Quotulatiousness

March 25, 2025

QotD: The nature of kingship

As I hammer home to my students, no one rules alone and no ruler can hold a kingdom by force of arms alone. Kings and emperors need what Hannah Arendt terms power – the ability to coordinate voluntary collective action – because they cannot coerce everyone all at once. Indeed, modern states have far, far more coercive power than pre-modern rulers had – standing police forces, modern surveillance systems, powerful administrative states – and of course even then rulers must cultivate power if only to organize the people who run those systems of coercion.

How does one cultivate power? The key factor is legitimacy. To the degree that people regard someone (or some institution) as the legitimate authority, the legitimate ruler, they will follow their orders mostly just for the asking. After all, if a firefighter were to run into the room you are in right now and say “everybody out!” chance are you would not ask a lot of questions – you would leave the room and quickly! You’re assuming that they have expertise you don’t, a responsibility to fight fires, may know something you don’t and most importantly that their position of authority as the Person That Makes Sure Everything Doesn’t Burn Down is valid. So you comply and everyone else complies as a group which is, again, the voluntary coordination of collective action (the firefighter is not going to beat all of you if you refuse so this isn’t violence or force), which is power.

At the same time, getting that compliance, for the firefighter, is going to be dependent on looking the part. A firefighter who is a fit-looking person in full firefighting gear who you’ve all seen regularly at the fire station is going to have an easier time getting you all to follow directions than a not-particularly-fit fellow who claims to be a firefighter but isn’t in uniform and you aren’t quite sure who they are or why they’d be qualified. The trappings contribute to legitimacy which build power. Likewise, if your local firefighters are all out of shape and haven’t bothered to keep their fire truck in decent shape, you – as a community – might decide they’ve lost your trust (they’ve lost legitimacy, in fact) and so you might replace them with someone else who you think could do the job better.

Royal power works in similar ways. Kings aren’t obeyed for the heck of it, but because they are viewed as legitimate and acting within that legitimate authority (which typically means they act as the chief judge, chief general and chief priest of a society; those are the three standard roles of kingship which tend to appear, in some form, in nearly all societies with the institution). The situation for monarchs is actually more acute than for other forms of government. Democracies and tribal councils and other forms of consensual governments have vast pools of inherent legitimacy that derives from their government form – of course that can be squandered, but they start ahead on the legitimacy game. Monarchs, by contrast, have to work a lot harder to establish their legitimacy and doing so is a fairly central occupation of most monarchies, whatever their form. That means to be rule effectively and (perhaps more importantly) stay king, rulers need to look the part, to appear to be good monarchs, by whatever standard of “good monarch” the society has.

In most societies that has traditionally meant that they need not only to carry out those core functions (chief general, chief judge, chief priest), but they need to do so in public in a way that can be observed by their most important supporters. In the case of a vassalage-based political order, that’s going to be key vassals (some of whom may be mayors or clerics rather than fellow military aristocrats). We’ve talked about how this expresses itself in the “chief general” role already.

I’m reminded of a passage from the Kadesh Inscription, an Egyptian inscription from around 1270 BC which I often use with students; it recounts (in a self-glorifying and propagandistic manner) the Battle of Kadesh (1274 BC). The inscription is, of course, a piece of royal legitimacy building itself, designed to convince the reader that the Pharaoh did the “chief general” job well (he did not, in the event, but the inscription says he did). What is relevant here is that at one point he calls his troops to him by reminding them of the good job he did in peace time as a judge and civil administrator (the “chief judge” role) (trans. from M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol 2 (1976)):

    Did I not rise as lord when you were lowly,
    and made you into chiefs [read: nobles, elites] by my will every day?
    I have placed a son on his father’s portion,
    I have banished all evil from the land.
    I released your servants to you,
    Gave you things that were taken from you.
    Whosoever made a petition,
    “I will do it,” said I to him daily.
    No lord has done for his soldiers
    What my majesty did for your sakes.

Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: Thoughts on CKIII: Royal Court”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-02-18.

March 15, 2025

QotD: Strategy

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

It has become popular of late to associate strategy with a “theory of victory”. Many policy pieces and journal articles define this as a narrative explanation of why a particular strategy will work — something every strategy must contain, if only implicitly. Others go so far as to insist that a strategy is nothing more than a theory of victory. […]

Strategy itself is a slippery term, used in slightly different ways in different contexts. In everyday usage, it is simply a plan to accomplish some task, whereas formal military definitions tend to specify the particular end. The US joint doctrinal definition, for instance, is: “A prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national, and/or multinational objectives”. If strategy is not quite a theory for victory, the connection between them is apparent.

There is a subtle problem with this definition, however. Victories are rarely won in precisely the way the victors anticipate. Few commanders can call their own shots, as Napoleon did in Italy or William Slim in Burma. Wars are complex and messy things, and good strategy requires constant adaptation to circumstance — a system of expedients, as Moltke put it. Even with the benefit of hindsight, the cause of a war’s outcome is not always perfectly clear, as the ongoing debate over strategic bombing bears witness.

Indeed, the very idea that strategy represents a plan is very recent. From the first adoption of the word into modern languages,1 strategy was defined more as an art: of “commanding and of skilfully employing the means [the commander] has available”, of “campaigning”, of “effectively directing masses in the theater of war”. The emphasis was decidedly on execution, not planning. As recently as 2001, the US Army’s FM 3-0 Operations defined strategy as: “the art and science of developing and employing armed forces and other instruments of national power in a synchronized fashion to secure national or multinational objectives”. Something one does, not something one thinks.

This is best understood by analogy to tactics, a realm less given to formalism and abstraction. What makes a good tactician? Devising a good plan is certainly part of it, but most tactical concepts are not especially unique — there are only so many tools in the tactical toolkit. The real challenge lies in execution: providing for comms and logistics, ensuring subordinates understand the plan, going through rehearsals, making sure that everyone is doing their job correctly, then putting oneself at the point where things are likely to go wrong and dealing with the unexpected.

Ben Duval, “Is Strategy Just a Theory of Victory? Notes on an Annoying Buzzword”, The Bazaar of War, 2024-12-01.


March 14, 2025

“CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up”

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t follow German politics closely, so I depend on regular updates from euygppius, like this post from the other day which I’m sure wasn’t popular among CDU voters or personal fans of Friedrich Merz, the likely next German Chancellor:

For some time now, I’ve wanted to catalogue in one place all the ways that CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up. His strategic failures are really a thing to behold; I’ve never seen anybody screw up this frequently and this dramatically before. Yet I have delayed writing this post, above all because I wanted Merz to reach the end of his present streak and stop screwing up for a while. I wanted to have a complete unit – a full collection of screwups – to present to my readers for analysis. I now accept that this is never going to happen, and that the coming months and years are going to provide nothing but an unending parade of screwups, one after the other, each more inexplicable and baffling than the last. We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.

As with all deeply rooted phenomena, it is hard to tell where the present parade of screwing up began. There was the lacklustre CDU election campaign and Merz’s ill-advised flirtations with the Greens that began last autumn, which cost the Union parties precious points in the polls. None of that looked auspicious, but the screwing up did not begin in earnest until January, in the wake of Aschaffenburg – when Merz decided to violate the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland. For the first time in history, the CDU, the CSU and the FDP voted with AfD in the Bundestag, first in a successful attempt to pass a meaningless if sternly worded anti-migration resolution, and then in a failed attempt to pass an actual piece of legislation that would take real steps to stem the influx of asylees from the developing world.

This manoeuvre had the real glimmerings of strategy, and so we would do well to ascribe it to Merz’s underlings rather than to Merz himself. It was only superficially an attempt to stop the tide of voter defections to the AfD. Above all, it was an effort to gain leverage over the Greens and the Social Democrats in any future coalition negotiations. Merz and his CDU, sobered by polls showing a left so weakened that they feared having to govern in a nightmare Kenya coalition with the SPD and the Greens both, wanted to send a clear message: “We’re not afraid to achieve parliamentary majorities with the AfD if you won’t go along with our programme”. Had Merz stuck to this line, he’d be in a far better place than he is today. Alas, the man chose to screw up instead. Spooked by yet another wave of leftist protests “against the right” – a “right” which now included not only the AfD but also the CDU and the CSU – Merz lost himself in a string of disavowals. A minority government with AfD support would be unthinkable, he and his lieutenants said. The Union parties would never work with the AfD, he and his lieutenants said.

In this way, Merz’s firewall gambit succeeded only in outraging and energising his future coalition partners, while achieving nothing for himself or his own party. A lot of CDU voters would like to see some measure of cooperation between the Union parties and the AfD, and for his constant never-again-with-the-AfD rhetoric Merz paid a price. The CDU underperformed the polls, crossing the finish line with a catastrophic 28.5% of the vote on 23 February. The Greens whom Merz had spent months courting – at the cost of alienating his own base! – emerged from the vote too weak to give his party a majority, and so the man was left to deal with the Social Democrats, newly radicalised not only by their own dim showing but also by Merz’s firewall trickery.

Thus it came to be that Merz ceded the high ground in negotiations to the SPD, the biggest losers in the 2025 German elections. That is itself remarkable, the kind of thing you could not be certain of achieving even if you tried. And yet it is only the beginning!

March 12, 2025

The Korean War 038 – The US President is Angry! – March 11, 1951

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 11 Mar 2025

Operation Ripper kicks off this week, and gains plenty of ground … but the enemy is almost nowhere to be found. Douglas MacArthur gives what becomes known as his “die for a tie” speech, which could have a serious negative effect on UN troop morale. But the Chinese are building up their forces for an eventual counterstrike, and the North Koreans even have a new Chief of Staff.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:15 Plans for Operation Ripper
04:45 Die for a Tie
06:34 MacArthur Won’t Toe the Line
08:17 The KPA Build-Up
10:38 Nam Il
12:31 The Chinese Build-Up
14:01 Ripper Begins
15:33 Summary
15:45 Conclusion
(more…)

March 5, 2025

The Korean War 037 – Matt the Ripper! – March 4, 1951

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 4 Mar 2025

This week is really a week of planning, as Matt Ridgway unveils the plans for Operation Ripper — to follow the somewhat disappointing Operation Killer, but there are South Korean spies involved, the blockade of Wonsan, and the continuing escalation of tensions between Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman, with people in American High Command concerned that MacArthur is bent on starting World War 3.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:25 Recap
00:44 Killer and Ripper
04:14 Intel and Distractions
06:57 South Korean Spies
08:06 Truman and MacArthur (Again)
(more…)

March 3, 2025

All The Basics About XENOPHON

MoAn Inc.
Published 7 Nov 2024

I actually found this video really tricky considering I want to go into the texts of Xenophon and if I told you everything about the march of the ten thousand then I would have just told you the whole Anabasis?? Which defeats the whole purpose of an introductory video?? So I PROMISE more clarity will come in future videos as Xenophon himself breaks down his journey home from Persia and why they were there in the first place. Therefore, you have ALL OF THAT to look forward to — coming soon!!!
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March 2, 2025

Which is better – Spitfire or Bf 109? – Battle of Britain Fireside Chat

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 1 Mar 2025

Indy and Sparty answer questions about the Battle of Britain! Spitfire vs Bf 109, the Big Wing Debate, and whether Goering had any kind of plan for the battle.
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February 26, 2025

The Korean War 036 – MacArthur Gets Dumber Every Week – February 25, 1951

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 25 Feb 2025

Operation Killer begins this week, and its objective is what the name implies, to destroy as much of the enemy as possible rather than just trying to merely take territory. But once again, UN Commander Douglas MacArthur threatens to telegraph it before it starts. The offensive itself, though, is stymied its first few days by the weather. Meanwhile in China, Peng Dehuai meets with Mao Zedong to clear the air.
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February 24, 2025

QotD: Great Men when it’s time to do x

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

    Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en
    This is obvious, but: Elon breaks libs’ brains because he is the living vindication of the Great Man theory of history. Literally nothing he built would have existed without him, and without him clearly exhibiting superior intelligence and indomitable will.

Not so fast.

I’m here to tell you, because I lived it, that the experience of being the “Great Man” who changed history can feel very different from the inside.

I’m not going to try to speak for Elon. Maybe he feels like a colossus out of Thomas Carlyle. I’ll just say that I didn’t feel like that when I was doing my thing, and I’m doubtful that he does more than a small part of the time.

Somebody was going to take the concept of “open source” to the mainstream fairly soon after general access to the Internet started to happen in the mid-1990s. But it didn’t have to be me; you get steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time, and it was time. Dennard scaling and cheap wide-area networking were the underlying drivers. Conditions like that generate ESR-equivalents.

Now it’s time for rockets to Mars. The drivers include extremely cheap and powerful computing, 3-D printing, and advances in both metallurgy and combustion chemistry. Conditions like this generate Elon-equivalents.

It is more than possible to look like the Great Man from the outside but to feel like — to know — that you are almost at the mercy of currents of change much larger than yourself. Yes, you have some ability to shape outcomes. And you can fail, leaving the role to the next person to notice the possibilities.

If Elon is like me, he sometimes plays the autonomous Great Man in order to get the mission done, because he knows that the most effective way to sell ideas is to be a charismatic prophet of them. But if he’s like me, he also feels like the mission created him to make itself happen, and if he fails or breaks the mission will raise up another prophet by and by.

I’m not claiming the Great Man theory is entirely wrong — it takes some exceptional qualities to be an Elon, or even a lesser prophet like me — but it’s incomplete. Great Men don’t entirely create themselves, they are thrust upwards and energized by missions that are ready to happen.

ESR, Twitter, 2024-10-31.

February 19, 2025

The Korean War 035 – The Battle of Chipyong-ni – February 18th, 1951

Filed under: Britain, China, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 18 Feb 2025

Chinese Commander Peng Dehuai has launched his 4th Phase Offensive, pushing the UN forces back in the center of Korea, and should his forces take Chipyong-ni, they will compromise the entire UN position. Chipyong-ni must hold!

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:21 4th Phase Offensive
03:07 Retreat from Hoengsong
06:27 Chipyong-Ni Must Hold!
08:50 First Relief Attempt
10:22 The Battle of Chipyong-Ni
15:34 Battle Side Notes
17:36 29th Brigade
19:36 Summary
19:59 Conclusion
(more…)

February 17, 2025

Forgotten War Ep 9 – Kohima – Hell in the Hills

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published 16 Feb 2025

The Battle of Kohima.

Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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February 6, 2025

Forgotten War Ep 8 – Imphal 44 Pt2 – Edge of Chaos

HardThrasher
Published 4 Feb 2025

A video discussing the Battles of Imphal and Kohima at the start of 1944.

Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
(more…)

February 3, 2025

Roman Senior Army Officers and their careers

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

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 1 Oct 2024

Today’s question is about the career paths for senatorial and equestrian officers in the Roman army. This is a big theme, so take this as an introduction. We will return to this topic in the future.

January 27, 2025

If you’ve ever thought society is run by psychopaths … you may be right (but you’re not entitled to compensation)

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

Spaceman Spiff discusses normal people, the mimics who pretend to be normal and often seem to work their way into positions of power and influence (not every mimic is a psychopath, but all psychopaths are mimics), and those who resist the mimics (and therefore also the psychopaths):

There are different types of people we can observe around us. Normals are the great mass of humanity. They don’t think too hard. They just get on with it. This is the majority.

Most Normals seek some confirmation from outside themselves, typically opinions and views from trusted sources. Many seem averse to thinking at all and almost none are independent thinkers in any meaningful sense.

This includes social mores. The majority look towards others for their cues on how to act which makes them easy to manipulate.

Social validation in differing forms is the controlling mechanism. What is the other fellow doing? That is what I must do.

Those doing the controlling are different. Many leadership positions are populated by people who display abnormal traits.

Cluster B disorders in particular are everywhere. Narcissistic, antisocial and histrionic behaviours are visible in many senior levels of society from politics to major charities.

These disordered people largely copy normal human emotions and behaviours. They are acting because they don’t experience life as the rest do.

Everything is a performance which provides enormous advantages to them as they climb their way up, but has the drawback of being fake.

We can call these people Mimics for convenience.

Today’s societies largely reflect the ascendency of Mimics as they seem to run many institutions we rely on, a situation referred to as a pathocracy.

The extreme version of the type is a psychopath, someone lacking conscience or empathy and therefore unable to enjoy the full human experience. Psychopaths are damaged people unencumbered by concerns with morality or social convention, so able to quickly get on in life.

Cluster B types have similar deficiencies that aid them in a myriad of ways and are more common than psychopaths. The end result is the same, leadership positions dominated by those with distorted thought patterns who quickly learn the majority of people prefer to be led and told what to do.

Some can resist

Both Normals and Mimics swim in the same waters. Normals because they are shaped by society and seek its approval. Mimics because they are faking it. They must scan the horizon at all times to ensure they are making it work. Their act is designed to reflect normality and the trophies it can bring so it must be calibrated to what works with an audience.

A need to seek approval draws these groups together. An external dependence they assume is universal if they even bother to think about it at all.

They are forever locked into a world dictated by the views and whims of others.

But there are individuals who can be defined by the fact they are much more self-sufficient. They do not seek external approval and are not subject to the judgment of others.

Everyone who resisted the Covid propaganda would be an example. This includes anyone who initially succumbed to the pressure but quickly worked out something was amiss.

The chief characteristic of this group is resistance to social pressure because they reject the need for external cues to guide behaviour.

The most extreme example of this phenomenon in society are schizoids, those indifferent to praise or criticism, largely motivated by inner drives and impervious to many forms of social stress.

As with the psychopaths, schizoids represent the extreme end of the insulated spectrum, but everyone resistant to today’s aggressive social controls share some schizoid traits to a greater or lesser degree.

We can call these the Resistant, individuals not dependent on external validation and naturally averse to being controlled. Independent thinkers who instinctively insulate themselves from the unthinking Normals who make up the bulk of humanity.

Because of their mental distance from the herd this group are often unmoved by the narratives controlling much of society.

Unlike the Mimics, the Resistant do not seek to control others and it is control that defines the West today, especially the ruling classes who fear the Normals waking up. They must be relentlessly managed via approved narratives lest they make the wrong decisions in life.

Mimics are naturally drawn to control since they are faking it. They run the constant risk of being discovered as fakes. Imposter syndrome rules their actions which drives the vigilance we commonly observe in their sensitivity to criticism and their enraged responses to being challenged. All this to stave off scrutiny.

It is the most broken who can be persuaded their fractured view of life is some grand vision that escapes the rest of us. Such people are everywhere and they are comically easy to control by appealing to their need for superiority which is why control is so attractive to them in turn. They assume it is a universal phenomenon.

Those who shun control are then a threat to their identity, hence the aggressiveness with which the independently minded are pursued. They cannot be left in peace, a very striking observation of today, the zeal with which nonconformists are targeted even when minding their own business.

January 22, 2025

The Korean War 031 – Operation Wolfhound – January 21, 1951

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Jan 2025

Matt Ridgway sends forth the US 27th Infantry Regiment, known as the Wolfhounds, into the no-mans-land between the UN and Chinese lines to sniff out and hunt down their enemy. The success or failure of his first few operations in Korea could be crucial, as confidence in the UN mission from generals, politicians, and the US’ allies continues to teeter on a knife edge. A strong showing here could finally put the uncertainty to rest.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:45 Recap
01:11 Meeting at Taegu
04:19 Operation Wolfhound
07:44 Collins Reports
09:35 Trouble in Paradise
12:59 Wonju
14:54 Summary
15:18 Conclusion
(more…)

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