The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2026Since 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.
February 9, 2026
Why This Is The Greatest Lord Of The Rings Scene Ever
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January 7, 2026
More anti-anti-boomer discussion from Scott Alexander
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:
- Boomers had it much easier than later generations.
- The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.
- 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
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Sokow writes:
[The anti-Boomer] take has been imported in part from the EU + the UK where the pension system is not the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)#Pensions_Act_2007
There is a lot of similar things in France that I could dig up, such as all attempts to tax benefits being defeated.
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?
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January 5, 2026
Friedman on Orwell
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.
- That free capitalism would ultimately fail was still Orwell’s view in 1947:
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“)
- Discussed in more detail in an earlier post.
- As late as 1947, Orwell wrote:
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“)
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QotD: Nitpicking the opening battle in Gladiator (2000)
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.
- I’d think its only real rival for prominence would be Spartacus (1960).
- If you are wondering, “but then were does our word “meridian” come from, the answer is from Latin meridies, meaning “midday”.
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December 15, 2025
QotD: Free-form Jazz
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-09-05.
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December 2, 2025
QotD: Brutalism “is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful”
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.
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November 28, 2025
Social media isn’t completely a depressing waste of time
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.
November 19, 2025
Ken Burns’ The American Revolution gets the Howard Zinn seal of approval
CDR Salamander is persuaded, against his better judgement, to watch the latest Ken Burns documentary … and discovers that it’s somehow still 2018-2022 in Burns’ world:
So, I’ve watched the two episodes of Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, in spite of my stated zero desire to do so. Why? If you are not up to speed with the MSNBCification of Ken Burns over the last decade, catch up.
Anyway, as Mrs. Salamander knows more about the American Revolution than 99.7% of people out there, she insisted we watch it. I’ve been married for over three decades for a reason, so I sat down with her to watch.
FFS.
… and … it started with a land acknowledgement. ISYN.
It doesn’t get better.
By the end of episode two we’ve gotten through the Battle of Bunker Hill, yet there has been no mention of John Locke, Montesquieu, or any of the other philosophical drivers of the revolution. They have plenty of time to quote the memories of an old man about what he thought of George Washington when he ran into him when he was 8 (it wasn’t good).
Let’s pause there a bit. It is clear that they made a decision that for every good thing they say about GW in the first two episodes, they insist on finding a way to smear him with presentism. It is also clear that he really wants to do a documentary on African Americans in the Revolutionary War, but couldn’t get the funding for that. Instead there is a constant referring back to slavery and racial issues. Just overdone to the point of being obvious, given that they were, at best, tertiary issues during the war. It deserves mention, but not in this ham-fisted, patronizing manner it is being done … and done mostly to smear GW up.
The presentism and biased scholarship is not shocking if you’ve read my reports at my Substack over the years about the absolute woke-soaked state of American historical organizations such as the American Historical Association. (see my FEB 2021 Substack, “The War on (Military) History: Half a Century In” for reference.)
The smearing of GW like this is more than “balance” — it is emblematic of the presentism that makes so many modern virtue signaling tiresome — and exactly meets the low expectations I had for this documentary.
There is also the pettiness of their choices of what to comment on, and how — the smug New England perspective of the Acela Corridor that is Ken Burns’ intellectual terrarium. Just one example from the second episode: the arrival of the Virginians to support the patriot forces around Boston. Might as well have called them rednecks.
Even Mrs. Salamander, halfway through Ep. 2, had about enough of the shoehorned in identity politics of “inclusion” … as if everyone ever got over the fever of 2018-2022.
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October 23, 2025
Karine Jean-Pierre’s “tell-nothing tell-all” memoir of the Biden White House
In the free-to-cheapskates part of this post (i.e., outside the paywall), Matt Taibbi discusses the former White House Press Secretary’s book Independent as the author does the rounds of TV talk shows to boost it:
Independent, the new tell-nothing tell-all by former Joe Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, is framed in the introduction as the patriotic diatribe of a once-loyal Democrat who’s now “free to speak for myself” and “eager to say what I think”, thanks to a dramatic decision:
After being a party insider for twenty years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within it. From here on, I am politically an independent.
Just a few pages later, however, Jean-Pierre claims she only noticed something wrong with Biden once, during his infamous debate performance last June 27th. “Whoa … He must be sick,” she deadpans, then reframes Independent as an answer to a book she hasn’t even read:
CNN anchor Jake Tapper kicked off the debate. He later wrote a supposed tell-all about Biden, Original Sin … accusing [Biden] of a cover-up of his mental decline and how his aides quashed concerns. I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House.
It’s all entertaining stuff (the “technically” is hilarious). Jean-Pierre announces she’s finally free to tell the truth, but begins by declaring that Tapper’s Original Sin — another book marketed as “the full, unsettling truth … told for the first time” — was wrong not because Tapper was lying about how long it took for him to notice Biden’s problems, but because Biden never had any problems to notice.
Jean-Pierre is generating significant negative Internet wattage this week, battered everywhere for insisting she never saw anything concerning in Biden’s private behavior. In a wild exchange with Gayle King of CBS, she doubled down on a book passage claiming she didn’t even see an issue with Biden before the critical debate, even though she traveled to it with him on Air Force One (“Maybe I was too nervous … to notice whether or not he was sniffling?”). Apparently, that trip was a rare instance in which Jean-Pierre not only didn’t talk to Biden on the plane, but didn’t have conversations with anyone who did. “I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game”, she wrote, “until he began to speak at the debate”.
Independent reads like an oxygen-deprived sequel to Tapper’s book. The humorous premise of Original Sin involved Tapper’s sources insisting Biden “stole an election” because if he’d stepped aside earlier, the party might have had a “robust primary” — exactly the scenario they spent years fighting to avoid, savaging challengers like Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and smearing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. directly into the arms of Donald Trump. The CNN man insisted “insiders” who had a “much better window into Biden’s condition than the general public” saw things that “shocked them” before last June’s debate, when the awful truth finally became obvious even to news media. But according to Tapper, the problem wasn’t so much that insiders lied, but were lied to. His first chapter was titled “He totally fucked us”, a quote about Biden by Kamala Harris aide David Plouffe.
Never mind that the world could see Biden was in drool-cup mode as far back back as 2019, or that Special Counsel Robert Hur made it legal record that Biden likely couldn’t be convicted because a jury would see him as incompetent, an “elderly man with a poor memory” who couldn’t find his own underpants, let alone classified papers he was accused of mishandling. No, the problem was, “Biden fucked us”.
Jean-Pierre has now one-upped Tapper by insisting nothing was wrong with Biden and that — get this — the real problem was that the press undermined the president, and not after the debate, but all along! “Pretty much since the day he’d stepped into the White House”, Jean-Pierre wrote, “the press had taken every opportunity to imply Biden was too old or mentally unfit for the job”. She is referring to the same press corps that insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack” for four and a half years, while he was serially sternum-poking voters, staring into space, walking off set in the middle of interviews, and turning every public ceremony into a potential Chevy Chase routine
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October 19, 2025
Forever War: Becoming the Enemy
Feral Historian
Published 8 Mar 2024The Forever War is a great piece of post-Vietnam social critique, not least in its depiction of a society that deserves to lose the war that its chosen to fight. Here I talk about the story through that lens, meandering toward a point in the usual Feral Historian manner.
Also I wanted to get this one out because I’m going to make some Forever War comparisons in an upcoming video.
Most of the B-Roll is from the Forever War comic adaptation, both the original black and white version and the later color release. Also threw in some clips from Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars just to mix up the visuals a bit because there’s already too much of me sitting on a rock.
00:00 Intro
00:53 The Draft
03:25 It’s so Army …
06:54 No Civilization
09:35 War’s Over. My Bad
13:14 Parting Thoughts
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October 13, 2025
Stephen Fry’s Odyssey weighed in the balance and found wanting
Bryan Mercadente received a copy of Stephen Fry’s latest foray into Greek mythology and not only is not impressed, he writes, “Every page wasted on Fry is a page stolen from the real thing. The copy my aunt has given me for my birthday is already skimmed with disgust and thrown into the dustbin: it is too disgusting for the charity shops.”
The Iliad and Odyssey are the founding works of our civilisation. They are poems of war, loss, exile, and return. The hero of The Odyssey is a liar, a man of cunning and cruelty, but also a survivor who longs for home. The Homeric poems have come to us out of the Bronze Age. They have survived the collapse of at least two civilisations, and will survive the collapse of our own. They survive because they are already perfect. The hexameters carry an austere music. Their formulaic epithets — “ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς“, “πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς“, “δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς” — are the memory-tricks of a sung tradition, but they also give the poems a dignity that no one who reads them can ever forget. Like The Iliad, The Odyssey was not written to be read in comfort with a cup of tea. It was composed to be chanted in smoky halls to men who might be dead tomorrow.
Stephen Fry knows none of this. Or if he knows it, he does not care. His Odyssey is Homer without the difficulty. It is Homer stripped of his grandeur, reduced to banter and “relatable” anecdotes. The Observer praised it for bringing “contemporary relevance” to the myths. That line is damning enough. Homer does not need contemporary relevance. A book that has spoken to audiences across three thousand years already possesses the only relevance that matters. To make Homer relevant is to make him trivial.
The Guardian called the book “relatable and full of humour“. Again, the praise condemns. Relatable? Homer is not relatable. The world he describes is harsh and alien. His heroes live by honour and die by the sword. They weep like children and sacrifice to gods who may or may not answer. That strangeness is the point. It is what makes Homer worth reading. To make him “relatable” is to gut him of meaning.
The Irish Independent calls Fry “A born storyteller“. This blurb, like the others, is the language of people who cannot read. No serious critic would praise a reteller of Homer as “a born storyteller”, as if the original poet were not the greatest storyteller of them all. These blurbs are not criticism. They are advertising slogans. And they work. The book is a bestseller.
Why, then, is Fry’s book a bestseller? Not because of merit. It sells because of Stephen Fry himself. For thirty years, he has been cultivated as a “national treasure”. He is the ideal leftist intellectual: clever enough to appear learned, shallow enough never to disturb. He quotes Wilde, sprinkles in Latin tags, and sprinkles them badly. His claque tells us that he is bipolar, gay, witty, and charming. He is on panel shows, chat shows, and literary festivals. He is always agreeable, always moderate, and always applauded.
Fry has built a career on the fact that the English middle classes like to feel cultured without effort. They want Plato without philosophy, Shakespeare without metre, Wagner without subversion, Homer without Greek. They want to be reassured that the classics are not difficult or dangerous, but fun. Fry gives them what they want. He domesticates the wild. He reduces epic to anecdote. He packages civilisation as entertainment.
It is not enough to call this dumbing down. It is worse. Dumbing down implies a reduction in complexity. What Fry does is not simplification but falsification. The Odyssey is not a sequence of funny stories about gods and monsters. It is about endurance and the fragility of human life under the indifference of the divine. To make it “funny” is to destroy it. It is as if someone rewrote the Inferno as a travel blog or recast the Iliad as a football commentary. The whole point of the work is lost.
Popularity, however, is not a defence. It is an indictment. Books that sell by the million are almost always worthless. They are consumed because they flatter the prejudices of the public. They make readers feel clever without having to be clever. They make them feel cultured without culture. They are the literary equivalent of processed food: cheap, sweet, addictive, fattening.
What, then, is the harm? Why not let people have their Fry and be happy? So what if his writing is as inconsequential as his suicide attempts? The harm is that time is short. Every hour spent on Stephen Fry is an hour not spent on Homer. It is an hour subtracted from Gibbon, Johnson, or Shakespeare. It is an hour less of life. The opportunity cost is everything. Bad books are not neutral. They are parasites. They feed on the hours that might have been spent on good ones.
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September 17, 2025
Dark Forest Deterrence: Bureaucrats are Destroying the Universe
Feral Historian
Published 2 Sept 2022A quick look at a minor and neglected detail of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem series. I trust that everyone has done the reading.
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September 5, 2025
BBC’s new King and Conqueror series
In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank discusses the BBC’s latest attempt to recast British history in a way more pleasing to, as the Critical Drinker would say, “modern audiences”:
If you care about truth, beauty or goodness, I have bad news for you: the BBC has just created a historical drama set in the Middle Ages. Yes, this is the arrival of King and Conqueror, which depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest. The raw matter of the historical record is incredibly promising: ferocious royal intrigues, hagiographical piety, civil and not so civil war, and all the strange poetics and ceremony of French and Anglo-Saxon courtly life. The culture that gave us Lincoln Cathedral and the culture that gave us Sutton Hoo, should be reason alone for the most spectacular of costumes, battles and speeches.
But anyone hoping for a moving epic or a gripping thriller would be equally disappointed, as the brainless BBC tramples cheerfully into a sordid pastiche even more gormless than Game of Thrones (which at least had a decent budget). Future King of England Harold Godwinson (played by James Norton) is introduced to audiences uttering the admittedly pretty Anglo-Saxon phrase “it’s a fucking massacre”, in the manner of someone commenting on an especially brutal 3-nil football match.
I could induce miserable groaning from readers at this point by listing every meta-level historical inaccuracy from the almost entirely fictitious events of the coronation, to the succession of geographical and biographical distortions that rain down on viewers like so many 11th century arrows, to the inexplicable but inevitable (it’s the BBC) presence of black Anglo-Saxons. But none of these departures from the historical record are inherently unforgivable and might in theory be justified in the name of telling a compelling story.
What is truly egregious is not the fictionalisation of details, but the outright misrepresentation of the morals, manners and minds of medieval man. If the past really was a foreign country, then the BBC would be rightly besieged by those outraged at the bigoted, hate-filled and slanderous portrayal of that alien nation in this drama. Edward the Confessor, a man who has been quite literally beatified, is depicted beating his own mother to death. Duke William of Normandy, is shown murdering a man in broad daylight for setting a captured enemy free. Later on, when the enemy — rebellious vassal Guy of Burgundy — is recaptured, he is personally tortured by William’s wife Matilda.
The modern imagination has rendered these figures, and the times they lived in, as more brutal than they truly were. Even the famously ruthless William, who grew up dodging assassins and facing down rebellious barons, is not the thuggish hard man the series would present. The historical accounts suggest that he was a strict adherent to chivalric custom and a deeply pious man. In the real world, William banishes Guy then declares the “peace of God” in Normandy, bringing an end to violence and retribution for the crimes of the past decades. King Edward, who is presented as a snivelling, cowardly mother’s boy, was by every contemporary account a heroic, forceful and gregarious ruler, one who had his mother exiled, and certainly not murdered.
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August 31, 2025
Andrew Doyle’s The End of Woke
In The Critic, Titania McGrath reviews The End of Woke, and nobody should be surprised that it isn’t a rave review, although there is some raving:
Renowned grifter Andrew Doyle has written another “book” called The End of Woke. It’s the most repugnant piece of tripe ever to reach the printing press. It’s ignorant, ill-formed and offensive in the extreme. I have absolutely no intention of reading it.
Not content with his previous fascist manual Free Speech and Why It Matters, Doyle in his new book challenges ideological dogma on both the left and the right. It is laughable that he believes that anyone would be interested in such an approach. Imagine being so insecure in your belief-system that you would be open to persuasion and debate.
Doyle is a reactionary monster with a sub-zero IQ, one who is so unenlightened that he does not seem to realise that “liberal values” and “free speech” are Nazi dog-whistles. Having skim-read the blurb of The End of Woke, I’ve gleaned that Doyle supports outmoded and frankly immature notions such as “tolerance” and “liberty”. And he has a head like a cube (see above).
It was to be expected that bigots would approve of this book. The “comedian” Jimmy Carr called it “thought-provoking and entertaining”. The white male author Michael Shermer said it was “a magisterial read”. And that evil cisgender demon Julie Bindel wrote in The Critic that it was “the best work yet by the creator of genius parody Titania McGrath”.
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August 22, 2025
QotD: “White fragility”
Carlos Lozada, “White fragility is real. But ‘White Fragility’ is flawed,” Washington Post, quoted by Ann Althouse, 2020-06-19.
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