Quotulatiousness

September 1, 2025

“Britain … has been reduced to a two-letter abbreviation … ‘Yoo-Kay’, and bearing a sad resemblance to ‘Yukky'”

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

Back when I first set up the blog, it was clear that certain countries would be mentioned frequently enough to merit having their own categories … Canada, obviously, the United States, our gigantic neighbour, and Britain. As I was born in England nearly 65 years ago, events in the old country still have a resonance for me, but I preferred to call the union “Britain” rather than its formal name of “United Kingdom” — and I try to use the proper names of “England”, “Scotland”, “Wales” and “Ireland” as tags when historically appropriate. I don’t regret that decision at all:

“Union Jacks and crosses of St George” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The current national flag-waving by the English is hugely gratifying for those of us who feel that our beloved country has been sidelined for too long.

Along with that visible symbol of English patriotism, may I make another plea – for I don’t want to live in an abbreviated country!

That country used to be called Britain, now usually described as “the UK” – and we see “Great Britain” even less.

Britain, the very name of which resonates with history, and of which I am very proud, has been reduced to a two-letter abbreviation – ugly-looking when written, and something akin to a cheerleader’s chant when spoken: “Yoo-Kay”, and bearing a sad resemblance to “Yukky”.

Almost every country in the world has a “real” name that helps its residents feel a sense of identity. But “I live in the UK”? It has a horribly soulless feel about it, like something a faceless quango has drawn up on the spur of the moment – certainly not a name rich in tradition that has been carried down the millennia.

It was not always so. This reduction of the title of our glorious islands has happened insidiously over the past two or three decades without most folk noticing it. One has only to glance through old newspapers and magazines, or listen to old broadcasts on radio and TV, to notice that 30 years ago the term ‘UK’ was rarely used.

It is ironic that our national broadcaster, the BBC, has ‘British’ enshrined in its very name, yet that organisation is among the worst offenders, almost always preferring ‘UK’ over ‘Britain’ or ‘British’!

How has this happened? There are perhaps many reasons; but the most obvious has been the use of .uk as the terminator in website addresses. If .gb had been the standard, as originally proposed, things may now be quite different.

One of the odd things about all this is that foreigners mostly still use the term ‘Britain’ rather than ‘the UK’ – putting us to shame.

Some may ask: ‘Why does this matter?’

It matters greatly, for the very word ‘Britain’ conveys the feeling of being connected to ancient history. It’s a name with centuries of glorious tradition behind it, a history which we should never be ashamed of proclaiming.

And what about England? Perhaps even worse than the reduction of our islands to an abbreviation is the widespread lack of recognition for my homeland, England.

Update, 2 September: 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.

August 30, 2025

Flagging hopes

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

The English have been told by the transnational elites who happen to use London as one of their bases of operations that pride in the nation is, at best, old fashioned and at worst, racist/sexist/homophobic hate embodied. You could easily imagine Keir Starmer quoting Justin Trudeau that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada England” [and consequently that] “makes us the first post-national state”. I’m certain that’s very close to Starmer’s actual views, but it’s very far from the views of a lot of ordinary English people:

Suddenly flagging has become a big thing in England. Out of nowhere a social media driven grassroots movement of flaggers has emerged. Throughout England groups of newly emerging activist are hanging flag on lamp posts and painting red crosses on roundabouts.

Even in my sleepy town of Faversham, Kent the English flag of St. George could be seen one pole after another waving in the wind. One flagger tells me that “we want to make sure that our town becomes proud of its national heritage”. Another tells me, “raising the flag helps make us feel at home”,

There is little doubt the people supporting Operation Raise the Colours are not just in the business of confining their activities to one-off stunts. At the very least this grass roots movement is determined to challenge the nation’s local councils to value the English flag of St George and to cease being hostile to the flying of the Union Jack.

The movement of flaggers took off in Birmingham. Probably this movement would not have gained such prominence if it hadn’t been for the reaction of Birmingham’s Labour dominated Local Council to the sight of England’s flag flying of the city’s lamp post. The Council reacted by ordering the removal of the flags on the ground that they put the lives of pedestrians and motorists “at risk” despite being up to 25ft off the ground! It was evident to all that this Council applied a different standard of judgment in relation to the Palestinian flag, which are flown all over the City.

Birmingham’s flaggers, who call themselves the “Weoley Warriors” stated that their goal was to “show Birmingham and the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements”. One local resident, Mrs Owens, a former police officer told the media; “I think there will be trouble, even riots if they take them down”. She added: “We are sick of having to apologise for being British. The flags have had such a positive impact on the community – people love them. There is nothing political about it.”

There is little doubt that Mrs Owens message has resonated with wide sections of the public. Supporters of the movement indicated that they were fed up with the situation where local councils were happy to fly the Palestinian and LGBTQ flags but not that of their nation. The movement of flaggers quickly spread from Birmingham to towns and cities throughout England. “Let’s bring back patriotism once and for all”, stated the Facebook page of Operation Raise the Colours, It urged members to post images of the assorted national flags of the four British nations “being raised around our great towns and cities”. In response groups individuals decided to form groups who took it upon themselves go out and do what they call “flagging” around their town.

There is also no doubt that the flaggers have provoked a hostile reaction from large sections of the British Elite, who regard the flaggers with contempt and never use an opportunity to issue warnings about the threat post by far-right conspirators lurking in the background. This alarmist rection was personified by Nick Ireland, the Liberal Democrat leader of Dorset Council who insisted that some residents found the sudden appearance St George’s and union flags “intimidating”. He added that it was “naïve” to suggest that these emblems had not been “hijacked” by some far-right groups.

August 29, 2025

Memories of Bournemouth

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

It’s nearly sixty years since my family emigrated, but I still have golden memories of the family trips to the seaside, although my family went to Scarborough, Whitby, and Redcar rather than the Bournemouth of Pimlico Journal‘s childhood:

“Harvester at Durley Chine” by David Lally is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

At every possible opportunity in the summer weekends of my childhood, my father would take our family down to the coast. Our route to the sea was normally through the medieval city of Salisbury, across the chalk downs of Hardy’s Wessex, and into the piney moors of the New Forest. The destination would nearly always be Bournemouth, the prim, stately model of the British seaside town, perched magisterially on Dorset’s sandstone cliffs, above a long golden strand lapped by the warm waves of the Channel.

Our favourite beach was at Durley Chine, where we could park (for free, greatly appealing to my father) among obscured mansions in the shade of thick-smelling conifers, and make our descent to the shore, where the chine gives way to the rows of huts that line the promenade, and a reassuringly lower-middle class Harvester restaurant. We would while away the hours on the sand until the sky was orange, my mother reading, my father swimming, and my brother and I playing whatever games we could devise, mostly involving the throwing of sand. The day would end with fish and chips under the pines, watching the sun sink over the jurassic cliffs past Poole harbour, the gateway to King Alfred’s stronghold at Wareham.

These were among the most precious times of my early life, and the sights and sounds and smells of that part of the world and the accompanying hazy, worriless bliss are cherished sensations. Though the beach is public, it was one of those places that felt special and individual to my family, as if we had somehow carved out our own summer fief on the crowded shore.

It was on Durley Chine beach, on 24 May 2024, that two innocent women, Amie Grey and Leanne Miles, were attacked by Nasen Saadi, a criminology student from Croydon of Iraqi and Thai heritage. Saadi murdered Grey and left Miles in critical condition, and was sentenced this year to thirty-nine years in prison for his crimes. The incident was part of an escalating pattern of violence, particularly sexual violence, in the Bournemouth area over the past few years, with the beach as the focal point, a pattern which had begun in July 2021 with the brutal rape of a 15-year-old girl by Gabriel Marinoaica, a young man from Walsall who dragged his victim into the sea to commit his attack. Another notable incident occurred eight months later. Afghan asylum seeker and convicted killer Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai (he had shot two fellow Afghans while living illegally in Serbia in 2018, before fleeing to Norway, where his asylum claim was rejected, then travelling to Britain and successfully claiming asylum by pretending to be an unaccompanied fourteen-year-old, despite being an adult) stabbed Thomas Roberts (a local man and qualified precision engineer who had recently applied to join the Royal Marines) to death outside a Subway in the city centre, in a dispute over an e-scooter.

The news stories become relentless from that point. Among many depravities are the sexual assault of a 17-year-old boy by a group of Asian males on 17 June 2023, accompanied the same day by an attempted assault on a 16-year-old girl outside the fish and chip shop on the seafront. A week later, two girls, aged just 10 and 11, who would have been in primary school at the time, were sexually assaulted while swimming in the sea. As far as I can tell, none of these crimes have yet been prosecuted.

Two months after the murder of Amie Grey, on 19 July 2024, a day of delirious warmth culminated in violent clashes between youths, many coming in from London, on the seafront — clashes which were filmed and circulated on social media. In the chaos, a teenage girl was sexually assaulted. Jessica Toale, the freshly-elected Labour MP for Bournemouth West, a seat which had been Tory since its creation in 1950, said after the events of 19 July that crime and anti-social behaviour had become a ‘huge issue’ in contrast to the safe Bournemouth she remembered as a girl, stating that ‘… parents had told [her] that they are concerned about letting their daughters go to the town’. These are almost reactionary words from a Labour MP, and reflective of the mood of anxiety and decline that seems to have enveloped the city, a mood founded on the series of despair-inducing events plaguing residents and visitors. On 30 June, disorder similar to that witnessed in July last year returned to the seafront, with police making arrests across the country in the aftermath.

A week later, on 6 July, a young woman was raped in a public toilet adjoining the beach. The police have charged Mohammed Abdullah, a Syrian asylum seeker living in West London, with the crime.

August 27, 2025

Operation Raise the Colours

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

Gawain Towler on the groundswell of quiet patriotic display in England, against the active attempts by local governments to suppress any and all flag-waving or even flag-flying by the plebs:

It was a seemingly innocuous tweet during the 2014 Rochester and Strood by-election that exposed a deep cultural rift. Emily Thornberry, then Labour’s shadow attorney general, a paragon of establishment elite thought, posted a photo of a terraced house in Strood adorned with multiple St George’s Cross flags, a white van parked outside.

No caption, just “Image from #Rochester”. To Thornberry, the image spoke for itself: a symbol of backward, flag-waving patriotism, the domain of the “white van man” she and her metropolitan peers presumably viewed with quiet derision. She expected her audience to share the contempt, to chuckle at the vulgarity of overt Englishness. But the backlash was ferocious. The public saw snobbery, a sneering dismissal of ordinary lives. Thornberry resigned from the shadow cabinet that day, rebuked by Ed Miliband for disrespecting hardworking families. I played a modest role in that storm, forwarding the tweet to Guido Fawkes and The Sun, which amplified the outrage and forced the reckoning.

That episode, now over a decade old, feels eerily prescient as I contemplate the “raising the flag” phenomenon sweeping Britain in recent weeks. What began as scattered acts of defiance has blossomed into a nationwide movement: St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks hoisted on lampposts, motorway bridges, and public spaces from Birmingham’s Shard End to Tower Hamlets in east London, Southampton to Brighton, and even Cannock. Roundabouts painted red and white, zebra crossings marked with the cross, symbols of England asserting themselves in the urban landscape. Last night I cycled through London’s Labour stronghold of Lambeth, and road markings have been transformed with the St George’s Cross, a quiet but bold reclamation in one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Dubbed “Operation Raise the Colours” by organisers (though it is hard to describe the phenomenon as organised), it has seen thousands of flags raised, with fundraising efforts like Birmingham’s £16,000 drive sustaining the effort. I support this gentle uprising, for it breathes life into symbols long marginalised. Yet I acknowledge the disquiet it stirs: in a polarised society, such displays can evoke unease, linked in some minds to far-right agitation or the riots of summer 2024, that and deeper darker memories of NF marches in the 1970s.

Why is this happening now? The timing aligns with the anniversary of last year’s Southport tragedy and ensuing unrest, where misinformation, both from the state and other bad actors, fuelled anti-immigration protests that spiralled into violence. Many participants frame it as a response to “two-tier policing”, swift crackdowns on native demonstrations while pro-Palestinian marches proceed with apparent leniency. It’s a broader reclamation of national pride amid economic stagnation, unchecked migration, and a sense of cultural dilution. For the overlooked, those Thornberry’s tweet mocked, this is a way to say, “We belong here”. and stronger yet, but uncontroversial in any other land than our own, “This is our land”.

It’s contemplative defiance: not riots, but ribbons of red and white asserting identity in a nation where Englishness often feels like an afterthought.

August 9, 2025

Alert the non-crime hate incident police: soccer star proclaims pride in being English!

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Soccer — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Obadiah Mbatang discusses a recent disturbing incident of a member of the Lionesses (England’s female national soccer team) saying something completely unacceptable to the great and the good:

So the Lionesses were victorious in the UEFA Women’s Euros, holding the title they won in 2022. England forward Chloe Kelly, who scored the decisive penalty in the final against Spain, declared after the match: “I am so proud to be English”.

To hear a sports star make such a simple and patriotic statement was, for most of us, a pleasant breath of fresh air. Just as refreshing has been the muted response to her declaration of national pride. In the week or so since, there have been no online campaigns denouncing Kelly’s views as “problematic”. This raises the question: is it just the Lionesses who are allowed to be patriotic?

Compare the response to Kelly’s post-match comment with the recent treatment of Courtney Wright, a 12-year-old schoolgirl from the West Midlands. A few weeks ago, she wore a Union Jack dress inspired by the Spice Girls to her school’s “Culture Day”, in which pupils were encouraged to “proudly represent their heritage”. Courtney, who had also prepared a speech celebrating Shakespeare and fish and chips, was put into isolation by her school and then sent home. Essentially, she was told it was unacceptable to express pride in being British.

What followed next gave us a fascinating, if depressing, insight into the online left. Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media, came out in defence of Courtney. “A white British person being proud of their country and its accomplishments does not make them racist”, Bastani said on X. “Either all groups get to celebrate identity and culture, or none.” Yet for striking a fair-minded and consistent approach, he was attacked by his largely left-wing audience.

One notable assault came from Eleanora Folan, who runs the hugely popular “Stats for Lefties” X account. Folan said celebrating British culture “literally does” make someone racist because “the concept of white ‘identity’ is inherently exclusionary and racist”, adding that “all of Britain’s ‘accomplishments’ were built on racism and imperialism”.

Now, I suspect Eleanora and many on the left would never say that Nigerians should view their heritage as “evil” because of the Biafran War and the anti-Igbo pogroms of the 1960s and 1970s. Does anyone on the left talk about King Ghezo’s determined efforts in the 19th century to maintain slavery, even as the British tried to stamp it out in his West African kingdom? Would they say that British people of Arab descent should be ashamed because of Arab slavery of Africans, which still persists to some extent today? Should British people of Rwandan Hutu descent be ashamed because of the Rwandan genocide? Of course not.

Admittedly, there is no shortage of right-wing whataboutery that uses the histories of other countries to avoid discussing the darker aspects of Britain’s past. But that is not what is going on here. Courtney’s treatment by her school, and those online leftists blasting her as racist, reveals that self-loathing oikophobia remains one of the dominant prejudices of the left.

August 6, 2025

QotD: Modern English night life

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

There are few sounds more frightening than that of the English young enjoying themselves. The English, it was once said, take their pleasures sadly; but now they take them loudly, which is far, far worse. Their pleasures are brutish, and the sounds the men emit while experiencing them are indistinguishable from those of a mob indignantly beating someone to death. As for the women, they never speak but they scream, as if being chronically raped. Of course, they all have to raise the level of their vocalizations because there is the perpetual background throb and thump of background music, or para-music, turned up to maximum volume, so that the ground vibrates beneath you like a ripple bed in an intensive care unit.

Recently I stayed overnight in a charming small cathedral city in England, genteel by day and Gomorrah by night. It is a little like H.G. Wells’ story The Time Machine, set 3,000 years hence, when humanity has divided into two: the effete, gentle, vegetarian diurnal Eloi, and the ugly, vicious, carnivorous nocturnal Morlocks, who emerge from underground once the sun goes down and prey on the Eloi.

I had booked no place to stay until the last minute, and found only a room above a cavernous, darkened bar, for me an antechamber of Hell, where the Morlock youth of the cathedral city gathered to enjoy themselves — or at least to pretend to do so, for I have long thought that those who cannot enjoy themselves without shouting and screaming are really hysterics, trying to convince themselves that they are enjoying themselves when actually they do not really know how to do so.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Evening Above the Hell-Bar”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-12-16.

July 23, 2025

Britain’s housing crisis has roots as far back as 1947

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall on the deep reasons Britain can’t seem to build any new housing:

Homes Fit for Heroes – Dagenham
“These are typical examples of the housing on the Becontree Estate. Initially 25000 homes were built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1934. These homes fit for the heroes of WW1 had all mod cons gas, water and electricity with inside toilets and bathrooms. A further 2000 homes were built before WW2. The Becontree estate was the biggest council estate in the world.”
Image and description from geograph.uk. Photo by Glyn Baker – CC BY SA 2.0

The real problem Britain faces is that it’s no longer legal to build the housing we thought was the bare minimum acceptable a century ago.

    The more apposite point is that a couple of hundred yards up the road are those post-WWI homes for heroes. Here. Semi detached, not huge to be fair. But kitchen, living room, parlour, 3 beds and indoor bathroom. They’re still highly desirable houses in fact. Note, they’ve front gardens. They’ve also back ones too.

    Now, we’ve heard this, even heard it from someone on Bath City Council (who had heard it, we’re not quite old enough to know anyone who was on BCC in the 1920s), and never, quite tracked it down officially. But the statement was made that the Homes for Heroes needed to be on 1/4 acre gardens. The working man needed the space to grow vegetables for his family and to keep a pig. These houses, the 1920s ones, do have substantial gardens as the 1960s ones don’t.

As I pointed out:

    But Homes for Heroes? We’ve done this before. And those Homes for Heroes? Right now, today, it’s illegal to build them. No, really. What was considered the basic minimum that the local council should provide to the working man is illegal to build now. Those decent sized houses were on those decent gardens d’ye see? You can get perhaps 9 dwellings with 1/4 acre gardens on a hectare of land. Last we saw the current insistence is that we must have no less than 30 dwellings per hectare in order to gain planning permission. Even though Englishcombe – as with so much other land – is there and ripe for the taking.

    It’s actually illegal to build houses that were regarded as the proper minimum a century ago.

The reason we cannot is that Green Belt, itself stemming from the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. The point of which — no, really, the stated purpose — was to make sure that no one would ever be allowed to build housing for proles — sorry, stout Britons — anywhere anyone ever wanted to live.

Which is a bit of a problem. For, outside my own head, there’s no constituency for repealing the TCPA and abolishing the Green Belt.

However, there is a large constituency for plastering farmland with solar cells.

    Waller-Barrett’s farm has been targeted for a massive solar plant, which will be called Glebe Farm, and now his landlord plans to take his land away, replacing potato crops with thousands of giant glass panels.

    The decision, backed by edicts from Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, favouring solar farms over food production on UK farmland, means his flourishing food business will shrink – and staff will be out of work.

    Meanwhile the distant landlord will be quids in, potentially quadrupling their rent with virtually no effort.

Oh.

And now one of those little wrinkles of the law. Those solar farms will last 20 years maximum. No, really, that’s tops. The wrinkle being that the land underneath them will be, in that 20 years’ time, defined as brownfield land. Been previously developed, see? And brownfield land to housing is usually pretty easy as a development path. Certainly wholly unlike greenfield (or even Green Belt) to housing.

The land area Ed wants to cover with these things is 2 to 3% of the land area of the country. Which, as it happens, is about the land area currently covered by housing — including their gardens.

So, therefore we can see that Ed is, in fact, playing the long game. He’s going to solve the housing problem by not having to take on the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England and every LibDem middle-ager with too few grandchildren to occupy her time. He’s going to do an end run around that problem by building solar first.

June 10, 2025

QotD: From Witan to Magna Carta

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

About 1,500 years ago, in Saxon England, the nobles of the realm, the bishops, abbots (and abbesses) and the ealdormen and thegns and others would gather, fairly regularly, in an assembly to advise and, sometimes, to constrain the king. In a very typically English manner, they hit upon the notion that the kings were not, generally, wicked or stupid, but they did too many dumb things just because they could. The reason that kings could, too often, do whatever they wanted was simple: they had an almost unlimited power to levy taxes.

After a few hundred years of trial and error, and given a king who really was wicked and stupid, too, they, the barons as they were then known, went to war with their king and bent him to their will by forcing him to agree to a great charter of their rights. There was a bit of ringing language about no free man being taken except after a trial by a jury of his peers, but, basically, in very typically English fashion, the rights about which the great charter was most concerned were property rights because the barons had learned, over the centuries that only by controlling the pursestrings could they really control the king.

A few hundred years later, one of liberalism’s and democracy’s greatest voices told us that we have three absolutely fundamental, natural rights: to life, to liberty and to property. These rights were not and still are not unlimited. There were and are ways to lawfully and properly deprive a person of his property and his liberty and, in some countries, even his life.

A few centuries after John Locke another philosopher wanted to do away with the right to property: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, Karl Marx wrote, and many, far too many, believed. The only real problem with Marx’s notion is that it requires that humans are perfect … and most of us know how rare that is. Here in Canada, especially since the early years of the 20th century, we have had far too much Marx and far too little Locke.

Ted Campbell, “Democracy is in peril”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2020-06-12.

May 27, 2025

QotD: Refuting the “state of nature” argument in Leviathan

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

Leviathan is a brilliant book, well worth reading, in fact one of only two political philosophy texts anyone really needs (Machiavelli’s The Prince is the other), but for all its brilliance it can be summed up in a sentence: Peace at any price. The only thing worse than a civil war is a religious war, and Hobbes got to see a war that was one and the same, up close and personal. The problem is, without that context — without the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War fresh in your eyes and ears and nose — Hobbes’s conclusions become unacceptable. Peace is nice, yeah, but surely not at that price …?

Alas, Hobbes’s method is so seductively useful, and his “state of nature” so seemingly correct (if you don’t think about it too hard, which is easy to do, as Hobbes’s prose is entrancing), that in their haste to reject his conclusions, later thinkers like Locke didn’t stop to question whether or not the premises behind the method are actually true. It helped, too, that Locke (born 1632) came of age as the civil wars were winding down (his father was briefly a Parliamentary cavalry commander); he made his philosophical bones with the Restoration (1660). […]

It’s easy to get too far into the weeds with this stuff, but I trust everyone takes my point: Because Hobbes presented such a seductive vision, and because he took such sustained criticism by such high-level guys as Locke even as they were adopting his premises and methods, we — later generations of thinkers, almost without exception — behave as if Hobbes really had done what he said he did, which was to naturalize political philosophy. Political science, he would’ve said, and unlike the pretentious dweebs who staff those departments in modern universities, he wasn’t kidding — he really thought the arguments in Leviathan were as unassailable and compelling as geometry proofs.

But they weren’t, and even he knew it. Hobbes is a fascinating personality, but he’s a hard man to like, not least because he’s so irascible. I sympathize, Tommy, I really do, I’m no mean curmudgeon myself, but dude, you were wrong. Recall the fundamental premise of the “state of nature” thought experiment: All men are functionally equal.

That’s not just wrong, it’s arrant nonsense. It’s hard to think of a statement this side of Karl Marx that’s so backasswards as that one. Far from naturalizing political philosophy, Hobbes made it totally artificial, completely mechanical. His social contract requires a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth free agents, of sound mind and body, all ready and willing to defend themselves to the hilt at all times. Women have no place in Hobbes’s world. Nor do children, or the weak, or the halt, the sick, the old …

In short, although Hobbes is a brilliant observer of human nature, full of acute insight into man and his works, the most famous passage of Leviathan, the one to which all modern political philosophy is mere footnotes, has nothing at all of Man in it. It’s baloney, and therefore, everything derived from it is also, on some deep philosophical level, horseshit.

Severian, “Range Finding III: Natural Law”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-23.

May 19, 2025

QotD: Food for Medieval English peasants

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The most common everyday sort of meal in wood-burning Britain was what we might call pottage or frumenty, a thick moist dish in which whole grains or pulses are brought to a boil and then simmered until as much liquid as possible has been absorbed. Think risotto but with less stirring. The simplest version was very simple indeed — wheat or barley or peas cooked in water with whatever fresh vegetables or herbs were available — but if you had the means you could add anything that was in season: meat, fish, butter or cheese, milk or cream, eggs, and even delicacies like sugar, almonds, or imported dried fruits.1 In fact most medieval dishes were thick and sticky, exactly the sort of thing I like to give my toddlers because it stays on even the most inexpertly wielded spoon, and they’re extremely well-adapted to cooking over wood. Just get your pot boiling over a big fire, then as the flames die down your dinner will simmer nicely. You’ll have to stir it, of course, to keep it from sticking to the pot, but you have to come back anyway to feed the fire. You can cook like this over coal, but it’s difficult: a coal fire stays hot much longer, so moderating the temperature of your frumenty requires constantly putting your pot on the grate and taking it off again. It’s far simpler to just add more liquid and let it all boil merrily away, with the added bonus that the wetter dish needs much less stirring to keep it from sticking. With the switch to coal, boiled dinners — soups, meats, puddings, and eventually potatoes — became the quintessentially English foods.2

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.

    1. We’re used to thinking of plants as being seasonal, but until quite recently animal products were seasonal too: chickens won’t lay in the winter without artificial lighting, cows stop giving milk when their calves reach a certain age, and generally one would only slaughter an animal for its meat at the right time of year. Geese, for instance, were typically eaten either as a “green goose”, brought up on summer grasses and slaughtered as soon as it reached adult size around the middle of July, or a “stubble goose”, fattened again on what remained in the fields after harvest and eaten for Michaelmas (in late September). Feeding a goose all autumn and half the winter only to eat it for Christmas would have been silly.

    2. It’s also typical of New England, which makes sense; the New Englanders by and large came from East Anglia, which is right on the Newcastle-London coal route and a region that adopted coal cookery relatively early.

May 5, 2025

The Bloody Battle of Agincourt | Animated Episode

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

The Rest Is History
Published 30 Nov 2024

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.

The Battle of Agincourt in 1415 endures as perhaps the most totemic battle in the whole of English history. Thanks in part to Shakespeare’s masterful Henry V, the myths and legends of that bloody day echo across time, forever enshrining the young Henry as the greatest warrior king England had ever known. So too the enduring idea of the English as plucky underdogs, facing down unfavourable odds with brazen grit. And though the exact numbers of men who fought in the two armies is hotly contested, the prospect was certainly intimidating for the English host looking down upon the vast French force amassed below them the day before the battle. Hungry and weary after an unexpectedly long march, and demoralised by the number of French that would be taking to the field, the situation certainly seemed dire for the English. One man amongst them, however, held true to his belief that the day could still be won: Henry V. An undeniably brilliant military commander, he infused his men with a sense of patriotic mission, convincing them that theirs was truly a divinely ordained task, and therefore in this — and his careful strategic planning the night before the battle — he proves a striking case of one individual changing the course of history. However, the French too had plans in place for the day ahead: total warfare. In other words, to overwhelm the English in a single devastating moment of impact, sweeping the lethal Welsh archers aside. So it was that dawn broke on the 25th of October to the site of King Henry wearing a helmet surmounted by a glittering crown and bearing the emblems of both France and England, astride his little grey horse, and riding up and down his lines of weathered silver clad men, preparing them to stride into legend … then, as the French cavalry began their charge, the sky went black as 75,000 arrows blocked out the sun. What else would that apocalyptic day hold in store?

Join Tom and Dominic as they describe the epochal Battle of Agincourt. From the days building up to it, to the moment that the two armies shattered together in the rain and mud of France. It is a story of courage and cowardice, kings and peasants, blood and bowels, tragedy and triumph.

00:00 What is to come …
00:50 Shakespeare and Henry V
02:53 Agincourt is exceptional
04:15 The battle is a test of God’s favour
05:27 The English see the French forces …
09:30 The French aren’t offering battle
10:40 Why the French delay
11:13 The French think they’re going to win
11:35 An ominous silence
12:35 Henry’s plan
20:50 The French plan
24:28 How big were the armies
28:49 The lay of the land
34:50 Henry makes the first move
37:00 The French charge into darkness
38:57 The French army advances
45:50 Reaction to the slaughter
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April 21, 2025

QotD: Thomas Hobbes’ view of the “state of nature” in Leviathan

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

By Hobbes’s day, then — the last, nastiest phase of the Period of the Wars of Religion, of which the English Civil Wars were a sideshow — it was clear that conversion by the sword wasn’t on the cards. But so long as political legitimacy remained tied, however tenuously, to God’s approval, malcontents would have a legitimate reason to oppose, and if possible depose, their prince. That’s the context in which Hobbes advanced his famous “state of nature” thought experiment.

The idea of “natural rights” was nothing new, of course. It goes back to at least Aristotle; Thomism and the whole medieval Scholastic schmear is incomprehensible without it. But Aristotle lived in a pre-Christian world, and Aquinas in a monolithically Catholic one. Both would find the idea of two sets of believers going to the hilt at each other over different versions of the same god incomprehensible. But that was the reality in Hobbes’s day, and it was real enough to reduce parts of Germany to cannibalism — the best modern estimates put casualties from the Thirty Years’ War at World War I levels proportional to population. That simply couldn’t go on, especially with the infidel Turk hammering at the gates.

Thus Hobbes decided to write God out of the picture. There’s lots of debate over Hobbes’s personal religious beliefs, if any; ranging from “he was a sincere, if somewhat unorthodox, Anglican” to “he was a raging atheist”. It doesn’t matter for our purposes. All we need to know is: because appeal to Scripture couldn’t end in anything but more bloodshed, perforce political legitimacy must be secularized, and the old concept of “natural rights” seemed to be the answer. Do we have rights just by virtue of being human, and if so, what are they?

Thus the “state of nature”. Hobbes was always quite clear that this was a thought experiment, not a statement about historical anthropology. His employer, the Cavendish family, the Earls (later Dukes) of Devonshire, were investors in the Virginia Company, and we believe Hobbes acted on their behalf in some capacity with the Company. So he knew better than anyone that the North American Indians weren’t in the state of nature (as he semi-jokingly suggested in Leviathan). Only semi-jokingly, though, because […] it was a real question back in the 1500s just what authority, if any, the conquistadores had to overthrow the native regimes in New Spain. Cortes and the boys might’ve laughed when the Requirimiento was read out, but they nonetheless felt compelled to do it, to legally cover their monarchs’ asses.

From the perspective of post-Hobbes political philosophy, it’s an easy answer. Montezuma was legitimately ruler of the Aztecs, as they, the Aztecs, had gotten out of the state of nature the way everyone else does: Via the “social contract” (recall that Hobbes himself doesn’t use this term). But since international relations remain in the state of nature, by definition, that’s all the justification the Spaniards would’ve needed. That Fernando and Isabella would’ve cheerfully burnt Hobbes at the stake is ironic, Alanis-level at least, but they were practical people; they’d be happy to use his arguments

Severian, “Range Finding III: Natural Law”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-23.

April 9, 2025

QotD: Legitimacy and revolution

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

Any revolutionary regime is faced with what you might call a crisis of foundations. Not necessarily a crisis of legitimacy, it’s important to note. “The power of the mighty hath no foundation, but in the opinion and belief of the people,” as Hobbes said, and he put his money where his mouth was — despite writing the firmest possible defense of royal absolutism, he took the Engagement and came home in 1651. Whatever the theoretical rights and wrongs of it, Parliament actually exercised power.

But though the English Civil War produced the first truly revolutionary regime, they were able to effectively co-opt most of the old regime’s symbols …

Let’s back up for a sec: As you recall, a revolution seeks to replace a people’s entire mode of living, whereas rebellions are just attempted changes of government. England had faced many rebellions before 1642, some of them successful, by which I mean they replaced one ruling faction with another. The usurpation of Richard II’s throne by Henry IV was extremely problematic, political theory-wise, but nobody was openly challenging the institution of monarchy as such. So too with the Wars of the Roses, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and so on: Those were all about the person of the king and his methods of rule, not about the legitimacy of his government.

The English Civil War was different. Charles I wasn’t the first English king executed by rebels (the aforementioned Richard II was starved to death; Henry VI died under extremely suspicious circumstances in the Wars of the Roses), but he was the first one found guilty of treason. To the kingdom he was king of. That’s a far different thing than “oopsie, I guess we forgot His Majesty’s lunch for two months running” or “we sent a whole bunch of goons with knives to the Tower, only to find His Majesty dead of melancholy”. A king who is guilty of treason is necessarily somehow inferior to his own kingdom, which forces us to confront the questions of 1) what, exactly, IS the kingdom? and 2) where does its legitimacy come from?

That’s why the rule of first the Council of State, then Lord Protector Cromwell, was a true revolution. In both cases, it was all too obvious where their legitimacy came from: out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao would so pithily put it 300 years later. And thanks to that power, they were free to remake the “lifeways” (as anthropologists say) of the people how they saw fit. Puritan England was as close to a totalitarianism as 17th century technology and information velocity would allow …

… but that wasn’t very close at all, as it turns out, and so most people in most places could get on with their lives pretty much as before. And even for those people directly under the State’s gaze, the Protectorate looked enough like the old monarchy that if you squinted and tilted your head sideways, you couldn’t really see the difference.

Severian, “Repost: National Symbols”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-27.

April 1, 2025

QotD: Jeeves proves his talent for the first time

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

[Bertie Wooster, who has a terrible hangover, encounters a prospective new valet – Jeeves.]

“If you would drink this, sir,” he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into a sick prince. “It’s a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcestershire sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.”

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a lifeline that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if someone had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the treetops and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

“You’re engaged!” I said, as soon as I could say anything.

P.G. Wodehouse Carry on, Jeeves (1925).

February 14, 2025

Henry VIII, Lady Killer – History Hijinks

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 3 Feb 2023

brb I’m blaring “Haus of Holbein” from Six the Musical on the loudest speakers I own.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
Britannica “Henry VIII” (https://www.britannica.com/biography/…, History “Who Were The Six Wives of Henry VIII” (https://www.history.com/news/henry-vi…), The Great Courses lectures: “Young King Hal – 1509-27”, “The King’s Great Matter – 1527-30”, “The Break From Rome – 1529-36”, “A Tudor Revolution – 1536-47”, and “The Last Years of Henry VIII – 1540-47” from A History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts by Robert Bucholz
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