Quotulatiousness

March 24, 2026

“Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book”

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

In The Critic, Ben Sexsmith reviews a new book by Matt Goodwin, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity:

Here is an exceptionally easy argument to make:

  1. Mass migration is ensuring that the historical majority in Britain is becoming a minority.
  2. This is the result of policies that have been pursued regardless of popular opinion.
  3. This has had many kinds of destructive consequences.

The first claim is so obviously true that one might as well deny the greenness of the grass. The second is proven by decades of broken promises (see Anthony Bowles’s article “Immigration and Consent” for more). The third requires argumentation, but I think that it is clear if one considers hideous incidences of terrorism, grooming gangs and violent censoriousness, as well as broader trends of economic dependency and electoral sectarianism.

Again, this is not a difficult argument to make. So why is it made so badly?

Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book. It reads like the book of a political operator extending his CV. The left-wing commentator Andy Twelves caused a stir on social media by pointing out various factual mistakes and what appear to be non-existent quotes. Twelves speculates that these “quotes” are the result of AI hallucinations, which is plausible, if not proven, in the light of the fact that two of Mr Goodwin’s sparse footnotes contain source information from ChatGPT.

Inasmuch as Suicide of a Nation makes a form of the argument sketched out the beginning of this article, there is truth to it. But it contains a fundamental problem — it assumes that this argument is so true that there is no requirement to make it well.

“Slop” is an overused term but it feels painfully appropriate for a book that is spoon fed to its audience. Goodwin, who had a long academic career before becoming a successful commentator, is not a man who lacks intelligence. But he writes as if he thinks his audience lacks it. “I did not write this book for the ruling class”, writes Goodwin, “I wrote it for the forgotten majority”. Alas, he seems to think that the average member of the “forgotten majority” has the reading level of a dimwitted 12-year-old. As well as being stylistically simple, the book is full of annoying paternal asides. “In the pages ahead I shall walk you through what is happening to the country …” “In the next chapter we will begin our journey …” Thank you, Mr Goodwin. Can we stop for ice cream?

The book is terribly derivative, with a title that reflects Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower and a subtitle — “Immigration, Islam, Identity” — that all but repeats that of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe — “Immigration, Identity, Islam”. It is written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI. I’m not saying it was AI-generated. (Indeed, a brief assessment using AI checkers suggests that it was not.) I’m just saying that it might as well have been.

March 21, 2026

“None of the artistic -isms lasted very long. Today’s -ism soon becomes yesterday’s was-ism”

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

Ted Gioia on “the shock of the old”:

During the 15th century, the leading critics all agreed that the greatest works of art came from an unusual place. No, not a museum or church or palace — they were found, instead, underground and amid ruins, literally covered in dirt.

Before you could see them, you first had to dig them up.

Can we even imagine this attitude today? Our whole hierarchy of aesthetics would need to be reversed. Just consider the shame of admitting that our most cherished cultural legacy had been buried and forgotten by our ancestors. Art appreciation gets turned into some kind of exhumation.

But the reaction to this rediscovered art was just as interesting as the sculptures themselves. How do you feel when you look at these works?

You probably aren’t shocked by the nudity. You’ve seen more salacious stuff on Netflix. In fact, you probably aren’t shocked by anything here — these statues feel very old fashioned and antiquated.

That’s an interesting word, antiquated. It means “old, and no longer useful”. If the plumbing in your house is antiquated, you’re in big trouble. And it’s even worse if you are antiquated.

The word comes from the same root as antiquities — a term applied to arts and artifacts from the past. And most observers today would put the two ideas together, and say that these old statues might be charming to see in a museum, but have little or no relevance to us today.

But that’s not how Michelangelo, Raphael, and other Renaissance artists saw them.

These works were more than a thousand years old, but the leading 16th century artists believed they were worthy of study and imitation. Even more shocking, the great minds of the Renaissance believed that such works represented timeless standards of artistic excellence that could not be erased by the passing centuries.

In other words, evaluating art was like pursuing the good life. After you discovered the pathway to do that, you kept to the course. It didn’t go stale like a loaf of bread. It wasn’t a fad or a trend, but something enduring. The same thing is true of good health or a good marriage — you want them to endure, not get replaced by the next new thing.

Five hundred years later, leading critics believed the exact opposite. Standards were not timeless, but constantly in flux. During the 20th century, art was supposed to disrupt the standards from the past. If a work made you uncomfortable, all the better — you needed a kick in the ass. If the Venus de Milo hadn’t already lost her arms, some witty critic would probably suggest that we cut them off. That would give you a jolt, huh?

This notion of disruption was already prevalent a hundred years ago. And the kicks aimed at your posterior came from all directions. Critic Robert Hughes called this the “Shock of the New”.

The individual asskicks were the -isms.

There’s surrealism, dadaism, cubism, futurism, brutalism, fauvism, abstract expressionism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, serialism, minimalism, and so forth and so on. You could make a patter song from all of them.

Critics placed wagers on them, as if they were horses at the track. If they made a smart bet, they could reap a windfall. Their reputation was enhanced, and also their wallet. I’m reminded of the elite art critic who launched the careers of painters, and sent the market price of their works skyrocketing — but only after he had accumulated some choice specimens for his own collection. In the finance world, this is called insider trading.

The suffix -ism originally denoted a doctrine, theory, or worldview. Or even a religion, such as Judaism or Buddhism. These aesthetic -isms were also a bit like religions, inspiring fervent loyalty.

But there was a big difference. Religions like Judaism or Buddhism last for thousands of years. But aesthetic theories come and go. None of the artistic -isms lasted very long. Today’s -ism soon becomes yesterday’s was-ism.

That’s a little strange, because the advocates of the -isms all promised that they were delivering the blueprint for the future. And then we finally get to the future — and what do we see?

March 19, 2026

District 9 and the Story of “Race”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 14 Nov 2025

Modern society has become a bit obsessed with the idea of race. District 9 subverts some of these assumptions and points at some of the ways that the entire concept of race is a product of the modern era. This one meanders a bit, but I suppose there’s no way around that.

00:00 Intro
02:45 Meet Wikus
05:42 Subverting Race
08:35 Bacon’s Rebellion and Trans-Racial Wikus
12:32 Let’s Talk About Rhodesia
14:48 Perspectives and Narratives
(more…)

March 13, 2026

QotD: “I was one-shotted in my teens by Guns, Germs, and Steel“

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

I was one-shotted in my teens by the way Guns, Germs, and Steel ✨explained everything✨ and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since. At this point honestly half the books I’ve reviewed could probably be described as arguments against Jared Diamond. But that’s okay. I can stop any time. Just one more sweeping transdisciplinary exploration of global history. Just let me see a map of British coalfields next to a chart of GDP per capita and I promise I’ll go back to that book about esoteric writing. C’mon, bro, I won’t ever talk about the Hajnal Line again, I swear. Just let me have one more study of an under-appreciated causal factor for the differing trajectories of human societies and I’m done. I have this under control.

Jane Psmith, “BRIEFLY NOTED: Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-11-03.

March 10, 2026

Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry

Filed under: Australia, Books, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:

… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.

But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.

Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.

In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.

Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.

Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”

The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.

Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.

March 8, 2026

QotD: Reading books versus remembering books

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As a gullible young man, I fell for the big lie that books are improving. “Reading develops the mind,” my parents told me when I begged for a TV in my bedroom. My teachers seconded the motion, as did one hundred per cent of the world’s self-serving authors. “Reading makes you smarter,” they all said. “Reading gives you endless knowledge and reduces stress. Reading makes you human.”

“What about people who can’t read?” I asked, thinking of all the illiterates in my year group at school. “Don’t they have human rights, too?”

My mother snorted with laughter, as if I’d told a dirty joke. “Oh, that’s precious!” she said, wiping her eyes, and I raced upstairs to bury my nose in the first book I could find.

To be fair, I’d no idea back then what the passage of time does to the brain; that knowledge is never accrued, only forgotten. As an adult, I’ve trudged my way through the entire oeuvres of a good number of literary giants, and not only do I remember bugger all about what I read in any of those books, I’ve entirely forgotten that I read the vast majority of those books at all. Worse, when people ask my opinion about one of their renowned authors, I frown bewilderedly and say, “Who?”, their very existence having somehow been completely blotted from my mind. In my lowest moments, I even add, “Oh, I’ve never heard of him/her. I’ll have to give him/her a try. Which book of his/hers would you recommend I start with?” Only when I’m several chapters into one of these titles does a muffled bell ring somewhere at the back of my broken brain. Hang on, I think, didn’t I read something a bit like this once before? Then I accuse Dostoyevsky of plagiarism.

Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.

March 4, 2026

Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints

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

Like many, I’ve heard of Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints but I’ve never seen a copy of it for sale and I certainly haven’t actually read it myself. At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses a rare thing: a newly translated printing of the book that iscurrently available for sale:

To call The Camp of the Saints prescient undersells it. At times, Raspail seems to be downright prophetic. Pope Benedict XVI plays a prominent role (albeit this is a character who could not be more different from Cardinal Ratzinger). Raspail also correctly predicted that Rhodesia would become Zimbabwe, which may have been easily foreseeable when Raspail was composing the work but still did not formally happen until 1980, seven years after the novel’s publication; while Raspail was writing, the Rhodesian Bush War was still in full swing. The Rhodies fought until the bitter end to prevent the breadbasket of Africa from being turned into Africa’s basketcase.

The Camp of the Saints is sometimes described as a dystopian novel, which should be read alongside 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, and C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. There’s something to be said for this interpretation. You get a pretty good description of the modern world with the Venn diagram overlap of the total state’s panoptic tyranny, the flattening of the human spirit into a mass-produced Last Man via the endless consumption of mass-produced trivial amusements, the death of literary curiosity, the imposition of forced egalitarianism, demon-worshipping transhumanist technocracy, and Raspail’s civilizational collapse via obsequious moral inversion.

Like every good dystopia, however, The Camp of the Saints is first and foremost a satire of the modern world, a warning about where things will head if certain sociopolitical trends are taken to their natural conclusion. Raspail’s work does not take place in some science-fictional near future, as the majority of other dystopias do: its world is technologically and politically indistinguishable from the world Raspail lived in, and still all too recognizable to us. It has been derided as a far-right racist tract, and Raspail’s depiction of the third world horde that subsumes the West is far from flattering, but his venom is directed primarily at the West’s own spineless cultural thought-leaders and political elites, who he identifies as the true and only possible architects of the world-historic catastrophe that he predicts.

The Camp of the Saints also has all the key tropes of a zombie apocalypse story.

The third world horde is depicted as a vast, ravenous, mindless beast comprised of individual members who are not at all fearsome or intimidating, but which triumphs through sheer numbers and slow but relentless advance, and which is defended by its revolting appearance and overpowering, nauseating stench. The migrants are the most wretched products of the slums of Calcutta, malnourished and sickly, afflicted by every kind of congenital defect, infectious disease, infirmity, and skin infection. Their leader is a monstrous, drooling idiot dwarf with lidless eyes, a toothless sphincter for a mouth, and stumps for limbs, who rides about on the shoulders of a giant coprophage. They make their way from India packed like human sardines in a fleet of rusting, dilapidated plague ships, wallowing their way towards Europe through the nauseating miasma that arises from the swamp of corpse-littered shit that they leave in their wake, spending their days listlessly staring out to sea and mindlessly copulating amidst their own putrifying filth. Merely to look upon the migrant horde is to be transfixed with a kind of a religious terror, overcome by its ugliness, paralyzed by pity. Soldiers forced to take even the smallest of aggressive actions against the horde, with only a few exceptions, throw down their weapons and run, not because they are terrified of the horde itself, but because they are terrified of their own conscience should they strike down a defenseless, pitiable wretch. In a few cases, soldiers take their own lives after being made to shoot. The horde’s primary weapon is the crushing psychological pressure that slams down on the souls all who behold it; better to give up and accept the inevitable than suffer the torment of fighting against it.

When the horde encounters a westerner, one of two things happens. Either the westerner is immediately killed by being trampled underfoot or torn limb from limb, or he is smoothly assimilated into the horde, becoming by and by indistinguishable from the innumerable wretches that comprise it. The zombies either eat you, or turn you into a zombie. Women of course are assimilated by rape.

Not everyone succumbs right away, of course. At the end of the novel a small group of psychologically resilient Frenchmen led by an army colonel and a right-wing government minister fall back to an abandoned mountain village. Inside the village’s borders they establish a micocosm of the old, pre-invasion French civilization. They defend their redoubt simply by shooting any migrants or white “assimilates” (as they immediately take to calling them) who get too close. The migrants and assimilates are easily seen, a constant presence shambling in the distance; they are just as easily picked off, being slow and unarmed, and the village’s inhabitants soon take to treating the hunt as a sport. Of course this refuge does not last long: the French air force, in what is implied to be its last act (for the new world will not be able to maintain airplanes) wipes the last surviving Frenchmen out in an airstrike. Racism can’t be tolerated, you see.

Finally, there are the delusional lunatics who imagine that they can befriend or master the horde, turning it to their own purposes or making common cause with it, and who are therefore instrumental in opening the gates to their and everyone else’s doom. Upon actually encountering the horde the madmen find only death or assimilation; the horde is utterly indifferent to any expression of friendship.

February 21, 2026

The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell

Filed under: Books, Germany, History, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Based on the few books of his I’d heard of, I wouldn’t have expected Malcolm Gladwell to dip into military history … and from what Secretary of Defense Rock says, it might have been better if Gladwell had steered clear of this particular topic anyway:

I recently received The Bomber Mafia as a gift for my birthday, and it was bad, so bad that I felt compelled to write this review. In so many ways, the book is everything that is wrong with the “pop history” genre: a bestselling author with a massive built-in audience, with a hit podcast to cross-promote the material, and a framing promise to reveal a supposedly “great untold story” about the strategic and moral struggles of American airmen in World War II. The problem in this case is that Gladwell’s narrative about Curtis LeMay, Haywood Hansell, and the evolution of strategic bombing repeatedly collides with the existing scholarship and often ignores it altogether. From his treatment of the raids of Münster and Schweinfurt–Regensburg to his use of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and his confident claims about what compelled Japan to surrender, The Bomber Mafia exemplifies the worst tendencies of popular history: sweeping pronouncements built on selective reading, caricatured context, and a startling indifference to both primary sources and a vast secondary literature.1

I was only vaguely familiar with Malcolm Gladwell and his work, but for those who don’t know (like me until recently), he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, has written a bunch of New York Times bestselling books on sociology, psychology, and economics, and also hosts a very popular podcast called Revisionist History.2 This is all to say he is widely known and already has a big audience that is generally receptive to his projects. The book was originally based on four episodes he did on this topic in July 2020, and then turned into print, so it isn’t so much an actual book as it is a printed podcast.3

Unsurprisingly, both the audiobook and print editions were widely acclaimed upon release. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Yale professor Paul Kennedy praised the book as “a wonderful book”.4 The journalist Michael Lewis described it as “a riveting tale”, while the bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson called it “a wonderful narrative”.5 The book was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It also enjoyed significant commercial success, reaching number two on The New York Times Best Sellers list.6 To promote the book, Gladwell made appearances on Jimmy Kimmel, MSNBC, and CBS’s Sunday Morning show. MSNBC even stated in the segment title that this is “A great untold story”, which is hilarious, given that I don’t know how much ink has been spilled on the strategic bombing campaigns.7

But it should be noted that the book has been criticized by virtually anyone who has seriously studied this topic. Much of the criticism of the book has come from the fact that it hardly focuses on the Japanese and German perspectives, misinterprets why members of the air tactical school focused on precision bombing, and the actual role strategic bombing played in the surrender of Japan.8 All of that is valid, but what was initially more startling to me was how little use was made of primary or secondary sources. So many important works are left out makes me wonder how much research Gladwell even put in.9 To write about strategic bombing in World War II and not include Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power, Richard Overy’s The Bombing War, Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air, Ken Werrell’s Blankets of Fire or Death From the Heavens, Geoffrey Perrett’s Winged Victory, and barely using any of the official histories is borderline negligence.10 Anyone doing research on strategic bombing and Air Power in World War II almost certainly would have come across these.

  1. Popular history is a form of historical writing aimed at broad audiences that usually prioritizes storytelling over real scholarship. See Gerald Strauss, “The Dilemma of Popular History,” Past & Present, no. 132 (1991): 130–49, and more recently, Ben Alpers, “The Promise and Perils of Popular History,” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, August 17, 2021.
  2. The show itself isn’t really a conversation with experts and historians (though they do appear) so much as storytelling.
  3. I would also preface that I generally don’t have a problem with this premise. There is definitely a segment of the historical profession that dislikes pop history for reasons tied as much to credentials as to content. Much “popular history” is produced by journalists, independent writers, or commentators rather than credentialed academic historians, and that fact alone generates suspicion. In some cases, this skepticism is warranted: weak sourcing, thin engagement with the scholarship, and overconfident claims do real damage. But the problem is not who writes history so much as how it is written. Plenty of non-historians have produced outstanding historical works by taking the craft seriously — immersing themselves in primary sources, engaging honestly with existing scholarship, and resisting the temptation to oversimplify for the sake of narrative punch. Conversely, academic credentials have never been a guarantee for insight or even accuracy. If a writer does the work, respects the evidence, and treats complexity as something to be explained rather than avoided, there is no real reason to dismiss the result simply because of the writer’s background.
  4. Paul Kennedy, “The Bomber Mafia’ Review: Architects of a Firestorm”, The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2021.
  5. Summary of reviews in paperback.
  6. “Hardcover Nonfiction – May 16, 2021”. The New York Times.
  7. Malcolm Gladwell: ‘Bomber Mafia’ Looks At A Great Untold Story From WWII.
  8. Some critical reviews include David Fedman and Cary Karacas, “When Pop History Bombs: A Response to Malcolm Gladwell’s Love Letter to American Air Power”, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 12, 2021; Saul David, “Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia is misleading history-lite”, The Daily Telegraph, April 25, 2021, and Steve Agoratus, Air & Space Power History 68, no. 4 (2021): 52–53.
  9. This is also coming from a guy who famously wrote that achieving world-class expertise in any field is, to a large extent, a function of accumulating roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, as described in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
  10. Gladwell doesn’t really deal with British strategic bombing; there’s just a brief chapter on Arthur Harris. If interested, see Noble Frankland, Bomber Offensive, the Devastation of Europe (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971) Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939-45 (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1979), and Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Air Offensive against Germany, 1939-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1983).

February 9, 2026

Why This Is The Greatest Lord Of The Rings Scene Ever

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

The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2026

Since its the 25th anniversary of the trilogy, I figured I’d reminisce about my favourite ever scene from all three movies. And explain why I’m objectively right about it.

January 7, 2026

More anti-anti-boomer discussion from Scott Alexander

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

I linked to Scott’s original article last month and thanks to the interest it generated (and perhaps my clickbait-y headline) it got linked at Instapundit thanks to Sarah Hoyt. Scott got a lot of feedback on his post and shares some of that here:

“… Millennials and Generation Z have more money (adjusted for inflation ie cost-of-living, and compared at the same age) than their Boomer parents, to about the same degree that the Boomers exceeded their own parents. This is good and how it should be. The Boomers have successfully passed on a better life to their children”

First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims:

  1. Boomers had it much easier than later generations.
  2. The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.
  3. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.

Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions — I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support — rather than letting them switch among them as convenient — then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.

Second, I wish I’d highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked.

Nobody is passing laws that literally say “confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B”. We’re mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you’re young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people’s expense. But if you’re old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they’re just two different tax policies and it’s not obvious which one a fair society with no “intergenerational warfare” would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We’ll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I’ll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.

I’m in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.

[…]

1: Top Comments I Especially Want To Highlight

…

Sokow writes:

Many Europeans chimed in to say this, including people whose opinions I trust.

I find this pretty interesting. We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there. I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite — that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context — but it makes sense that this should happen. I might write a post on this.

Kevin Munger (Never Met A Science) writes:

    Hating Boomers (and talking about hating Boomers) is uninteresting and I agree morally dubious.

    But it is *emphatically* false that “Boomers were a perfectly normal American generation”. They have served far more terms in Congress than any generation before or since (and we currently have the oldest average age of elected officials in a legislative body IN THE WORLD other than apparently Cambodia), they have dominated the presidency (look up the birthdate of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election…), they controlled the commanding heights of major companies, cultural institutions (especially academica).

    They are a historically *unique* generation, for three intersecting reasons: 1. They are a uniquely large generation 2. they came of age as the country and its institutions were maturing 3. they are sticking around because of increased longevity. These are analytical facts, and they produce what I call “Boomer Ballast” — a concentration of our societies resources in one, older generation that increases the tension we are experiencing from technological innovation. Our demography is pulling us towards the past, the internet is pulling us into the future, and this I think is the major source of the anti-Boomer frustration.

    On the specifics of social security and why we might think Boomers have played things to their advantage (not bc they’re specifically evil but bc they have the political power to do so) — the key thing is that they have prevented forward-thinking politicians from fixing the inevitable hole in social security that comes from our demographic pyramid. It would have been relatively painless to increase the rate or incidence of the social security payroll tax at any point in the past 25 years, the looming demographic cliff was obvious and the increased burden could’ve been shared more equally. Instead, they prevented reforms and all of the fiscal pain from demographic shifts will be borne by younger generations.

I agree this is a strong argument, and part of why I think it’s helpful to separate the three points I mentioned at the beginning.

RH writes:

    We [Boomers] did [vote for ourselves to pay higher taxes and get fewer benefits]. My lifetime SS benefits will be 20-25 percent less than they would have been under previous law, and I voted for that. My SS tax rate went up itself, and has been well over 15% since the changes took effect, and the cap on earned income subject to that went up a lot. And I voted to accept all that because it was projected to be sufficient.

    Then the immigrant haters decided we needed fewer workers in the country, or at least fewer paying SS taxes, so they slowed legal immigration and pushed illegals into the underground economy, so they don’t pay taxes to support social security. And social security is going to get whacked again, plus the evils the SS system was intended to alleviate — people too old to work and too poor to live — will return.

I think this says something profound about politics. The problem is less that there’s some group of people who don’t believe in fairness, but that fairness is very hard to calculate.

Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration. Then whether Boomers are paying “their fair share” or not depends on whether immigration is good or bad (a hard question!), and on whether we think of high vs. low immigration as the natural unmarked state of the universe (such that immigration opponents must “own” closed borders and compensate the losers), and on what kind of compensation the losers from closed borders deserve.

Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people. The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?

January 5, 2026

Friedman on Orwell

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, David Friedman considers some of the things that George Orwell was mistaken about in his non-fiction writings:

    It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of. (George Orwell, The Observer, April 9, 1944)

George Orwell got some things right; unlike most political partisans, he saw the problems with the position he supported. He also got quite a lot of things wrong. The quote is from Orwell’s review of two books, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus, a left-wing writer and politician. The conclusion of the review is that Hayek is right about what is wrong with socialism, Zilliacus is right about what is wrong with capitalism, hence that “the combined effect of their books is a depressing one”.

But Zilliacus was wrong about capitalism, as was Orwell, who wrote:

    But he [Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter. (“As I Please”, pp.117-119)1

The problem is that Orwell, like many of his contemporaries (and ours), did not understand economics and thought he did. Since he wrote we have had extensive experience with free competition, if not as free as Hayek would have wanted, and the result has not been the nightmare that Orwell expected. “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them” sounds right only if you don’t actually understand the logic of a competitive market. In most industries organizational diseconomies of scale, the effect of more layers between the head office and the factory floor, limit the size of the firm to something considerably below the size of the market for what the firm produces. In some fields, such as restaurants or barber shops, the result is an industry with thousands of firms, in some five or ten, in only the rare case of a natural monopoly can one large firm outcompete all of its smaller competitors.

The effect of free competition is not the only thing that Orwell got wrong. Consider his essay on Kipling.2 He gets some things right, realizes that Kipling is not a fascist, indeed less of one than most moderns, and recognizes his talent:

    During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

But he gets quite a lot wrong. In arguing that Kipling misunderstood the economics of imperialism, Orwell writes:

    He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.

In explaining his own view of the logic of empire, what he thought Kipling was missing, Orwell writes:

    We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are “enlightened” all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our “enlightenment”, demands that the robbery shall continue.3

Britain let go of its empire, starting with India. British standards of living did not collapse; by the time all of the colonies were independent, the average real wage in the UK was 50% higher than when Orwell wrote. He could not know the future but he could observe that Switzerland, before the war, was richer than England, Denmark, with no significant colonies, almost as rich, Portugal, with an enormous African empire, much poorer. Whether Britain ran its empire at a net profit or a net loss is, I think, still an open question, but Orwell’s view of colonialism is strikingly inconsistent with the observed effects of decolonization.

Economics is not all that Orwell got wrong about Kipling; he badly underestimated the quality of Kipling’s work, due to having read very little of it. The clearest evidence is Orwell’s description of The Light that Failed as Kipling’s “solitary novel”. Kipling wrote three novels, of which that is by a good margin the worst. Orwell not only had not read Kim, Kipling’s one world class novel, he did not know it existed. In a recent post I listed eighteen works by Kipling that I liked. Orwell mentions only one of them.

  1. That free capitalism would ultimately fail was still Orwell’s view in 1947:

    2. In North America the masses are contented with capitalism, and one cannot tell what turn they will take when capitalism begins to collapse (“Toward European Unity“)

  2. Discussed in more detail in an earlier post.
  3. As late as 1947, Orwell wrote:

    4. The European peoples, and especially the British, have long owed their high standard of life to direct or indirect exploitation of the coloured peoples. (“Toward European Unity“)

QotD: Nitpicking the opening battle in Gladiator (2000)

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

This week, we’re going to take a close look at arguably the most famous and recognizable Roman battle sequence in film: the iconic opening battle from Gladiator (2000).1 Despite being a relatively short sequence (about ten minutes), there’s actually enough to talk about here that we’re going to split it over two weeks, talking about the setup – the battlefield, army composition, equipment and battle plan – this week and then the actual conduct of the battle next week.

The iconic opening battle, set in the Marcomannic Wars (166-180) during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180) dominates the pop-cultural reference points for the Roman army in battle and you can see its heavy influence in things like how the Total War series presents Roman armies (particularly in trailers and other promotional material). Students and enthusiasts alike will often cite this sequence as the thing which sparked their interest in the Roman army. It is hard to overstate how pervasive its influence is in the public imagination of what the Roman army, particularly of the imperial period, was like, especially as its style is imitated by later pop culture works.

Which is why it is so unfortunate that it is such a deceptive historical mess. This sequence in particular is a banner example of what I’ve termed elsewhere the “perils of historical verisimilitude“, the habit of historically based popular-culture works including what we might think of as fake signifiers of research, things that seem historically grounded rather than being historically grounded, as a way to cheaply cash in on the cachet that an actually grounded representation gets.

Gladiator actually provides a perfect metaphor for this: its main character’s name. Russell Crowe proudly informs us he is, “Maximus Decimus Meridius”, a name that certainly sounds suitably Roman, picking up the three-part name with that standard second declension -us ending. It sounds like it could be a real name – if you didn’t know Latin you would probably assume that it could be a real Roman name. But, as we’ve noted, it isn’t a Roman name and in fact gets nearly all of the Roman naming conventions wrong: Roman names are ordered as praenomen, nomen and cognomen, with the nomen indicating one’s gens (“clan” more or less) and the praenomen selected from just a couple dozen common personal names. Decimus is one of those two-dozen common praenomina (which also means it is never going to show up as the name of a gens), so it ought to go first as it is actually his personal name. Meanwhile Maximus (“the greatest”) is very much not one of those roughly two-dozen praenomina, instead being always cognomen (essentially a nickname). Finally Meridius isn’t a Latin word at all (so it can’t be a praenomen personal name nor a cognomen nickname),2 meaning it has to be the nomen (referencing a fictive gens Meridia). Every part of his name is wrong and it should read Decimus Meridius Maximus.

It sounds just right enough to fool your average viewer, while being entirely wrong. It is “truthy” rather than true – verisimilitudinous (like truth), rather than veristic (realistic, true).

In the case of Gladiator‘s opening battle scene, the attention is on creating verisimilitude (without fidelity, as we’ll see) in the visual elements of the sequence and only the visual elements. The visual representation of a Roman army – the equipment in particular – is heavily based on the Column of Trajan (including replicating the Column’s own deceptions) and since that is the one thing a viewer can easily check, that verisimilitude leads a lot of viewers to conclude that the entire sequence is much more historically grounded than it is. They take their cues from the one thing they can judge – “do these fellows wear that strange armor I saw on that picture of a Roman column?” – and assume everything is about as well researched, when in fact none of it is.

Instead, apart from the equipment – which has its own deep flaws – this is a sequence that bears almost no resemblance to the way Roman armies fought and expected to win their battles. The Roman army in this sequence has the wrong composition, is deployed incorrectly, uses the wrong tactics, has the wrong theory of victory and employs the wrong weapons and then employs them incorrectly. Perhaps most importantly the sequence suggests an oddly cavalry-and-archer focused Roman army which is simply not how the Romans in this period expected to win their battles.

Now I want to be clear here that this isn’t a review of the film Gladiator (2000) or my opinion in general on the film. To be honest, unlike the recent sequel, I enjoy Gladiator even though it is historical gibberish. So I am not telling you that you aren’t “allowed” to like Gladiator, but rather simply that, despite appearances, it is historical gibberish, particularly this opening scene, which I often find folks who are aware the rest of the film is historical gibberish nevertheless assume this opening scene is at least somewhat grounded. It is not.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nitpicking Gladiator’s Iconic Opening Battle, Part I”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-06.

  1. I’d think its only real rival for prominence would be Spartacus (1960).
  2. If you are wondering, “but then were does our word “meridian” come from, the answer is from Latin meridies, meaning “midday”.

December 15, 2025

QotD: Free-form Jazz

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

The music here is “free-form jazz”, which appears to be several heroin addicts chasing a melody glimpsed in a hallucination.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-09-05.

December 2, 2025

QotD: Brutalism “is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful”

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When a country is intent on committing suicide, as is Britain, it celebrates the very things that have led, or are leading, to its demise. Whether this is because it thinks it no longer has a right to exist and the world would be better off without it, or whether it is because, when something appears inevitable to us, we welcome it to disguise our impotence to halt it, I do not know. But the fact is that London is about to have a museum devoted to the kind of architecture that has turned so much of Britain’s urban landscape into a visual nightmare, a scouring of the retina.

I have long suspected, but cannot prove with an indisputable argument, that this architecture has played its part in the brutalization of daily life and social behavior in the country. Certainly, it has dehumanized the appearance of many towns and cities; its harsh surfaces and willfully austere and jagged designs leave the mere human being feeling that he is about as welcome as an ant on a kitchen counter — which, indeed, he now much resembles.

This architecture is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful, not despite the fact that so many people detest it, but because so many people detest it. They are like the doctors of old, who, if they could not cure their patients, could at least make them take the most repellent and noxious medicine, on the grounds that a little bit of what revolts you does you good.

The projected museum is in a former school in the north of London, designed in 1968. Here is fairly typical commentary on the building:

    Despite decades of wear and some unfortunate interventions, the raw concrete structure has remained a cherished example of socially driven modernist design.

It is to be noticed that the cherishing done here is independent of anyone who cherishes; as for “socially driven modernist design”, we might read “totalitarian”. Indeed, the building exudes totalitarianism, as raw reinforced concrete exudes ghastly stains after a short time.

Le Corbusier, one of the founders of this kind of architecture, was indeed a fascist in the most literal sense, though he had no real objection to communist totalitarianism, either. What he most hated was what he called the street, that is to say the place where people behave spontaneously and without direction from above, and where they are not corralled into functions imposed on them by all-wise socially driven architects. It was for this reason that he and his acolytes preferred to build urban wildernesses of the kind that have now been built the world over, but especially in Britain.

The architects who have been given the task of renewing the school building where the museum dedicated to architectural brutalism is to be housed have “noted its distinct geometry, as well as its symbolic presence reflecting the ideals of the school’s broader 1960s Brutalist architecture conceived in an era of social progress”.

Apologists for such architecture write a pure Soviet langue de bois — or perhaps I should say langue de béton, since concrete rather than wood is their favorite material:

    Consultation with the school, families and local stakeholders has underpinned the project from the outset, ensuring that the building’s next chapter remains tied to its founding ethos centered on architecture as a tool for collective learning and expression.

Does anyone, after the death of the late, not much lamented, Leonid Brezhnev, have thoughts that correspond to, or are couched in, words such as these? By their language shall ye know them.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Architects of Our Own Destruction”, New English Review, 2025-08-08.

November 28, 2025

Social media isn’t completely a depressing waste of time

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen reacts to a political hack who wants to impose regulations on social media that would allow him to shut down people who criticize him and other swamp creatures:

We all know what’s really going on here.

Utah senator John Curtis, and other political hacks like him, are getting their boomer asses handed to them on social media.

They long for the days of television, when they could control the narrative by having a cozy relationship with the networks, and so they could lie to you without fear of contradiction by some autist named @DataRepublican whose existence is solely defined by her full-time hobby of sniffing out lying dirtbags.

So they want to pass a bunch of laws to make the internet behave like television. To filter it all through a set of major website choke-points that they can control by threatening the corporate entities that run them.

Long, complicated, and vaguely defined liability laws are a tool to do that.

Basically what they do is allow John Curtis to put any website out of business if people say mean things about him on it, such as pointing out that he looks like some kind of deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp.

The problem he has right now is that when I say stuff like that on Twitter, I’m the one who said it.

Not Twitter.

There’s nothing he can do to me. Because even if I get hit by a unmarked sedan tomorrow in a totally unrelated accident, there’s a million more people like me who are only too happy to point out that John Curtis looks like a deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp.

So he wants legal tools to punish Twitter for what I said.

So how does he go about that? What is a deranged and malevolent goblin, with a “business management” degree, and a history of changing political parties when convenient, to do?

Why, muddy the waters with vague platitudes about “safety”, of course.

Except we’ve heard that song before, and we’re not interested. So let us laugh at him, remind him that he looks like a deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp, and mock until he goes back to doing what he normally does, which is shilling for the “Fairness For High Skilled Immigrants Act”.

And then we can eventually replace him with someone who cares about fairness to actual fucking Americans.

Update, 29 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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