Quotulatiousness

October 12, 2025

Inventing boring Sundays – a British innovation

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

Ed West ruminates on the phenomenon of boring British Sundays and explains how they got that way:

Nietzsche thought that this was the whole idea, that the English designed Sundays that way in order to encourage people to appreciate the working week. In Beyond Good and Evil, he described how “The industrious races complain a great deal about having to tolerate idleness: it was a masterpiece of the English instinct to make Sunday so holy and so tedious, a form of cleverly invented and shrewdly introduced fasting, that the Englishman, without being aware of the fact, became eager again for weekdays and workdays.”

There may be some truth in this, so that before the Industrial Revolution there was the “Industriousness Revolution”, with a new emphasis on work rather than leisure. This is something which Joseph Henrich noted from studying reports from the Old Bailey between 1748 to 1803, and “spot-checks” observations about what Londoners were doing at a particular moment:

    The data suggest that the workweek lengthened by 40 percent over the second half of the 18th century. This occurred as people stretched their working time by about 30 minutes per day, stopped taking “Saint Mondays” off (working every day except Sunday), and started working on some of the 46 holy days found on the annual calendar. The upshot was that by the start of the 19th century, people were working about 1,000 hours more per year, or about an extra 19 hours per week.

Before the Industriousness Revolution it was common for people to enjoy a number of saints’ days as holidays, including the three-day weekends offered by these “Saint Mondays”. That all changed with the arrival of Protestantism, with its scepticism towards saints’ days, William Tyndale arguing that these were only celebrated by convention and that there wasn’t anything special about them.

While they were keen to abolish holidays, the reformers also believed in making the Sabbath more godly, and so the Boring English Sunday was invented. This followed from a growing sense that leisure time was wasted time, but it was also the case that many of the Protestant reformers just didn’t like people having fun. In God is an Englishman, Bijan Omrani noted how “From the end of the 1500s, Puritan preachers condemned the way people generally spent their Sundays: ‘full heathenishly, in taverning, tippling, gaming, playing and beholding bear-baitings and stage-plays, to the utter dishonour of God'”.

Theologian William Perkins believed that Sunday “should be a day set apart for the worship of God and the increase in duties of religion”. Lincolnshire cleric John Cotton said in 1614 that it should be unlawful to pass Sunday without hearing at least two sermons; the idea of going to church twice would have filled my ten-year-old self with intense horror.

Hugh Latimer asked: “What doth the people do on these holidays? Do they give themselves to godliness, or else ungodliness … God seeth all the whole holidays to be spent miserably in drunkenness, in glossing, in strife, in envy, in dancing, dicing, idleness, and gluttony”.

Latimer also disliked holidays for quite modern-sounding reasons related to social inequality, noting that “in so many holidays rich and wealthy persons … flow in delicates, and men that live by their travail, poor men … lack necessary meat and drink for their wives and their children, and … they cannot labour upon the holidays, except they will be cited, and brought before our officials”.

The reverse argument is now made against allowing supermarkets to drop Sunday trading hours – that it pressures working people into excessive toil so that Waitrose shoppers don’t suffer any inconvenience. Although, reading Latimer, I can’t help but suspect that his real objection was to people having fun.

The reformers won, and English Sundays became notably dull. Banjani quoted children’s writer Alison Uttley, who said of Sundays that “Nobody ever read a newspaper or whistled a tune except hymns”.

October 10, 2025

A POSWID analysis of the contention that “Canada is broken”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s my strong opinion that Canada is indeed “broken”, and much but not all the blame for that goes to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and increasingly to current PM Mark Carney. It hasn’t all been the direct action or deliberate inaction of the Liberal party and their bureaucratic minions in the civil service, but their fingerprints are on a lot of the damage. Eberhard Englebrecht analyzes Canada using POSWID framing and concludes that “the Purpose Of Canada is What It Does”:

Now, one of the core criticisms made of POSWID by its opponents is that it leans heavily on a consequentialist interpretation of events, completely discarding the roles human intention, error, and agency play in how things transpire.

However, these critiques only hold validity if you take POSWID and make it your singular mode of analysis — something that I don’t encourage, nor intend on doing myself. Rather, POSWID should be understood and used as a specific tool with a specific purpose — that is, to peel back the noxious platitudes, gaslighting, and wishful thinking that envelop our politics, and hinder our ability to view our present situation with clarity and honesty.

And, unfortunately for the citizenry of Canada, Canadian politics is — and has been for some time — a domain chock full of the misguided idealism and obfuscation that POSWID seeks to erase.

It is why many Canadians — despite their country having experienced a precipitous decline in both general prosperity and the integrity of the common social fabric — remain willfully blind to such an absurd degree.

POSWID, as I will be applying it, can tackle many of the polite pleasantries and mindless incantations that have become embedded in Canada’s “consensus” of acceptable political discourse, exposing them as misaligned with reality. This will take one of two forms: the first is to demonstrate that a common belief in the trope in question has led to results contrary to the intentions of those who originally pushed the trope; the second is that the trope was always purely abstract and aspirational, never described reality, and any attempts to align reality with said trope have failed miserably.

Many of these tropes are sacred cows of Canada’s political establishment — ideas that they would insist define “what it means to be Canadian” or are things that “we all believe”. Going against them, or merely questioning their validity or suitability, would be considered “UnCanadian”. These tropes have, in many cases, dictated the direction of Canadian society since the 1960s and created the foundations for the paradigms that currently define Canadian politics. Therefore, the deconstruction of these tropes constitutes the deconstruction of these paradigms — something that would have cascading ramifications for our country.

It is worth noting, however, that my intention in writing this piece is not to make granular policy prescriptions. My job is merely to provide a clear-eyed account of how three of the values and policy programmes of Canada’s chattering class (you could substitute “chattering class” with “professional-managerial class” or “Laurentian Elite”) are out of step with how this country actually exists — a reality felt and experienced at an intuitive level by many, but rarely articulated in public.

October 9, 2025

QotD: Ontario and the Loyalists

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

The Province of Ontario is the most populous province in Canada, home to 38.5% of Canada’s national population as of the 2021 census. Located in Central Canada, it is the political, economic, and cultural heart of the country. Its capital, Toronto, is the nation’s largest city and financial centre, while Ottawa, the national capital, lies along Ontario’s eastern edge. Ontario is bordered by Quebec to the east and northeast, Manitoba to the west, Hudson Bay and James Bay to the north, and five U.S. states to the south — Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York — mostly along a 2,700 km (1,700 mi) boundary formed by rivers and lakes in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence drainage system. Though Ontario is the second-largest province by total area after Quebec, the vast majority of its people and arable land are concentrated in the warmer, more developed south, where agriculture and manufacturing dominate. Northern Ontario, in contrast, is colder, heavily forested, and sparsely populated, with mining and forestry serving as the region’s primary industries. But Ontario is more than just a province; it is the crucible of English-speaking Canada.

In 1784, after the American Revolution, Loyalist settlers arrived with intention, bringing with them the legal traditions, religious institutions, and steadfast allegiance to the Crown that had shaped their former world. They sought to uphold a civilisational order rooted in monarchy, Church, and Law, and to establish a society founded on duty, hierarchy, and restraint. From these early Loyalist settlements, beginning at Kingston, a distinct political and cultural tradition emerged. It was neither British nor American. It became the foundation of a new people.

Today, the descendants of these settlers form the core of an ethnocultural identity known as Anglo-Canadian. Numbering over ten million across the country, and more than six million in Ontario, Anglo-Canadians are known for their enduring institutions: constitutional monarchy, common law, Protestant-rooted civic morality, and a national ethos shaped by loyalty and order. This cultural framework shaped Ontario’s development across every sphere of life.

Loyalists built the province’s schools, banks, and legal systems. They established its early industries, including agriculture, forestry, mining, and railroads, and later came to dominate the professional sectors of law, education, public administration, and finance. Their shining city, Toronto the Good, became the centre of Canadian banking and corporate life, while small towns across the province were anchored by courthouses, parish churches, and grain elevators.

Language and schooling played a central role in shaping the Anglo-Canadian character. Ontario’s education system, from common schools to universities, was built to transmit British values, civic order, and the English language. Protestant denominational schools and later public grammar schools taught the children of settlers to read scripture, study British history, and speak in the elite formal register of English Canada. Institutions such as Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and the University of Toronto became pillars of elite formation, producing the clergy, lawyers, teachers, and administrators who carried the culture forward.

Culturally, Anglo-Canadians preserved a rhythm of domestic and seasonal life rooted in British tradition but adapted to the northern landscape. Autumn fairs, apple bobbing, and harvest suppers marked the calendar in rural communities. Roast beef, butter tarts, mincemeat pies, and tea with milk became the everyday fare of farmhouses and urban kitchens alike. Sunday observance, cenotaph ceremonies, school uniforms, and service clubs reflected a moral seriousness and civic sense inherited from the Loyalist project. It is this tradition that formed the structural spine of its political and cultural development.

Fortissax, “Loyal she Began, Loyal she Remains”, Fortissax is Typing, 2025-07-07.

October 6, 2025

QotD: Britain’s immigration crisis

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the consequences of massive, indiscriminate immigration – equivalent to the entire population of Sheffield, every year – is that it radically alters the general mood of those on whom this demographic transformation is being imposed. One might, for instance, aspire to the role of gracious host, as it were, of making newcomers feel welcome. But this ideal presupposes an immigration policy that is limited and selective, and in which newcomers have good reason to feel lucky – and grateful.

The graciousness of the locals, the ideal, depends on the notion that the host country is regarded as something special, a desirable thing, something worthy of respect.

But massive, indiscriminate immigration undermines that ideal. If seemingly anyone can walk in and demand goodies, any ill-mannered flotsam of the world, and if they can do so with no discernible sense of gratitude, or any expectation of such, and with no apparent regard for the norms and values of the host society, as if they were unimportant, then the indigenous population may feel they have little reason to be gracious. Indeed, being gracious may be something of a struggle.

I realise that even the idea that the locals might dare to think in such terms – of being the gracious host – is, for some, anathema, a basis for tutting and scolding. But the sense that the value of one’s society – one’s home – is being pissed away, sold off cheap, is not a promising basis for coexistence.

And yet here we are.

Doubtless there are progressives who would regard the “gracious host” attitude as wickedly hierarchical and “othering”, or even racist. But I suspect it’s how quite a few people process a sudden influx of newcomers, regardless of the gasping of lefties. I suspect that something along those lines is a necessary precondition of any subsequent coexistence. A social lubricant.

And were I to relocate to, say, South Korea, I think I would feel much like a guest – and feel a corresponding obligation to be on my best behaviour. Possibly on an indefinite basis. I very much doubt I’d feel entitled to disregard queueing norms, or to, quite literally, shit on the doorsteps of the indigenous.

But hey, maybe that’s just me.

David Thompson, Explaining Civilisation”, Thompson, Blog, 2025-07-01.

September 30, 2025

QotD: The modern cult of “victimhood”

Filed under: Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is the idea of “victimhood”; the idea that a man is not responsible for his acts; that he is instead a victim of the oppression of some abstraction called “society” — because he is black, or on welfare, or whatever. And everyone who isn’t can be held guilty, regardless of how they have actually behaved.

Oppressed by whom?

Oppressed, actually, by the implied permission that is granted in advance, to looters, and rapists, and thugs, and amateur neighbourhood terrorists, by that very satanic idea of victimhood, and its practical corollary, that if you can play the victim, you can manoeuvre yourself into a position to victimize everyone around you.

David Warren, “Bad Gumbo”, DavidWarrenOnline, 2005-09-03.

September 22, 2025

HBO’s Rome – Ep 12 “Kalends of February” – History and Story

Filed under: History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Apr 2025

Today, we look at the final episode of Season One, which deals with the last days of the conspiracy against Julius Caesar and his murder on the Ides of March — not that the date gets a mention. There is quite a lot of soap-opera stuff in this one, the culmination of character arcs, so less time for politics.

One day, we may do Season Two, but for the moment, that’s all folks!

September 19, 2025

QotD: The sub-generations of Generation X

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

… “Gen X” is actually a misnomer, as there are at least three distinct subgroups. There’s the very earliest Xers, the guys who were in high school in the late 1970s. They often get lumped in with the Baby Boomers, too, though they’re as different from the Boomers as they are from us, the “mid” Xers. Think Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. Brian Niemeier calls them “Generation Jones”, and while I don’t like that tag I don’t know what else to call them (except maybe “Woodersons”), so roll with it.

Then there’s the group that was in high school in the late 1980s. I squeak into this group (barely). We’re the mid-Xers. The real “grunge” generation. If Dazed and Confused is a pretty decent late-90s approximation of late-70s high school kids, then the best description I can give you of a “grunge” kid is the movie Deadpool. Made in 2016, by guys who were born in the mid-1970s. That’s grunge, in a way Kurt Cobain couldn’t even imagine. Fourth wall breaks! Sarcastic asides about the fourth wall breaks! Profanity! Masturbation jokes! And snark, snark, snark — unrelenting snark, about everything, all the time. Every second of that movie screams “I can’t believe you fags are amused by this, but since you obviously do, here’s lots more! Choke on it!!!”

The writers obviously wanted to work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Joss Whedon was too cool for them — imagine the twisted psyche of a person who thinks Joss Whedon is cool — and Sarah Michelle Gellar just laughed at them, so they made Deadpool out of spite.

Then there’s the late Xers. They were in high school in the late 1990s, which is why us oldsters call them “Millennials” (as the term is now used, it seems to mean “those born around 2000”, i.e. the generation just now getting out of college. We took it to mean “those who were just getting out of college around the turn of the century”). Obviously I use the Internet. I’m using it now, but I’m not on the internet, and I’m certainly not an Internet Person. The very late Xers are Internet People. The very first Internet People; they invented the concept of Internet People. Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984) is a late Xer. The people behind Twitter (Jack Dorsey born 1976; Biz Stone 1974; Evan Williams 1972) are mid-Xers; they were ahead of the curve.

Severian, “Addendum to Previous”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.

September 18, 2025

QotD: Americans, poker, and chess

Filed under: Europe, Gaming, Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The game of chess has never been held in great esteem by the North Americans. Their culture is steeped in deeply anti-intellectual tendencies. They pride themselves in having created the game of poker. It is their national game, springing from a tradition of westward expansion, of gun-slinging skirt chasers who slept with cows and horses. They distrust chess as a game of Central European immigrants with a homesick longing for clandestine conspiracies in quiet coffee houses. Their deepest conviction is that bluff and escalation will achieve more than scheming and patience (witness their foreign policy).

J.H. Donner, “The King: Chess Pieces”, New In Chess, 2008.

September 15, 2025

HBO’s Rome – Ep 11 “The Spoils” – History and Story

Filed under: History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 23 Apr 2025

This time we look at episode 11 — and only this episode as there is more to talk about when it comes to the historical background. Some of the plot doesn’t fit too well to the actual history, but there are some nice details that crop up and make it worthwhile. In the main, I get excited about a coin and a court.

September 14, 2025

History of Britain VIII: Welsh, Picts, and Irish in the Early Middle Ages

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Thersites the Historian
Published 7 Mar 2025

In this video, we look at the other major ethnic groups in the British Isles and trace their development, insofar as our limited sources allow.

September 10, 2025

Space Nazis! Evil Empires and Historical Memory

Filed under: History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 30 Jun 2022

A brief look at the echo of Nazi Germany and its impact on American sci-fi, with a focus on Star Wars because it’s endured for nearly half a century.

September 9, 2025

Uh-oh. It’s not a good sign to see your town’s name in Not the Bee

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Law — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We’ve lived in Bowmanville for ten years and in that time the demographics have changed substantially. Some of those changes have been positive, but others have definitely been negative:

Video out of Bowmanville, Ontario, shows Southeast Asian men (do with that what you will) flipping salmon out of a small stream during the annual salmon run back to their spawning locations.

Early September is peak salmon-fishing season. Fisherman across the continent catch millions of fish as they return upriver to spawn.

But it is highly illegal to catch salmon near their actual spawning sites (especially with nets), which includes Bowmanville (upriver from Lake Ontario). It is also unsafe, as the fish die off in mass numbers after spawning, making the meat inedible.

Despite this, migrants have been seen poaching fish in the area for several years (at least).

In the comment section, some people shared stories of their own, including this anecdote from Port Hope, Ontario.

Over the summer, SE Asian men went viral in Muskoka, Ontario, for filming themselves shooting up a local bridge and river. Locals say they have reported such incidents for years, but despite the danger and the leftover environmental pollution, authorities have been slow to act.

September 8, 2025

Ancient Historian Reviews Monty Python’s Life of Brian | Deep Dives

Filed under: History, Humour, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published 1 May 2025

In this new video, classicist Honor Cargill-Martin delves into the iconic Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Is it historically accurate or is it a very naughty film?

00:00 Intro
00:53 Judea A.D. 33
01:55 Colosseum?
06:56 People’s Front of Judea
10:28 “What have the Romans done for us?”
16:05 Roman Grafitti
19:44 Hypocaust
23:30 Biggus Dickus
28:42 “Crucifixion?”
30:37 “… release a wrong doer from our prison”
32:09 “I’m Brian!”
(more…)

September 7, 2025

QotD: Generation X

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

… But Sailer’s right about Klosterman’s ability to grasp the obvious about Gen X. For instance:

    The concept of “selling out” — and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything — is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties. The complexity, nuance, and application of the term sellout was both ubiquitous and impossible to grasp. Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche.

Or, as I like to put it, we were so obsessed with “authenticity” that we took as our guru an exquisitely sensitive longhaired goof who fronted a band named after spooge. […] But Klosterman does have genuine insights sometimes:

    The detail always noted in remembrances of the Bronco chase is the throngs of bystanders cheering for Simpson as the car rolled down the freeway, congregating on overpasses and holding makeshift cardboard signs proclaiming, “The Juice Is Loose”. It seemed perverse then and still seems perverse now. Yet this can also be understood as the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.

Sailer thinks that’s clever and perceptive, and I agree. Too bad you have to read some masturbatory bullshit about Zima to get to it.

Sadly, he doesn’t take that out a step (or, at least, he doesn’t get quoted doing so in Sailer’s review). Here’s Klosterman’s verdict on why Gen X, for all its faults, wasn’t so bad:

    The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy.

True enough, but look: Of all the things that made the Boomers so fucking insufferable, right near the top was their utter inability to let go of their youth. Instead of seeing Forrest Gump as a metaphor so unsubtle, an anvil to the head seems sneakier, they thought it was a lighthearted celebration of a simpler, more innocent time. We knew better. Since they couldn’t let go of their youth, we made “being old and jaded long before our time” into our signature thing.

But where, my fellow alterna-dudes, is that attitude now, when it matters? We’re in the same position in 2022 as our parents were in 1992: Staring down the barrel of middle age, teeing off on life’s back nine, pick your metaphor. It’s time to put away childish things. Grow the fuck up already, the way we wish our parents would’ve done for us back in 1992. Instead, we’re letting our lunatic children smear their pathologies all over what’s left of America, because … ?

I know why Klosterman does it: That’s what they pay him for. What’s our excuse?

Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.

September 2, 2025

Too much empathy can be more dangerous than too little

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spaceman Spiff explains why boundaries matter, in so many different areas of modern life:

Empathy is a virtue many strive to demonstrate. But few will discuss its downsides. Why it is not universally good or useful. How it can be misdirected.

In some situations it is lethal. It can reflect a suicidal urge we now see in Western nations.

Much empathy in society is in fact sentimentality, which is dangerous. Sentimental ideas about mixing cultures, elevating poor performers through quotas, or tinkering with traditional gender roles have real world effects.

With such an emphasis on empathy, which many think of as niceness, we overlook the need for boundaries to maintain a functioning society.

This is the issue at the heart of much that is damaging us today.

Individual rights

We live in an era that champions individual rights to an almost autistic degree. This is a product of Western liberalism, which now seems to be entering its terminal phase as its effects ultimately destroy what made Western societies strong.

Since an individual’s rights trump everything we cannot easily enforce boundaries our ancestors could take for granted. Try challenging a gay pride parade or transgender material in schools on the grounds of public decency and the least you can expect is to lose your job.

Profound changes have happened just in the last few decades and all in the name of individual rights. The erosion of boundaries on behaviour is one of the most visible aspects of this.

Physical boundaries

The concept of boundaries is almost universal and spans everything from the mundane to the spiritual.

Most countries recognize the right to private property and inherent within this is the notion of boundaries. My car is mine and no one else’s, for example.

This is applied to our homes and gardens. These are ours and defendable from theft. Ultimately this in turn includes a neighbourhood or locale, even a region or state. All these things have visible boundaries that demarcate where they begin and end.

Most famously this applies to national borders, a traditional form of boundary in use for thousands of years. Failing to enforce this barrier is national suicide. The world is not like us and if it comes to us we will look like the world in return. Borders keep the barbarians out.

Everyone instinctively grasps these kinds of boundaries. We close our windows and have locks on our doors because of this understanding.

Using boundaries to exclude others feels natural.

Cultural boundaries

Less explicitly visible are cultural boundaries, often transmitted via tradition and convention. We have spent the last century attacking many of these as old fashioned, with little pause to consider why tradition emerges in the first place.

Marriage between men and women. Complementary gender roles. Sexual mores kept private. The sanctity of childhood, its innocence protected from intrusion.

As we removed constraints in the name of progress we destroyed much of the glue that held our societies together. We are now watching things unravel as people marry less and produce fewer children. We see widespread mental illness and anguish as the few basic certainties of life are destroyed in the name of progress.

People don’t know who or what they are when cultural boundaries are deleted. Women, men, natives, newcomers, the working class. Who are we really without some certainties in life?

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