and the Franks were quickly outmanoeuvred by the Sultan, who used his superior knowledge of the Nile’s flooding patterns to trap them against the river.
The Crusaders reacted by launching an all-out assault on their substantial wine provisions so that, when the Muslims attacked, the Christian army disintegrated in a drunken rout.
In the ensuing peace deal, Al-Kamil regained Damietta, in return for giving safe passage back to Europe to the Christian survivors.
July 20, 2026
Eight Great Powers Invade China: the Boxer Uprising 1900-1901
Real Time History
Published 20 Feb 2026After the defeat in the 1st Sino-Japanese War, the Qing Dynasty is under pressure: Some are calling for domestic reforms and ousting Western influence, while the Great Powers want to further open up China for their businesses. Violence erupts when the so called Boxer movement kills several Westerners.
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