Quotulatiousness

August 20, 2026

“It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his Substack, Andrew Doyle discusses the fine art of writing libellous things about someone without quite giving enough legally actionable material for the victim to have a chance to retaliate successfully:

Simon Edge on GB News.
Screencap from Andrew Doyle

How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a “racist” for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society. White supremacists have denounced me as a traitor for my opposition to racism.

It’s all noise, of course, and best filtered out. These aren’t serious people, and no serious person would believe their smears. However, last week an author called Simon Edge, well-known in gender-critical circles, published a blog post about me that I can only describe as defamatory. He’s very lucky that I’ve no appetite for litigation, but I think it’s worth discussing the nature of his smearing technique because it’s become so common among activists of the more mendacious ilk.

It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it.

Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.

Here’s how he did it. Recently, it was announced on X that Oldspeak Books, which bills itself as “Britain’s only centre-right bookshop”, has closed its doors. The manager posted a message on social media to explain.

    Over time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced. The uncertainty around which customers were genuine, made it hard for me to greet everyone warmly, and my customer service suffered.

This looked like a clear case of cancel culture to me and, since Oldspeak had been kind enough to stock my books, I reposted her message with a comment to the effect that it was a shame that she had been pressurised into closing her shop. This was, according to Edge, my first foray into the murky world of fascist apologism. Who knew it could be so easy?

August 15, 2026

Mark Steyn denies being a “Never Trump”-er

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

From his sickbed, Mark Steyn responds to a criticism from one of his long-time readers that he’s “gradually devolved into NeverTrumpism:

I have no idea where I saw this meme, but it makes me laugh

I begin to understand why, since I emerged from my coma, the docs have recommended eschewing the Internet. Following Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A, Joe Huber comments:

    Unfortunately, SteynOnline (once my favorite place to visit) has gradually devolved into NeverTrumpism, and that’s sad. But it is what it is.

We may have to introduce weekly ceremonial expulsions from The Mark Steyn Club. I’m not “NeverTrump” on immigration, DOGE, MAHA, endless war, etc, and I would still favour him over any likely Democrat candidate or “mainstream” Republican. The first time I met him was over thirty years ago, when his then wife was auditioning for a Broadway musical produced by a friend of mine. The only substantive exchange we had that day was his demand for assurance that the show was a bona fide hit … because the defining characteristic of Trump has always been his utter contempt for what he calls “losers” and his disinclination to allow his brand to be contaminated by association with them.

So it is a mystery to me that he allowed himself to get mixed up with an institution that, by any objective measure, is the biggest “loser” on the planet.

By contrast, my position on this has been exactly the same throughout the time Mr Huber regarded SteynOnline as “my favorite place to visit”. This piece, for example, was published in the print edition of National Review over fifteen sod-bollocking years ago, and its first sentence remains the question that, multiple unwon wars later, the Rah-Rah Right still declines to answer. I recall multiple back-and-forths with the editors over passages they felt were too strong meat, and I would probably write it more bluntly today. But its comparative sobriety should cause Mr Huber to reflect that his charge of “NeverTrumpism” is bollocks, and that my concerns about US inability to use half of the entire planet’s military budget to accomplish any minimal strategic purpose is principled, long-held, and borne out by any random headline. From today:

    Russia Captures Record Share of India’s Oil Market

And so it goes. (Incidentally, just as a minor point: I note the increasing adoption of the term “West Asia” for the zone of conflict. “Middle East” is a designation that reflects the view from Washington; “West Asia” is how it looks from Delhi and Beijing.)

You will see in the latter half of my ancient piece the reference to the US military as “the expeditionary force of the Parliament of Man”. It is safe to say that President Trump — with his declaration that he’ll pick the next Supreme Leader — does not see it like that, but that’s the point: the rhetoric may change, but the self-bollocksing of American warmongering does not.

August 7, 2026

Blood Dawn by Hans van de Ven

Filed under: Books, Britain, China, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman reviews a new book on the Second World War in Asia by Hans van de Ven:

I really wanted to enjoy this book. The enthusiastic endorsements from Rana Mitter, Antony Beevor and Richard Overy raised my expectations considerably. Yet by page eight of Blood Dawn I felt as uncomfortable as the proverbial curate confronted with a rotten egg.

The author aims to provide a narrative that “contributes to a gradual shift in our understanding of the significance of World War II”. This is admirable. A more Asian-centred interpretation of the conflict is certainly needed, as the war is still too often viewed through a Eurocentric or North Atlantic lens. Historians such as Rana Mitter, Jonathan Fennell and Richard Overy have already helped redress this imbalance. It is unquestionably true that the conflict began with Japanese aggression in China as early as 1931 and that the war both began and ended in Asia.

The problem is that the book insists that the central dynamic of modern Asian history is a nationalist struggle to escape imperialism and colonialism. While both undeniably shaped Asia, it is a considerable stretch to explain the region’s political development primarily through resistance to empire. The author correctly notes that many Asian political movements saw the war as an opportunity to cast off colonial rule, but he greatly overstates their role in determining the war’s outcome.

Consequently, the analysis neglects the broader dynamics of power – local, regional and imperial – that shaped Asia before, during and after the war. The author assumes that modern Asia is the product of “Asian peoples’ continuing struggle to overcome the legacies of empire”. That seems reductive. A more convincing interpretation would describe modern Asia to be the result of a power-based confrontation among declining powers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands, a rising Japan, a developing China, and the emerging superpowers whose ideologies would shape postwar Asia: the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was principally caused by one rising empire, Japan, seeking to assert its dominance regionally and to replace existing empires.

As a result, some empires disappeared, others expanded, and many colonial territories gained independence as competing political elites seized opportunities created by wartime upheaval. Where those struggles could not be resolved peacefully, civil war followed. One may call this nationalism or self-determination, but it was power politics nonetheless.

In the postwar period, Asians were often less concerned with abolishing imperial legacies than with creating new centres of power controlled by local elites. Since 1945, Asia has been shaped by competing powers, some imperial in nature, such as China, the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States, and others nationalist and local.

A similar lack of nuance appears in the treatment of imperialism. British imperialism is lumped together with that of France and the Netherlands, with little appreciation for their differences. British involvement in 19th-century China is presented primarily as the cause of China’s problems rather than as part of a broader interaction with a declining and dysfunctional Qing polity. Imperialism was certainly influential, but so were domestic developments, including China’s internal sclerosis and Japan’s response to modernity, which produced its own imperial ambitions in China, Korea, Manchuria and the Pacific.

The author’s ideological predispositions are impossible to miss, and the book frequently descends into crude Anglophobia. We are told, for instance, that “British elites, who liked (and like) to think of themselves as natural and gifted rulers, found a new outlet for their yearning to govern India”. Such statements are simplistic, if not puerile. Similarly, discussing the collapse of the American-British-Dutch-Australia Command (ABDACOM) in 1942, the author remarks that “the Dutch were abandoned to their fate. Retreat is an underappreciated military skill, and the British were practiced masters of it, as they had shown at Dunkirk”. This is the sort of cheap point-scoring that would weaken an undergraduate essay, yet here it appears in a supposedly serious work of history.

The treatment of India is particularly problematic. The narrative focuses heavily on the Indian National Congress and consequently overlooks the diversity and complexity of the independence movement. There is little recognition that what Congress often described as British obstruction was, in part, a debate within Britain (especially the Conservative Party) about the form an independent India should take. The same debate also took place within Indian circles considering the subject.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the central political question in India was often not whether independence would occur but what form it would take and, crucially, who would benefit from it. The Quit India movement of 1942 followed the Cripps Mission, which had already offered India Dominion status after the war. Congress sought immediate separation, but many of its leaders privately supported the Allied war effort, believing correctly that victory would hasten independence. One could even argue that Congress’s greatest unintended achievement was not independence but the partition and communal violence that accompanied it. The book fails to engage adequately with these complexities.

August 6, 2026

The Goddess That Failed by Janice Fiamengo

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo shares the foreword to her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself:

Feminism poses a threat to everything good in western culture, perhaps especially to women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint.

I was an adherent of feminism before I became a critic. I have felt its euphoric exultation and its self-flattering conviction of moral purity. Later, I recognized its hubris and moral hollowness.

I am familiar with feminism’s core texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Anne Franks, having studied them and believed in them for years. I understand the psychology and the history of the movement because I lived inside it for many years.

Unlike others who have criticized feminism’s excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.

Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.

From the first occasions when I began to speak and write about feminism in 2012 and 2013, I encountered the same response from feminists: “What you are describing is not real feminism” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists”, and so on.

I am regularly accused of hating myself, of hating other women, and/or of seeking male approval. I am accused, by those who have never studied feminism, of not understanding feminism.

It’s true that not all feminists are as fervid as an Andrea Dworkin or a Sally Miller Gearhart. They do not all fantasize, as Gearhart did (to much congratulation and gushing praise), about how much better life would be if the number of males could be reduced to 10% of the human population. They do not rhapsodize, as Mary Daly did, about a decontamination of the earth through such a reduction. They do not make jokes about killing men as a public service, as Mona Eltahawy did.

But it’s also true that such vicious women, and the many others who have lent their malign energies to the movement, have never been disavowed by other feminist leaders. In fact, feminists’ lack of shame before bloodthirsty feminist pronouncements is remarkably consistent.

True, there are many varieties of feminism, not all of them agreeing on every point: radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, post-colonial feminism, intersectional feminism, eco-feminism, animal rights feminism, abolitionist feminism, trans-inclusive feminism, feminism for sex-based rights, maternal feminism, and even (most bizarrely) conservative or reactionary feminism. Some extend their compassion to victim groups other than women, such as trans women, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, or the environment.

Such distinctions do not concern me because none makes a real difference.

None escapes the victim mentality: the belief that the history of humanity up until the present moment has been a history of (privileged, white) men oppressing women and other innocent victims; and that because of their alleged greater suffering and moral innocence, particular care and attention must be paid to women and to their unique capacity for empathy and social justice.

No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category.

Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims.

August 3, 2026

“Find your Honest Broker, and your problems will be solved”

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Business, China, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Ted Gioia explains how he became the “Honest Broker”:

This particular project brought me to China. I was trying to set up an operation in a remote province, far outside my comfort zone, and couldn’t seem to figure out how to maneuver among the various interests and stakeholders. My patron was one of the wealthiest men in Hong Kong, and by using his contacts, I gained access to people who normally operate behind layers of intermediaries and gatekeepers. But even these contacts led me on an endless runaround. My sources gave me conflicting advice and confusing directions. Everything felt wrong and nothing seemed quite on the level.

I knew I needed help, but had run out of options. Then I met the drunk Australian.

He wasn’t a contact on my list, and I can’t even remember his name. This was a chance encounter in a hotel bar late at night. But this hard-drinking Australian was talkative and had interesting things to say. He had spent most of his life bouncing around the capitals of Asia, and was a high-level operator in his own spheres. He bragged about his insider’s knowledge, and claimed — with some accuracy, as I came to discover — that he knew how to maneuver in China better than the clueless Westerners who were now appearing on the scene. He had traced the secret paths to power and knew all the dangerous mistakes amateurs always make.

He reeled off a list of them. “You go into a province or city and flash around some money, then expect the local officials will help you? Forget it. They’ll rob you blind, and even make you bribe them for the privilege. Same goes for the party leaders. From each according to his ability, and all that, my friend. And forget about lawyers — the legal protections here are like this” — he held up his empty glass, then flipped it over as if to emphasize the nothingness of what he was offering to the gods of Marx and Mao. “As for the bankers, you might as well call them wankers.”

The empty glass was also a sign that I needed to order another round of the local brew, and I quickly complied. My new friend fell into a meditative silence until further libations arrived. Finally, after another sip on the stomach-destroying glass of baijiu that passed for spirits at our watering hole, I asked the obvious question.

“So what do I do? Who can I trust?”

“That’s easy, mate. You need to find the Honest Broker.”

This sounded appealing enough, but I had zero idea what my new acquaintance was talking about. He might just as well have told me to go to Oz and consult with the Wizard.

“Who, exactly, is this Honest Broker?”

“There’s at least one in every city. But don’t expect their business cards to say ‘Honest Broker’ — that’s just what I call them. But that’s exactly what they are. Sometimes they don’t even have an official position. But they are the key to everything.”

He proceeded to explain how Honest Brokers play a hidden but vital role in communities without a history of legal protections and stable institutions. Their influence and power is built solely on a reputation for straight talk and trustworthy dealings. “They are true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren’t going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage. Whatever you need — a loan, a building permit, political influence, a place to land a private jet, whatever — they will introduce you to the right people and steer you away from the sharks.

“And they do this for a very simple reason: their prestige is enhanced by making these connections. In many cases, they don’t even want to be paid. Or let me put that differently — you repay them by becoming a trusted contact for them in future dealings. The Honest Broker may help you for free right now, but don’t be surprised if you’re asked for assistance on something completely different months or even years later. You Yanks have a hard time grasping it, and are always looking for shortcuts. But the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate.

“Find your Honest Broker, and your problems will be solved.”

This proved to be valuable advice, worth far more than the cost of drinks. Over the next few weeks, I changed my approach completely. I made inquiries, compared notes, and finally found my Honest Broker — who did solve my problems, just as promised. My mission accomplished, I returned back home to California and tried to forget all about it.

I put my passport out of sight. My world shrank back to manageable dimensions, and my days were spent at the two keyboards, the piano and the word processor. I was getting back into my music groove again.

A long time went by before I realized the real importance of what I had learned in China, and how it applied to the other half of my split and fractured life. I was putting energy into a new sphere now, music criticism, and trying to create a rule book for how to make it sizzle.

Yet criticism seemed such a degraded form of writing at that juncture. I had already seen the collapse in literary criticism — in fact, I had lived through it as a student at Stanford and Oxford. The whole enterprise had turned into a circus sideshow over the course of just a few years. Critics now aspired to quasi-celebrity status, and they exploited their roles as arbiters of taste to engage in the worst sort of strutting and preening. The more outlandishly they sold out their craft, opting instead for self-aggrandizement, the larger the rewards they received. This blight took root first in France but quickly spread elsewhere. And now the taint seemed to be seeping into other forms of criticism as well. Whether the subject at hand was a movie or a meal or a TV wrestling match, the critics were the real stars, and everything else subservient to their self-serving deconstruction of anything in their path.

July 31, 2026

Drinker’s Extra Shots – Clarkson’s Farm

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Critical Drinker After Hours
Published 30 Jul 2026

In the mood for an Amazon show that’s actually good, unlike Rings of Power? Then Clarkson’s Farm, arguably the best reality show on TV right now, has got you covered. Join me for a quick review of this absolute gem.

July 27, 2026

The shambolic Fifth Crusade, or “Waiting for Fredot”

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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 24, 2026

QotD: The first rule of strategic analysis

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Do you know the first rule of good strategic analysis? When a war begins: shut up.

Wars are theatres of chaos, noise, confusion and premature certainty. The temptation to declare victory, defeat or historical turning point within the first few hours or days is not analysis. It is posturing. Yet the modern media cycle, with its appetite for endless commentary and instant verdicts, cannot tolerate silence. The result is a steady stream of confident assertions, most of which will age badly.

The current conflict between the alliance of the United States and Israel and Iran has followed this pattern almost perfectly. Within days, it was announced that America was winning; America was losing; Iran is winning; Iran had been neutralised; Iran remained undeterred; Trump doesn’t have clear plan; he does have a clear plan; this was the start of a forever war; it wasn’t a forever war; the war is a catastrophe for the US; the war is a triumph for the US.; that the war would soon be over; the war is over.

Obviously, these claims cannot be true simultaneously. Most of them will turn out not to be true at all.

Resisting the customary rush to instant judgement and adopting a more analytical frame of mind, what can we, discerning sceptics that we are, sensibly say six weeks into the war? Which claims survive contact with reality, and which are, for now, better treated as conjecture?

Michael Rainsborough, “A Sceptical Stocktake of the Iran War So Far”, The Daily Sceptic, 2026-04-21.

Update, 27 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 22, 2026

Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” at the national level

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In The Critic, Shimeon Lee looks at Andy Burnham’s time as Mayor of Greater Manchester and what his record there says about how he will try to run Britain from No. 10:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official MP portrait, July 2026.
© House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

Andy Burnham is now Prime Minister, and the country soon to discover what “Manchesterism” means when applied to the British state. Burnham’s nine years as mayor, alongside his earlier national record, offer a clear guide to the instincts he is likely to bring to No.10: a willingness to raise taxes, expand the state and prioritise policies that sound good but ultimately deliver poor value for money.

It is revealing that after being elected mayor in 2017, one of Burnham’s first acts was to impose a new charge on households in Greater Manchester. The new mayoral precept was initially set at £8 for the average band D property, funding the mayoral operation, including Burnham’s £110,000 salary. As so often happens with new charges, it did not remain modest for long. The charge more than doubled the following year, rising again in 2020-21, 2022-23, 2025-26 and 2026-27. By the time Burnham resigned to contest the Makerfield by-election, it had risen to £61.75, nearly eight times the original amount in less than a decade.

As residents paid more, the mayor built an increasingly elaborate network of advisers, commissioners and panels funded by taxpayers. These included a young person’s advisor paid £500 per day, a transport commissioner and an active travel commissioner each paid £650 per day, and an LGBTQ+ advisor paid £177 per day. He also established seven equality panels facilitated by “culturally appropriate organisations” which cost £392,435 a year. Taxpayers can only speculate how much larger that ecosystem could become when he takes control of Whitehall.

The mayoral precept was not the only tax rise implemented by Burnham. As mayor, he raised every tax under his control. The band D police precept rose from £162.30 when he entered office to £285.30 by the time he left, a 76 per cent increase. At the same time, the fire precept increased from £59.95 to £92.20, a 54 per cent increase. Both increases substantially outstripped cumulative inflation of 37.5 per cent during that period.

Even that understates his tax-raising ambition, as it only includes the charges he managed to implement. In 2019, Burnham proposed a clean air zone for Greater Manchester which would impose a daily charge on commercial vehicles that did not comply with environmental standards: £7.50 per day for taxis, £10 per day on vans and £60 per day on buses, coaches and heavy goods vehicles. These would have added thousands of pounds a year to local businesses’ costs.

July 21, 2026

Frederick the Great’s 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel

Filed under: Books, Germany, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his look at all things Machiavelli, including Prussian king Frederick the Great’s polemic against the author of The Prince:

Frederick the Great, 1781
Oil portrait by Anton Graff (1736-1813) in the Sanssouci Palace collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Maybe Machiavelli’s teachings have no relevance in any remotely civilized political system. Maybe they’re far worse than irrelevant: maybe they’re all entirely evil (as they appear), and in addition, would prove the ruin of both the people and their ruler.

This was, as it happens, the view espoused by one important ruler: the Prussian king Frederick the Great. In his 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel, he claims Machiavelli’s book is “one of the most dangerous that ever appeared in the world”, in that the political crimes it encourages would impose “a lasting misery upon whole nations”. Truly great rulers, says Frederick, aren’t the avaricious, amoral, self-serving, shape-shifting demons that Machiavelli describes. Rather, they are those “whose business it is to administer justice, and to set examples of justice to their subjects; and who, by their magnanimity, mercy, and goodness, ought to be the living images of Deity”. Thus, Frederick sees his rebuttal as “a defense of humanity against a monster who would destroy it”; it is “an antidote to poison”.

Frederick ruled Prussia for nearly 50 years. Most historians rate him a success. On the face of things, he seems like the kind of critic who knows what he’s talking about.

But Machiavelli would say, not so fast. What did Frederick do almost immediately after assuming power? Without any provocation, he launched a war to seize the large, prosperous, populous province of Silesia (now in southwestern Poland) from the Habsburg Monarchy. And he did so on a convoluted, centuries-old dynastic claim which sounded as unconvincing to his contemporaries as it does to us now. In the three Silesian wars which followed (the third turning into the Seven Years War), well over a million soldiers died fighting. Millions more wound up maimed, psychologically scarred, or otherwise ruined. Of course, millions of non-combatants also suffered: wives lost husbands, mothers and fathers lost sons, children lost fathers and uncles and brothers. Those non-combatants also suffered displacement, terror, deprivation, and injury. Over two decades, Frederick’s wars — particularly the Seven Years War — convulsed Europe. Frederick gained 30% more territory and 50% more citizens, but the cost was losing 10% of the Prussian population to combat or disease (the modern equivalent of 35 million Americans, 6 million English, or 3 million Australians). The point is: if his actions are anything to go by, Frederick didn’t oppose Machiavellian power moves as much as he professed, if at all. Machiavelli might even argue that in taking pains to proclaim his opposition to Machiavelli even as his wars of acquisition injured and killed millions, he was doing exactly what Machiavelli had advised: seeming to be good even as he was doing whatever the hell he wanted, for his own purposes. Most people will buy the act anyway, says Machiavelli, so why not?

This brings me back to Machiavelli’s claims about how rulers do in fact act, and how they must act to avoid ruin. And that in turn brings me back to the original wording of The Prince, and what real-world credibility Machiavelli might have as a political commentator.

As it happens, Machiavelli was no armchair quarterback. Even if he hadn’t spent nearly fifteen years at the highest levels of Florentine government (which he did), he might well have qualified as a political expert just by virtue of growing up in the tumultuous time and place he did. Between the jockeying Italian states, the myriad (and ever-changing) foreign alliances and enemies and designs, the political influence of the papacy, and Florence’s own internal politics, Machiavelli’s home city furnished more than enough lessons in how the political world could, and often did, operate.

July 13, 2026

A Fair Reading of The Camp of the Saints

Filed under: Books, France, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Feral Historian
Published 10 Jul 2026

Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints has gone from obscurity to infamy in recent years, drawing condemnation for its highly … unflattering depiction of third-worlders. Much of this condemnation comes from people who haven’t read it, or gave it only a shallow and cursory read. But if we let the book speak for itself it can be quite insightful at times, and the true target of its scorn becomes brutally evident.

Rather than use politically-charged b-roll, it’s all hiking shots this time. Mostly to cover some edits. This is a great one for those who listen to these on the commute. Or the commode as the case may be.

00:00 Intro
01:03 The Story
14:22 Escalation Curve
17:38 Hamadura and “Whiteness”
22:05 Culture and Ethnicity
26:33 Why so Serious?
30:09 The End of a World
34:14 Your Virtual Right-Wing Uncle
35:48 A “Martian” Perspective

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July 8, 2026

Initial reactions to The Odyssey trailer

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As always, I’m not closely following whatever movies Hollywood chooses to extrude, but I do see the occasional high and low lights from the reactions of others. The latest attempt to portray Homer on screen isn’t finding it easy to get potential viewers excited:

The public reaction to the Odyssey trailer is a strong indication that Nolan’s reputation won’t be enough to prevent this turd from leaving a smoking crater in the studio’s budget.

People are sick of blackwashing. They’re sick of girlboss reimagining. They’re sick of every movie turning into a sermon.

Does this mean that a Tipping Point will be reached, that Hollyweird will finally sit up and pay attention to the dashboard full of red warning lights and sirens screaming for its attention?

Lol. Lmao.

The cultural revolution means that everyone in a position to do something has been replaced with religious fanatics who don’t care about nonsense like “money”.

Just like every other institution they suborned.

They are crashing the plane with no survivors, and as it goes down in flames they will take the opportunity for a final smug lecture about how the failure of the audience to appreciate them demonstrates that the audience are nothing but white supremacists.

I’ve seen speculation that the current crop of “big” movies were all in early production just at the peak of a few trends that have since receded in popular culture — girlbosses and general wokeness — and it might just be a matter of timing … or it could be that Hollywood’s movers and shakers are still determined to press on with the undiluted progressive message even if it means losing hundreds of millions of dollars with every new release.

On the topic of The Odyssey, Ted Gioia talks about his own discovery of Homer as a youngster and says “youngsters were Homer’s target audience — you can feel that at every turn in his story”:

The first work of classical literature that thrilled me to the depths of my soul was the Odyssey. It made such a big impact that, decades later, I insisted on reading it aloud to my own children, hoping they would feel that same magic.

I was little more than a child back when I discovered Homer — 12 or 13 years old, I’d guess. Back then I knew more about comic books than serious literature. But I was outgrowing Spiderman and Superman, and decided to take a chance on Odysseus.

I approached this book with fear and trembling — worried it might be too difficult. But I soon discovered that Homer was the Stan Lee of antiquity. He told adventure stories not much different from the ones peddled by Marvel or DC.

I’d somehow gotten my hands on a tattered used paperback copy of the Odyssey, in a 1937 prose translation by W.H.D. Rouse — published by Mentor Classics (cover price when new = 60 cents). This is not a respected translation — they will never assign Rouse’s version of Homer at any Ivy League college. [NR: I think this is the way I first encountered The Odyssey … possibly this version in Grade 5 as it was a prose translation.]

That’s because the legit translators try to convey this epic as poetry. Rouse made no attempt at that. He just turned Homer into everyday language, just like it was a pulp fiction story for the mass market.

That was the right choice, he believed, because (as he wrote in his introduction): “The Odyssey is the best story ever written … It has been a favorite for three thousand years”. Other translations of this book are, he claimed, “filled with affectations and attempts at a poetic language Homer himself is free from. Homer speaks naturally and we must do the same.”

You can see the difference by comparing Rouse’s rendering of the opening lines with the esteemed Chapman translation from Shakespeare’s era.

Is this the best version of Homer? I won’t go that far — years later I became very fond of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation. But I will insist that Rouse is the superior version for a youngster. And, in many ways, youngsters were Homer’s target audience — you can feel that at every turn in his story.

So this is the first thing about the Odyssey you won’t learn at Harvard — namely that this tale was not intended for Harvard elites. It’s a story for everybody. So it’s an obvious choice for a big-budget Hollywood movie. There was no pretension or elitism in Homer’s approach. In today’s parlance, you would say that he was appealing to a mass audience.

Director Christopher Nolan — whose screen version of the Odyssey makes its debut in London today — relied on the more recent Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In her version, our hero is described, like Shaft, as a complicated man who won’t cop out (when there’s danger all about). Okay, she doesn’t use those exact words, but comes close …

Emily Wilson’s translation of the opening lines of the Odyssey

I like this rendering, and can almost hear that Isaac Hayes synth vamp in the background. Wilson is just as straightforward as Rouse — living up to her aspiration to “tell the old story for modern times”.

June 27, 2026

Larry Correia is “not a real writer”

Filed under: Books, Business, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While I haven’t read everything Larry Correia has published, I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of his work, but I’m clearly having fun wrong because “he’s not a real writer“:

    T-Lex @T_Saurus_Lex
    “Not a real writer” is an inside joke, from the Sad Puppy era. Something some cunning quarter-wit accused him of because Larry wasn’t prone to bend the knee to the SJW mafia. I think the details are on his blog somewhere.

Yeah, for my newer readers saying I’m not a *real* writer has been a running joke forever.

When you are a writer who annoys the liberal publishing establishment they always make up some reason to disqualify you, so they can dismiss you, and never take anything you say seriously. These are not honest people.

(If you are a proper good thinking liberal writer, don’t worry, you achieve real writer hood by loudly existing and they’ll stick you on panels if you’ve published one short story that was read by six whole people)

So at first I wasn’t a real writer because I only wrote monster adventure pulp. So then I was multi genre (and now I’m successful in more genres than most authors ever attempt). No. Those are the wrong genres.

Then I didn’t count because I wasn’t a bestseller. Until I was.

Then to be a real writer I needed to win some awards. (The big one I got nominated for at the beginning didn’t count because reasons). So then I won some awards. No. Not those! Those don’t count!

Real writers tackle serious topics and impress serious academic critics, until I wrote Son of the Black Sword, which impressed even my snootiest haters … so they promptly dropped that path to real writer hood.

This got super silly at times, and how the title really stuck, one time on book tour one of my haters saw me arrive early to a book signing outside Portland. It didn’t start for an hour so there was only three people there who had driven a long way. So I was just hanging out talking to them.

My hater immediately got on Twitter and told everybody “I saw Larry Correia on his alleged book tour and he only had three people show up. WHAT A FAILURE. WHAT A LOSER!”

The actual signing had 40, which is pretty decent. I was still there when somebody showed me this tweet. We all laughed and responded with a group photo saying learn to count, dork.

But Social Justice Warriors (ah, the good old days) can never admit a mistake. So he doubled down and tweeted I still wasn’t a REAL WRITER because that same store ROUTINELY had book signings for TWO HUNDRED customers.

Problem was, the book store wasn’t that big. To fit 200 they would have to remove all the shelves. And at this point I was still there signing their inventory so I asked the manager. She said out of hundreds of signings they had only hit 200 twice the entire time they’d been in business. Brandon Sanderson post WoT and GRRM at the absolute height of the HBO show, and those had lines out into the parking lot.

So only the top bestsellers on Earth at that moment count as Real Writers. Seems unfair. But okay.

So me and my fans leaned into this super hard to mock the absurd and ever moving goal posts of the terminally online haters. And the rest of my book tour was called THE STILL NOT A REAL WRITER WORLD TOUR. And I got a big group photo at every event for the next week.

And yes, I have hit 200 since, but I’m sure the minute I did the new Real Writer threshold moved to 400. 😀

This has been a running gag ever since, the same way my fans refer to me as the ILOH, though that is a story for another day.

June 22, 2026

Authenticity … if you can fake that, you’ve got it made

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apologies to Ted Gioia for the flippant heading on this item. While I may be going for a cheap laugh, he certainly isn’t doing that in this essay on how to discover authenticity in music in an age of AI slop:

“Authenticity required: password?” by liako is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down on to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

I say this in full awareness of the contentiousness and backlash arising from almost any assertion of authenticity, especially in the arts — but in other spheres of life as well. There’s been so much debunking of authenticity in recent years that it’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to use it as a term of praise. Sometimes words in the critic’s lexicon become tainted, defeating the very purpose for which they are applied. The situation is so dire that I might even claim that we are facing an “authenticity crisis” in the arts — especially now with the rapid rise of AI. But even making that statement would spur a meta-backlash against the implicit assumption that there’s any legitimate concern over such a debased concept. After all, why defend authenticity if it doesn’t really exist?

In this regard, authenticity is coming to resemble its kindred word “sincerity”, which now implies the exact opposite of its dictionary definition. As Lionel Trilling points out, in his magisterial Harvard lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, the term “has an effect that negates its literal intention — ‘I sincerely believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe’; in the subscription of a letter, ‘Yours sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of ‘Yours’.” [Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

June 21, 2026

Jean Rapail’s The Camp of the Saints, translated by Robert Laffont

Filed under: Books, France, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Copernican reviews Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints which was reprinted in an English translation by Robert Laffont earlier this year:

It is time that I throw my own hat into the ring regarding this particular piece of polemic fiction. It’s particularly topical given the recent events in the UK and the Western World. A look at toxic progressive empathy taken its natural conclusion.

Written by Jean Raspail and published in 1973, Camp of the Saints is a book infamous among those the media describes as “Far Right” and virtually unknown outside of that. Were history set upon an even keel, Camp of the Saints would sit on the bookshelf of every high school right next to the classic works of the same genre: notably 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.

This book was so dangerous that for decades, now, the English translation has been out of print, available only as an expensive antique, or through the Internet Archive, [as] a single shoddy .pdf. The corporate owners of the English translation rights have, despite considerable interest, refused to republish it. That was until September of 2025, when a new translation was created and distributed.1

As of now, what was once an antique book is now cheap and in-print. What’s more, it’s been converted to an audiobook available on Audible.2 It took the destruction of Western Culture for us to see published the one work of dystopian fiction that warned us of it.

Given its relevance, it makes sense that over ten percent of the run-time consists of various forwards from the author, translator, and the publisher, that describe the political and cultural push against its own publication. It’s worth it to read (or listen) through the numerous forwards to better understand the context and the author.

An Introduction to the Text

Among the dangerous books written in the late 20th century, Camp of the Saints takes the self-destructive anti-nativism of the neoliberal world order and draws it forward to its own natural conclusion. Like other works of fiction, it takes popular ideas and asks the question: “What if these beliefs are taken to their ultimate logical end?”

The book is written from the perspective of an omniscient historian who witnessed the events of the text; he knows that his work will be censored, silenced, or redacted. In the context of the book, the accurate recollection of the events described is inherently destructive to the (now) dominant anti-racist political regime. The force of political progressivism will destroy any such history on the basis that it may “incite racial hatred” or “create division”.

A fascinating bit of forethought in that those are the exact reasons why Camp of the Saints was itself banished from public view for the last half-century: Liberal cultural diversity transitioned smoothly to violent censure and virulent “anti-White” or “anti-Western” genocidal hatred.

The book is a dramatization of the Fall of the West. Not in pitched battle, but as it has lost its spiritual core to rampant idealism. The “other” is always to be given deference over our own people. The sympathy that is demanded for the “other” is also silenced and denied for our own. At what point do a people become so spiritually deracinated that they lose all legitimacy to exist? At what point do they become so deluded as to lack totally a theory-of-mind of the “other”, and at what point does sympathy for the foreigner overwhelm survival?

Camp of the Saints answers these questions in sometimes graphic detail. Some of the horrors written on those pages hadn’t happened to innocent Western children yet … but now, fifty years on, and they have happened. Many times over, in many places and nations, across the West.3 In comparison to the reality of the West in the 21st Century, Camp of the Saints is a tame warning.

The book begins with a great migrant fleet setting off from Calcutta, India. The poor, the starving, the diseased, and the malformed set out for the West- A land where milk and honey flow freely and where the rivers are rich with Fish. The people of India want a better life for themselves, even if they have to walk, unarmed, onto foreign lands to get it. They, like many peoples, believe that their land is simply poor and that Western nations are simply rich. Failing to understand that it is not some “magic dirt” that made France, England, Australia, and the United States rich, but rather it was the French, English, Australians, and Americans. The West doesn’t horde “magic dirt” but “magic people”, so to speak. Were the West to be flooded with Indians, it would become just like India, not magically make the invading Indians wealthy and intelligent.4

I doubt that it’s possible to explain that fact to third-world migrant retards.

To conclude a spoiler-free version of the review: You should read it. It should have been taught in high schools for the last 50 years. You should probably buy a copy before the beast of Progressivism finds a new way to censor it. If you buy the Audible copy, use a tool to convert it to an .mp3 file so that it can’t be deleted from your personal library after the fact.5 There’s a reason it’s been censored for the last 30 years or so. It’s dangerous, subversive, and intelligent in a way that modern dystopian authors wish they could be.

  1. Here is a direct link [https://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail/dp/B0FG4MJS8K] to where you can purchase the book on Amazon. A shoutout to Vauban Books for doing the work that every other publisher has been unable, or too scared, to do.
  2. I kind of enjoy audiobooks. Though Camp of the Saints can be particularly tricky to listen to over reading directly due to its complex cast and jumping around in the timeline.
  3. The Rape Gang Inquiry Report by Rupert Lowe is particularly poignant and well-timed here.
  4. A fact that is in stark relief as of 2026, with over 10% of their population (official sources say it’s close to 7%, but I don’t believe them) now being Skaven imports from India … and the wealth, safety, culture, and prosperity of Canada now vanishing at an alarming rate.
  5. The “Open Audible” tool is works for this, but it isn’t free.
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