Operations is the middle layer of military analysis, below strategy and above tactics. Operations concerns the movement of forces (often over multiple lines of advance to fully utilize the transportation network available) and their logistical support. Fundamentally, operations are about getting forces to the objectives specified in your strategy with sufficient supply to sustain themselves, so that once there they can employ your tactics to achieve victory. The specific task of crafting operations which will achieve a set of strategic objectives is called “operational art” in US doctrine. Operational failures typically manifest as logistics and maneuver failures – particularly operational plans with unreasonable timetables – both of which have been particularly in evidence in the initial Russian invasion [of Ukraine in 2022].
[…]
Strategy is the upper layer of military analysis. Fundamentally strategy concerns the identification of final objectives, the way those objectives can be achieved and the resources to be used to achieve those objectives; these three components of strategy in US doctrine are termed “Ends, Ways, and Means” respectively. Strategy is thus the “big picture” thinking behind an action, including the decisions to both commence hostilities and end them.
[…]
Tactics are the lowest layer of military analysis. Tactics concern the methods to be used to win battles. Things like flanking, suppressive fire, ambushes, etc. are tactics. A military’s tactical system is often spelled out in doctrine. In theory, operations is designed to deliver forces to battles in such a way (positioning, comparative force, etc.) that their tactics can win those battles, while strategy should aim to ensure that winning those particular battles will achieve the desired political end (whatever concessions are desired). It is important to distinguish actions which are strategy (designed to directly produce a desired end to the conflict) from those which are merely tactical (designed to achieve a local success or advantage in a given engagement). It is important when assessing failures in war to distinguish between strategic failures (typically a failure to come up with realistic goals and the means to reach them), operational failures (e.g. logistics failures or unreasonable maneuver timetables) and tactical failures (e.g. failure to use combined arms effectively).
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
March 6, 2026
QotD: Operations, strategy, and tactics
February 25, 2026
“Allyness” in the British military
I suspect anyone who has spent time in uniform out in the field (peacetime or wartime) would recognize these traits, but so far as I know only the British army and Royal Marines have a specific term for it:
(British troops in Afghanistan, 2008, looking very ‘ally’)
Photo and caption from Combat Threads
Professor Andrew Groves is one of the few true academic experts on menswear. In fact, it was his work as the Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive that inspired me to pursue my Costume Studies MA. Recently, he has started a weekly Substack that is well worth checking out. Last week, he wrote an essay on “Ally“, a British military slang term. What exactly “Ally” is can be hard to nail down, as it has no comparable terms in the US military or civilian cultures. Broadly, it can be described as a language of visual signifiers that denote a soldier as “having been there”, or at the very least, wanting to come across that way, usually by modifying pieces of kit, or wearing it in a particular fashion.
As Groves puts it, “The quiet discipline of looking ready. It is a system that emerges precisely when regulation lags and consequences move faster than command … Allyness was awarded horizontally, not issued from above. It was recognition from peers who knew what to look for.” Groves continues:
That recognition lived in detail, but it was never a checklist. Allyness was built through small, cumulative acts, field-smart adjustments passed down through units, not rulebooks: cutting down webbing to reduce snagging, taping over buckles to kill shine, shaping berets tight to the temple, sewing in map pockets, blacking out brass, marking kit discreetly. None of this was required. All of it mattered, because it signalled experience rather than purchase.
While the origins of “ally” definitely had roots in field-wise functionality and competence (the widespread adoption of Bundeswehr boots by British Paras or the “norgi” baselayer adopted by RM Commandos come to mind), by the time the GWOT generation were forming their own sense of “allyness”, much had devolved to style. I am going to quote from Simon Akam’s wonderful book The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11, on the evolution of “ally” in the 21st Century:
“Ally” is rifle magazines taped together — it draws inspiration from films as well as finding exhibition through the same medium. Ally is beards. Ally is non-regulation scarves and shemagh cloths. Ally is belts of 7.62mm link machine-gun ammunition draped over shirtless muscled torsos. Ally is liberal use of sniper tape on bits of kit, scrim netting pulled taut over the issued helmet, or “hero sleeves” — sleeves rolled only halfway up the forearm. A strong influence, ironically given the outcome of that conflict, is Vietnam … Of course, the two quantities of violence and ally are entwined. Fighting is ally. It seeps into Iraq, too: Major Stuart Nicholson, a Fusiliers officer serving on an exchange post with the Anglians in Basra in 2006, sees one sub-unit who keep one set of totemic combats [field uniform] to wear every time they go out on patrol, regardless of how dirty and disgusting they become. Nicholson catches one of this crew deliberately driving a Warrior armoured vehicle over a helmet cover to make it look already battered.
Later in the book, Akam recounts the “ally” origins of the British Army’s adoption of a Crye designed variant MultiCam (named Operation Peacock). The need for a new camouflage pattern was practical: British troops in Afghanistan found their DPM uniforms coming up short, and it was also based on seeing American SOF using MultiCam. I think that best illustrates the push and pull of what makes something “ally”. Some “allyness” traits can be seen as battlewise modifications to equipment, like taping down loose straps or added helmet scrim to help break up the silhouette, while others can be affectations that soldiers think look cool. And often, a bit of both.
Like anything to do with the infantry, of course, it can be taken too far and rather than improving effectiveness in the field, it can lead in very unwelcome directions:
These kinds of regulation-flouting practices can be interpreted as signs of a breakdown in unit discipline, which, in turn, can lead to more serious issues. It isn’t exactly “broken windows” theory for military units, but it also kind of is. It’s why, when Akam tells a story of an American officer who visited a British base in Afghanistan in 2006 and remarked that the British soldiers “look like our army at the end of Vietnam”, It was not meant as a compliment. Elsewhere, the desire to be “ally” led to armored vehicles flying English flags (despite its local connotations to the Crusades being an issue) and SS decals on other vehicles. “Allyness” can be a sign of the unit culture going rogue.
The result was a crackdown on the excesses of “allyness”. As Akam writes, “the ally clampdown is also a knee-jerk response to a realisation that something had got out of control. Some elements of ally survive, in particular the Paras’ interest in taping up bits of their gear. That is harder to stamp down on.”
February 24, 2026
QotD: The! Exclamation! Mark!
To the grammatically sane, reading the exclamation mark in its proper mode, the modern world appears increasingly deranged, authored seemingly by caffeinated twelve-year-olds. The delirium jumps at you in emails, on billboards, from the end of every other sentence.
The exclamation mark — the name a dead giveaway — means to exclaim. To cry out or speak suddenly or excitedly, as from surprise, delight, horror, etc. That line and dot seize your attention. Help! Now, it seizes your last nerve. Stop! If everything is exclamatory, then nothing is.
To the cynic, the exclamation mark is a hypodermic needle spiking foreign joy into the bloodstream of language. With each excitable email, I wonder, is this person in need of urgent medical attention? Or have they overdosed on Adderall?
Christopher Gage, “Against Enthusiasm”, Oxford Sour, 2025-11-21.
February 16, 2026
“Multiculturalism” should really be called “anti-cultural slop” for it destroys real culture in favour of bland genericism
At Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ traces the rise of the “global hub” among western cultures and identifies why we shouldn’t strive to drown distinct local cultures under a tide of “could be anywhere” multicultural slop:
London’s vibrantly diverse bus riders … or is it Toronto … or Sydney … or Montreal?
Multiculturalism is the false prophet of celebrating difference, presented as the ultimate engine for “diversity”.
In practice, it is a factory of global homogenisation, and a solvent that erases local cultures. Cities like Sydney, Toronto, and London now compete to be the top “global hub”, which is no unique identity at all.
There is no preservation of character under the hegemony of the global hub, only its erasure. The officially multicultural city is uniform across continents, like clones of each other in all but the most superficial ways. It sounds contradictory on the surface, but makes perfect sense once it is understood that multiculturalism as a policy and identity is inherently anti-cultural.
The multicultural city has nearly identical urban design, and its bureaucrats and professionals weaponise the same moral vocabulary, deploying terms like “inclusivity” and “openness“. It has all the charm of an airport lounge, justified with the same slogans, decorated with the same grey glass-and-steel architecture, and guided by the same self-reinforcing sensibilities.
It makes people docile, and rewards them with sensory appeasement, like supposedly exotic cuisine. A fusion rice bowl is the consolation for the disappearance of the environment you grew up in.
In Canada, it first came to the Anglo cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Now it has broken linguistic and cultural containment into Quebec. For decades, Montreal was the metropolis of the Québécois. Now, as Kevin Paquette outlined last month, the city has changed. It mirrors the anti-culture that took over Toronto, and has no use for the legacy of those who built it.
Paquette described how Montreal has become a “filter” that promotes an internationalist identity that renders it alien to Quebec’s exurban regions. Bloc Québécois (BQ) leader Yves-François Blanchet has warned that “two Quebecs” have emerged, which are disconnected and alienated from each other.
Jean-François Lisée has gone further, and written of the emergence of an “anti-Québécois identity” in an increasingly diverse Montreal. In public schools, students openly mock the Québécois, and English is more commonly spoken than French in the hallways.
Lisée writes that an alternate, anti-Quebec dynamic now exists among some newcomers. In this dynamic, attachment and assimilation into the Québécois identity become contemptible.
This is the essence of multiculturalism when treated as an end in itself. “Inclusion” is the hollowing out of the obligation to belong, and the transformation of identity into a lifestyle choice.
Not even Quebec City is immune. It was long a living, breathing exception to Canadian multiculturalism, with a dominant Québécois culture and ethos. However, the mayor, Bruno Marchand, has embarked on a mission to destroy what makes it distinct.
The following sentence is from a glowing feature in the Globe and Mail last week: “Mr. Marchand says his hometown’s traditional pure laine image is changing, and it’s a good thing”.
Quebec City’s inherited way of life is being targeted so that it can become just one more global hub. The city’s established symbols, traditions, and habits stand in the way. It takes remarkable ideological and moral heavy lifting to dismiss provincial identities as unworthy, and as something that must inevitably be replaced.
The city still carries deep meaning for francophones across the country.
“I’ve never lived there, or in the province of Quebec, and yet it speaks to me profoundly,” said one resident of Ontario I spoke to. “This is where my ancestors landed 400 years ago and it still bears witness to them.”
What was the point of Quebec’s 400-year effort to survive if it becomes a mirror image of what has happened to the rest of Canada?
Ontario, and the rest of Anglo-Canada, have long been conditioned to regard its own inheritance as unworthy of loyalty or respect.
Anglo-Canada is bound up in the history of the British Empire, the most fashionable whipping boy of leftist academics and activists. Due to the institutional power of these malcontents, it naturally follows that Canada’s historic and cultural self is treated as an embarrassment, whose memory is a problem that must be solved, or rather dissolved.
Update, 17 February: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
January 28, 2026
Update your NewSpeak dictionaries: “digital twin”
On his Substack, William M Briggs introduces us to a new coat of paint and fresh marketing polish to encourage us to feel so much more comfortable with clankers:
Cracker Barrel infamously tried changing their homey friendly warm and folksy logo to a stripped down dull almost monotone cool version. To remain “current”. They also, reports say, redid the insides of restaurants to emulate modern real estate Soviet-inspired ideas of stripping all detail and turning everything monotonous shades of suicide-inducing gray. They thought this would increase business.
Scientists, grown weary with their dull old ways, and wanting to stay hip — do they still say hip? — decided to redesign their logo, too, as it were. Only they didn’t make the same mistake Crack Barrel did. Instead of hiring some ridiculously over-priced longhoused consulting firm, they asked computer scientists to do the redesign.
Brilliant!
Computer scientists are the firm that brought us neural nets, machine learning, genetic algorithms, and, yes, artificial intelligence, which they cleverly capitalized as “AI”. What’s fantastic is all these evocative names represent the same thing! Models (basically non-linear regressions with some hard coded rules thrown in).
Used to be computer guys would trot out a new name only after they sensed the old one had lost its shine. But “AI” has not. The bubble daily swells. It still tickles imaginations. Which means computer guys hit upon a real innovation: they invented a new name while the current one still shines.
Digital Twin.
What is a Digital Twin? It is, like every new name invented by computer scientists, a model. Only now AI “creates” or “builds” the model. In other words, a Digital Twin is a model of a model.
Where might we find Digital Twins? Here’s some happy-talk hype examples.
Outperform your competition with a comprehensive Digital Twin
Leverage the comprehensive Digital Twin to design, simulate, and optimize products, machines, production, and entire plants in the digital world before taking action in the real world. This helps manufacturers to tackle industry’s biggest challenges: mastering complexity, speeding up processes, and improving sustainability overall.
IBM:
What is a digital twin?
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object or system that uses real-time data to accurately reflect its real-world counterpart’s behavior, performance and conditions.
What is digital-twin technology?
A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical object, person, system, or process, contextualized in a digital version of its environment. Digital twins can help many kinds of organizations simulate real situations and their outcomes, ultimately allowing them to make better decisions.
In other words, models. But how tediously banal is models? Try and sell a model. IBM: “Let us build a model of your system, which might provide useful predictions.” Doesn’t sing. Doesn’t entice. Doesn’t scream premium price. Try this instead: “Be the first to adopt our AI-designed Digital Twin which gives AI insights.” Now you can charge real money.
Digital Twin reeks of excitement. So much so, you just know academics will be getting in on it.
December 8, 2025
QotD: Austerity versus “austerity”
Words have connotations as well as denotations, and one way of insinuating an untruth into someone’s mind is to disconnect the two, so that the denotation and the connotation are at variance and even opposite. An excellent example of this is in the use of the word austerity as applied to certain government economic policies. Frequently one reads, for example, that the difficulties of countries such as Britain and France in the matter of responding to the Covid-19 epidemic were caused by previous government austerity, that is to say, failure to spend more. But irrespective of whether, had the governments spent more (and France already devotes a greater proportion of its GDP to healthcare than the great majority of countries at the same economic level), the epidemic would have been more easily mastered, their policies in restricting their expenditure cannot be called austerity, because they still spent more than their income: as, in fact, they had done almost continually for forty years.
Supposing I were to say, “This year I’m going in for austerity. Last year I spent ten per cent more than my income, but this year I am going to spend only five per cent more,” you would think I were uttering a sub-Wildean paradox. But if I were to say only, “This year I’m going in for austerity,” you would think I were going to wear a hair shirt and subsist on locusts and honey. To say that the British and French governments have exercised austerity is to mean the first and imply the second, which is clearly dishonest: though we should note that the proper term, reduction of the deficit, is neutral as to whether it is economically wise or unwise. After all, I can borrow equally to start a business or drink champagne for breakfast.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Controlling Thought”, New English Review, 2020-06-09.
Update, 9 December: 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 25, 2025
“So what?”
Spaceman Spiff makes the case for the two simple words in the title being the most powerful words in the English language:
The two most powerful words in the English language are, so what? We do not use them enough.
A “so what?” is a rebuff, a rejection of some cherished belief. It confronts the promoter of an idea with the worst form of disagreement, indifference.
In a narcissistic world where attention is often the goal of agitators, genuine disinterest is difficult to manipulate. It disarms anyone intent on destroying established norms.
A “so what?” forces a reconsideration. It has the strongest effect on the issues we care most about.
Nobody enjoys their precious cause being dismissed. That is why we must use it more.
Who cares?
Many of today’s moral crusades are imposed on us against our will. We are told we must attend to issues most of the world ignores.
Here are a few to consider.
Racism and diversity
Accusations of racism are now endemic in Western nations. The underlying drive is one of punishment. Natural wariness of alien peoples is recast as a moral failing, the antidote to which is enforced mixing to demonstrate the backwardness of one’s social inferiors. A policy unique to Western countries.
The promotion of diversity quotas rests upon tacit acceptance of the idea that homogeneity is undesirable. This requires our participation to succeed, especially the consequence of this belief, that the mass importation of foreigners is needed to improve society.
The response to accusations of a lack of diversity should be, so what? It needs to be laughed at. Who cares if we are too homogenous? Says who?
No rational group seeks to dilute their numbers. This is a perverse affectation confined to a handful of ethnomasochists who think racism is unique to Western societies.
A robust rejection of this helps recalibrate to the global norm, a useful reminder to anyone steeped in woke catechisms. Much of the world views out-group preference as either treason or mental illness, a perspective easily observed simply by travelling.
Sexism and gender equality
There is a mismatch between the sexes. Men win the prizes, dominate their fields and invent the inventions.
We are told this is a disgrace. Such patriarchal domination will not do.
A key flashpoint is the “gender wage gap” that unwittingly illustrates the insincerity of feminism. There is no wage gap. There is a lifetime earnings gap. This is a consequence of decisions women voluntarily make such as spending more time with family or choosing less risky employment closer to home.
This is firmly established and supported with unimpeachable data, often produced by the very governments pursuing gender pay gap legislation.
Polite counterarguments against feminist talking points like this fail despite their thoroughness because facts are dismissed as they are inconvenient to a lucrative narrative.
Therefore the response to accusations of gender imbalances should be met with a robust so what? If they don’t care about engaging with established facts why should we care about the issue at all? Energetic indifference is the only way to deprive feminism of its momentum.
Much of the “argument” for gender equality is emotional manipulation. It abuses men’s protective instincts in a shameless way.
A firm “so what?” arrests this natural urge in men. It provides a small space for us to escape manipulation and examine the facts.
Who cares if women are underrepresented or have less money? This is a result of decisions women themselves make, so solve the problem yourself. Stop begging men for special favours.
Update, 26 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.
October 10, 2025
A POSWID analysis of the contention that “Canada is broken”
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.
September 1, 2025
How did the Egyptians forget Hieroglyphs?
toldinstone
Published 25 Apr 2025Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:53 Introducing hieroglyphs
2:15 Hieroglyphs in Roman Egypt
3:10 The great temples
3:53 Decline of the temples
5:04 FlexiSpot
6:28 Vanishing hieroglyphs
7:40 Roman ignorance of hieroglyphs
8:44 Hieroglyphica
9:28 Mysterious or powerless
August 14, 2025
August 13, 2025
The Dispossessed: State Happens
Feral Historian
Published 21 Mar 2025Ursula K. le Guin’s The Dispossessed is one of the most in-depth examinations of how a large anarchist society might function, addressing both the problems it solves and those it creates for itself. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the communist-leaning variants of anarchism in particular.
00:00 Intro
01:58 Anarres is not an Island
04:45 Shevek goes to Urras
07:00 Abolition of Property
08:30 Social Pressures and Pravic
12:30 Necessity and Ossification
14:45 Necessity of Conflict
15:45 Shevek’s Wild RideThis video is in part a companion to this one — Cloak of Anarchy : Gradations of Stat… from a few weeks ago. The original cut of that one had a brief mention of a couple details from The Dispossessed, but it really needed its own video.
August 9, 2025
QotD: The New Newspeak
I’ve read their explanation a few times and it seems to boil down to the idea that all people of African descent all around the world are somehow one single identifiable entity, while white and brown people are too diverse and variegated to be treated the same way. (The Times explains: “We’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase ‘Black’ to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere.”)
Given the extraordinary diversity of the African continent, and the vast range of cultural, ethnic, religious, and tribal differences among Americans of African descent — new immigrants and descendants of slaves, East and West Africans, people from the Caribbean and South America, and the Middle East — this seems more than a little reductionist. As Times contributor Thomas Chatterton Williams has noted, there are “371 tribes in Nigeria alone. How can even all the immigrants from Nigeria, from Igbo to Yoruba, be said to constitute a single ethnicity? Let alone belong to the same ethnicity as tenth-generation descendants from Mississippi share-croppers?” The point, of course, is to ignore all these real-life differences in order to promote the narrative that critical race theory demands: All that matters is oppression.
Andrew Sullivan, “China Is a Genocidal Menace”, New York, 2020-07-03.
August 3, 2025
QotD: Undermining cultural taboos
One side of the debate argues that the only way to break a taboo is to break a taboo, so the only way forward to is to talk frankly about these things. In the case of crime, for example, the dissident must always interject the demographic facts about crime into the debate, even if it makes the beautiful people shriek. Since most people know the facts, the shrieking by the beautiful people actually advances the cause. This line of reasoning is extended to all taboo subjects universally.
The other side of the debate points out that the taboo breakers always end up in exile or condemned to some ghetto. In fact, their deliberate breaking of taboos ends up reinforcing the taboo, as no one wants to end up like the heretics. Instead, this camp argues the dissident must come up with clever language that subtly mocks the taboos, but narrowly adheres to the rules. The recent use of the word “jogger” is an example of complying with the taboo, while undermining it.
The taboo breakers counter that this just results in an endless search for approved language to hint at unapproved things. It is just a form of self-deception, where the clever think they are in revolt when in reality they are just asking permission. The optics guys counter this by pointing out the obvious. The taboo breakers are removed from the process, so in reality their tactic is just quitting the game. Rather than take on the system in a meaningful way, they mutter epithets in their ghetto.
The Z Man, “Strategy, Tactics & Discipline”, The Z Blog, 2020-05-19.
July 6, 2025
QotD: After the Bronze Age Collapse
But what surprised me most about After 1177 B.C. is how short this era was. In some places, anyway.
We have a vague picture of what happens after a civilizational collapse, but it’s been disproportionately influenced by two particularly dramatic examples: sub-Roman Britain and the Greek Dark Ages. This was perfectly sensible coming from the Anglo historians and archaeologists who have dominated the public conception of the field — after all, the only thing more interesting than the history of your own island is that of the classical world you’ve been studying since you got your first Latin grammar at age six — but it turns out that neither of these are the general rule. Foggy, faraway Britain, so reliant on imported goods and troops, was far more seriously impacted by the withdrawal of Rome than was most of the Empire and saw a longer and more significant reduction in cultural complexity, standards of living, average stature, and of course population. (Imagine what would happen to a Mars colony if the connections to the home planet stopped working.)
Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeans suffered an even more striking decline. As Austrian archaeologist Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy summarizes:
The impressive palatial structures were not rebuilt, and very little of the representational arts and crafts of the palaces seems to have survived. The complex forms of political, social, and economic organization fell into oblivion. Palaces, kings, and royal families became matter for Greek myths. The art of writing was lost for centuries. In short, Greek civilization was reduced to the level of a prehistoric society.
The Greeks of the classical era had little conception that the Mycenaeans had even existed, let alone that they were their own ancestors: they retained a vague mythological tradition of past kings, but they attributed the few surviving Mycenaean structures to the work of cyclopes. In fact, the disconnect between the civilization of the Late Bronze Age and the later classical world was so great that until Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, it was an open question whether the people responsible for the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus were even Greeks at all. (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes: Linear B turns out to be a syllabic script for the most ancient attested form of Greek. It features a number of uniquely Greek words and deity names even in the limited surviving corpus. More recently, ancient DNA has confirmed the linguistic evidence: the classical Greeks were the descendants of the Mycenaeans.)1
But the more you look at the archaeological record, the more you can pick out signs of cultural continuity. Agricultural practices don’t seem to have changed much, nor did Mycenaean pottery styles, and the names and attributes of the gods preserved in Linear B are close if not identical to their forms as codified in Homer and Hesiod. Even the cyclopean architecture continued to provide shelter: the Mycenaean palace at Pylos was almost completely destroyed in the Collapse, but the few rooms that survived intact show signs of having been inhabited by squatters over the next century or two.
Homer too is chock full of details that turn out to be distant memories of the Mycenaean world, somehow preserved in the oral tradition until writing was reintroduced to Greece.2 For instance, he describes a kind of boar’s tusk helmet that, by his time, no one had worn for centuries, but which archaeologists have since regularly discovered in Mycenaean shaft graves throughout the Aegean. But my favorite example, which is of course linguistic, is the word for “king”: Homer describes Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others with the word anax, which is recognizably the Linear B word 𐀷𐀙𐀏, wa-na-ka, used in the Bronze Age to describe the supreme rulers of the Mycenaean palatial societies. (The w sound was lost with the tragic death of the digamma.) By the classical era, however, anax had fallen out of use in preference for basileus (Linear B 𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄, qa-si-re-u), which in the Mycenaean period had referred to a much lower-level chieftain.
This all paints an evocative picture of a post-apocalyptic world. You can imagine it transplanted to an American context, with the scattered survivors of some great cataclysm huddled around fires built in the corners of a crumbling Lincoln Memorial. You can picture them passing on stories of the great men of the past with their tall tube-shaped hats and the shiny black stones they carried in their pockets. And by the time this remnant rebuilt, they might well have forgotten the word “President” except as an archaism; after centuries of as a small-scale society, “Mayor” might become so deeply engrained as the highest title that two thousand years later they would still use it to refer to their emperor.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.
1. It’s slightly more complicated than that, because of course it is; see here for more detail from Razib Khan.
2. A reasonable ballpark guess is that the poems traditionally attributed to Homer were composed in something like their current forms around 750 BC and written down for the first time shortly before 525 BC, although like the dating of Beowulf there’s a great deal of argument.
June 28, 2025
Punctuation microaggression
We appear to have an entire generation — Gen Z — suffering undue trauma from, checks notes, aggressive and distressing punctuation marks:
“American typewriter keyboard layout” by Любослов Езыкин is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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What is more delicious than casting sweeping judgements over entire generations? Contrary to prevailing wisdom, studying and mocking the mores and manners of Generation Z is not only morally just but entirely natural. Not to mention good fun.
At the end of this paragraph, re-read this string of sentences. Study the punctuation. You’ll notice that each sentence ends with a satisfying symbol. What Americans call a period and what Britishers call a full stop signifies the end of the sentence — that the sentence contains a complete thought. How lovely.
That unassuming little dot was good enough for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Ibsen, Miller — every writer who mastered the well-mannered violence of the English Language. They understood, too, the writerly compulsion to kneel before that impossible mistress. Submission sets the writer free.
Submission, however, is not in vogue. Submission implies hierarchy, which implies standards — forbidden notions to anyone under 45.
Generation Z. The Zoomers. Those with the misfortune to have spawned here on Earth between 1997 and 2012. This swarm of digital natives has never known a world without the internet. Or, it appears, one with grammatical standards.
According to linguists, Zoomers view the full stop as Bill Clinton views a well-adjusted woman: with intrinsic horror. For Zoomers, the full stop is the mark of unbridled aggression. Zoomers refuse full stops — period.
In The Telegraph, one-linguist-cum-exorcist said that Zoomers find the full stop deeply troubling. That little dot before these seven words provokes a generational panic attack: “Full stops signify an angry or abrupt tone of voice”.
Another expert chimed in. Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted, “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message. So, if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it, and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.”
To renew my sense of horror, I probed further. In a 2015 study at New York’s Binghamton University, undergraduates perceived text messages ending with a full stop as “less sincere” than the same message without one.
Language, like the fish, rots from the head. Researchers also found that exclamation marks, those hyperactive symbols of faux cheer, achieved the opposite of full stops. Those employing an exclamation mark appeared “more sincere and engaged”.
