Quotulatiousness

February 19, 2026

An American anarchist

Filed under: Books, Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve never met Christopher Schwarz, but I’ve read a lot of his writing in books, magazine articles, and blog posts. He’s forgotten more about hand tool woodworking than I’ll ever know, and he’s amazingly generous in sharing his knowledge with others. He calls himself an anarchist, which often puzzles people who only know of anarchism from media-presented bomb-throwing nihilists and conspiratorial Russian stories. Here he explains what he means when he uses the term:

“Chris Schwarz and Meredith Schwarz” by jessamyn west is marked with CC0 1.0 .

I get asked a lot about what I mean by the word “anarchism”, and if I could please explain what I mean when I use that word.

My answer is always unsatisfying. Here’s why.

For the love of creamed corn, why would I publicly discuss ideas that are – for now – a crime in our country? Why would I say – for example – that I think that copyrights and patents on things that use public money are bullshit? That wars are founded on lies? And that the state – in general – seems to be a menace to peaceable living?

That would be stupid. Dumb nuts.

Also, I am a practitioner of anarchism, not a philosopher.

If you want to know more about American anarchism (and aesthetic anarchism, specifically), you need to ask a philosopher, not a front-of-house worker. Read Native American Anarchism (Hachette Books, 1983) by Eunice Minette Schuster for an easy on ramp. Or Josiah Warren’s Equitable Commerce (1852) for the full banana.

The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: Revised Edition by Christopher Schwarz – Link.

Or follow the trail of breadcrumbs left in The Anarchist’s Tool Chest to figure it out yourself. The book describes how to disrupt the furniture industry by building things that never need to be replaced. It’s also about how to jailbreak yourself from a tool industry that offers up aluminum jigs as a substitute for skill.

That book is not the only path. There are other ways to throw a bunch of ball bearings into the guts of the IKEA robots.

Buy antiques or used furniture. The other week I was in Savannah, Georgia, and visited one of my favorite antique stores. The price of handmade antiques has hit bottom. So-called “brown furniture” can be bought for less that the cost of the materials used to make it.

Even though I make furniture for a living, I sometimes save time and money by purchasing vintage industrial furniture for our warehouse, fulfillment center and workshop. Megan’s giant oak desk from the 1960s cost us zero dollars (we just had to move it from an insurance office). Our printer and scanning station? An old workbench from Pennsylvania. Our associate editors’ shared desk? A giant vintage drafting table from Sweden.

And if you think for a moment, there are other industries and organizations that can be farted upon by your actions. The clothing industry is even worse than the furniture industry when it comes to making flimsy crap and abusing workers.

Yes, you can buy ethically made jeans, shirts and socks. Yes, you will pay a premium for these items. And if you can afford that path, great. If you can’t, then buy secondhand clothing.

I’ve always wanted a pair of R.M. Williams boots but could never afford them on a writer’s salary. Last year I found a used pair for about $100 where the owner had ragged out the elastic part of the slip-on boots. It was a stupid easy fix. And now I have boots I shall wear at my funeral.

The other side of the equation is that I’m denying the new-boot-goofin’ industry my dollars. Forever. I don’t have to buy a pair of shoddily made boots that can’t be re-soled and will have to be replaced in a couple years. All my future “boot money” will go to our local cobbler so she can re-sole them every few years.

Too many “conservatives” today are just slower-speed liberals

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

Most self-described conservatives in politics are not particularly inclined to “conserve” anything, as Spaceman Spiff points out, they’re pretty much onboard with the liberal vision they just want it to be fractionally slower or infinitesimally not-quite-as-liberal as the liberals. They are the ineffectual, neutered, tame opposition:

Modern conservatism is not conserving our world. Mainstream conservatives seem to have no interest in the real issues affecting us.

At best they merely wish to slow down our decline. At worst, they are fully on board with the destruction.

When they do act or speak they often pick a safe version of a sensitive issue.

In Britain there is lots of talk of illegal immigration and how the state mishandles it. None about ruinous volumes of legal immigration, almost one million per year, and what it is doing to the country.

Pushback against climate policy falters on the speed of changes, not the underlying fraud of climate science itself.

No conservative will honestly discuss the plummeting happiness of women recorded across the West and yet there it is, writ large in antidepressant prescriptions and social media videos. It may have multiple causes, but feminism cannot be challenged so they say nothing lest they are reprimanded by the sisterhood.

Everything real is forbidden. It is all an act.

Like the left, those on the right are increasingly unable to face reality which means they can never course correct. They are trapped within a self-referencing culdesac designed to maintain their position in someone else’s hierarchy. That is why they have become so ineffective and appear to do very little except moan about the pace of change while they say nothing about the changes themselves.

We sense the conservatives do wish to conserve things but they are inexplicably mesmerized by the opinion of their enemies. They seek reassurance and applause from people who view them as evil.

This makes no sense to ordinary people.

Thinking like the enemy

The problem with modern conservatives is they are animated by underlying drives that cannot create a conservative or traditional society. They have adopted the thinking patterns associated with the progressive left while still using the language of conservatism.

The left is traditionally defined by a series of interrelated traits that manifest in much of what they agitate for.

  1. A desire for centralization;
  2. A notable external locus of control;
  3. Seeking approval from the group.

Central control systems feature prominently in all left-wing schemes. From local councils to national governments, those who gravitate to the left often want to create centralized decision-making bodies to manage society. Institutions, government departments, NGOs and even charities all feature, but only when they act as the controlling authority in some field of interest.

Related to this is a clear external locus of control visible in individuals and their decisions. There is a relief others make the key decisions, so people actively seek out direction from an established authority. This ensures minimal resistance to the many centralized schemes we see emerge.

Acting solo creates discomfort. An older formulation understood this as the rejection of responsibility. Today it often manifests as an obsession with experts making key decisions for us all, partly to mask individual cowardice. People making their own decisions in life are derided as naive or dangerous.

During Covid decision makers became hysterical at the very idea we would reject the advice of experts and perform our own research despite the issue being medical and therefore dangerous.

A related phenomenon characteristic of many leftists is the need for approval, often from a group. Not just others making decisions but a dependency on confirmation and endorsement to ensure thinking and behaviour follows an established norm. This is the antithesis of original thinking or bold action; it is how adolescents often behave.

In today’s world this deep urge is reflected most in the social media landscape of harvesting attention and likes. Every fledgling narcissistic applause-seeking trait is given full expression in the endless search for approval from strangers. Whole sections of society seem lost to impulses we once understood as immature and dysfunctional.

Update: Not long after I queued this item for publication, a Canadian example popped up in the news, as yet another rock-ribbed “conservative” suddenly realized that electing a Liberal was what his constituents actually wanted when they inexplicably voted for him as a Conservative candidate in the last federal election.

Edmonton Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux has crossed the floor to the governing Liberals.

“I am honoured to welcome Matt Jeneroux to our caucus as the newest member of Canada’s new government,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney, in a post on X.

“I am grateful to Matt and his family that he will continue his service as a strong voice for Edmonton Riverbend in Parliament.”

Carney said Jeneroux, who has represented the riding of Edmonton Riverbend since 2015, will take on a new role as special advisor on economic and security partnership for the Liberals.

Jeneroux is the third Conservative to join the Liberals, after colleagues Michael Ma and Chris d’Entremont crossed the floor late last year.

A Liberal source says Jeneroux first met Carney back in November, which was the first of at least two conversations, with talks between Carney’s office and Jeneroux continuing since. That source added that it has been a “long journey” to Wednesday’s announcement.

d’Entremont crossed the floor to join the Liberals in November, which unleashed a wave of speculation as to who might be next, with Jeneroux’s name heavily floated. Jeneroux then announced his plans to resign from the Conservative caucus, citing family reasons. Since then, he has not voted with the Conservatives and did not attend the party’s recent convention in Calgary in late January.

After Carney’s announcement, the prime minister updated his daily itinerary, adding a stop in Edmonton to meet with Jeneroux before attending events in British Columbia.

“Matt brings a wealth of experience in Parliament, despite his young demeanor,” said Carney, while sitting next to Jeneroux.

The MP from Edmonton welcomed the prime minister and laid out the reasons for why he had reversed his decision to resign.

“I had announced my resignation back in November, largely due to family reasons, but quite simply, couldn’t sit on the sidelines after seeing what the prime minister’s ambitious agenda he was undertaking across the country and across the world,” he said.

“Quite honestly, it was the speech in Davos where you took everything head on,” he added.

Jeneroux said it felt disingenuous and “quite simply wrong” to sit on the sidelines.

February 14, 2026

Voltaire & Rousseau’s Best Friend Breakup – Valentine’s Day Special

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Feb 2025

Watch as two of the smartest men in French history bravely push the bounds of being the pettiest, most toxic idiots possible.
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February 9, 2026

QotD: The pre-modern versus the modern concept of “self”

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

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor once wrote a very long book about how the essential quality of secularization is the transition from what he calls “the porous self” to “the buffered self”. In pretty much every premodern society, people believe that their psyches are subject to benign or malign or simply alien influence from external forces and entities — gods, demons, faeries, curses, the evil eye, or Iwa. Contra many popularizers of Taylor, the crucial distinction isn’t that these forces are supernatural in nature, it’s that the boundary between inmost self and the outside world is vague and semi-permeable, and therefore that any one of our thoughts or desires might have arisen through outside influence.

In contrast, most modern societies believe in a self that is “buffered”. In this view there are a few limited, low-bandwidth ways that the external world can act on one’s innate nature, for instance via drugs or other body chemistry, and even these are often seen as revealing or disclosing previously hidden innate characteristics of one’s personality rather than as imposing something alien. Taylor argues quite convincingly that these two ways of viewing the self — porous vs. buffered — inexorably produce two different ways of viewing society and the world: premodern and modern. For example: if selves are porous, then we need to be extremely vigilant against the invasion or violation of our minds by hostile spirits, and we must be suspicious of what we want, because it might not really be what we want, but rather what something else wants through us. Conversely, if selves are buffered then our desires are just part of who we are, and in order to be true to ourselves, we need to explore them and act upon them.

It may have been reasonable to believe in a buffered self back in the days before the internet, but recent developments have made it clear that (as in so many things) the primitive superstitions were actually correct, and the enlightened modern view was just a lamer and dumber kind of superstition.1 Science fiction has long been fascinated with stories of infohazards — images or jokes or snippets of cognition that act like a Gödel sentence for the human mind and leave people braindead or mind-controlled. But such things long since slipped the shackles of fiction — we now have internet creepypasta that induces girls to become murderers and a genre of pornography that turns boys into girls.2 The noösphere is a vast ocean, and its abyssal depths teem with lifeforms and thoughtforms that seek to possess you and live out their blasphemous unlife through your mortal husk.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.

  1. Or maybe society is already correcting itself on this point. Many like to make fun of the “fragility” and “snowflake” nature of Gen Z, and I’ve argued before that these critics miss the point that they’re actually being “flexed on” (in the parlance of our times) because loudly asserting an exaggerated harm is a power move (think: upper class women in an honor culture claiming to feel threatened, and how that’s actually itself a threat).

    2. But here’s a different take on it: maybe “trauma” as it’s popularly conceptualized is actually modernity groping its way back to a porous understanding of the self! We no longer believe in spirits or curses, but our psyches are self-evidently susceptible to immaterial external influence, so we create a new concept that aligns empirical psychic porosity with the dominant metaphysical and ideological currents.

  2. I had a long debate with myself on whether to include either of those links. Do I really want to expose more people to an infohazard? Ultimately I decided to do it because this stuff is already so widespread. In both cases I’ve linked to a page that links to the subject matter in question rather than linking directly, so you have one more chance to bail out.

January 23, 2026

“Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one”

Filed under: Education, History, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Maninder Järleberg illuminates the problem of functional illiteracy in higher education in the west:

The Age of Functional Illiteracy

Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one. It referred to those who could technically read but could not follow an argument, sustain attention, or extract meaning from a text. It was never a term one expected to hear applied to universities. And yet it has begun to surface with increasing regularity in conversations among faculty themselves. Literature professors now admit — quietly in offices, more openly in essays — that many students cannot manage the kind of reading their disciplines presuppose. They can recognise words; they cannot inhabit a text.

The evidence is no longer anecdotal. University libraries report historic lows in book borrowing. National literacy assessments show long-term declines in adult reading proficiency. Commentators in The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times describe a generation for whom long-form reading has become almost foreign. A Victorian novel, once the ordinary fare of undergraduate study, now requires extraordinary accommodation. Even thirty pages of assigned reading can provoke anxiety, resentment, or open resistance.

It would be dishonest to ignore the role of the digital world in this transformation. Screens reward speed, fragmentation, and perpetual stimulation; sustained attention is neither required nor encouraged. But to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology is a convenient evasion. The crisis of reading within universities is not merely something that has happened to the academy. It is something the academy has, in significant measure, helped to produce.

The erosion of reading was prepared by intellectual shifts within the humanities themselves—shifts that began during the canon wars of the late twentieth century. Those battles were never only about which books should be taught. They were about whether literature possessed inherent value, whether reading required discipline, whether difficulty was formative or oppressive, and whether the humanities existed to shape students or merely to affirm them. In the decades that followed, entire traditions of reading were dismantled with remarkable confidence and astonishing speed.

The result is a moment of institutional irony. The very disciplines charged with preserving literary culture helped undermine the practices that made such culture possible. What we are witnessing now is not simply a failure of students to read, but the delayed consequence of ideas that taught generations of readers to approach texts with suspicion rather than attention, critique rather than encounter.

This essay is part of a larger project to trace that history, to explain how a war over the canon helped usher in an age in which reading itself is slipping from our grasp, and why the consequences of that war are now returning to the academy with unmistakable force.

The Canon Wars: A Short Intellectual History

To understand the present state of literary studies, one must return to the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s — a conflict that reshaped the humanities with a speed and finality few recognised at the time. Although remembered now as a dispute about which books deserved a place on the syllabus, the canon wars were in truth a contest over the very meaning of literature and the purpose of a humanistic education.

In the decades after the Second World War, the curriculum in most Western universities still rested upon a broadly shared assumption: that certain works possessed enduring value, that they spoke across time, and that an educated person should grapple with them. This conviction, however imperfectly applied, formed the backbone of the humanities. It was also increasingly at odds with a new intellectual climate shaped by post-1968 radicalism, the rise of identity politics, and the importation of French theory.

By the early 1980s, tensions that had simmered beneath the surface erupted into public view. The most emblematic flashpoint came at Stanford University in 1987–88, when student demonstrators chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” in protest of the university’s required course on Western civilisation. The course was soon dismantled, replaced by a broader, more ideologically framed program. What happened at Stanford quickly reverberated across the country. Departments revised reading lists, restructured curricula, and abandoned long-standing core requirements.

On one side of the debate stood defenders of the canon—figures such as Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, and Roger Kimball—who argued that the great works formed a kind of civilisational inheritance. The canon, they insisted, was not a museum of privilege but a record of human striving, imagination, and achievement. On the other side were scholars like Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, who contended that the canon reflected histories of exclusion and domination, and that expanding or dismantling it was a moral imperative.

But beneath these arguments lay a deeper philosophical rift. The defenders assumed that literature possessed intrinsic value, that texts could be read for their beauty, their insight, or their power. The critics, armed with concepts drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, argued that literature was inseparable from structures of power, that meaning was unstable, and that reading was less an act of discovery than an exposure of hidden ideological operations.

The canon wars ended not with a negotiated peace but with a decisive transformation. The traditional canon was not merely expanded; its authority was dissolved. And with it dissolved a set of shared assumptions about why we read at all.

January 2, 2026

QotD: From Rousseau to Marx, Hegel to Gramsci

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

How did we get here? Can those of us who understand what Communism and socialism would mean for our republic win the election that will be upon us in less than 100 days? Only if we understand how on earth Karl Marx’s ideology survived the end of the Cold War to flourish and grow here in America.

The fundamentals are clear enough. The New Left in America, which is the conveyor belt for everything from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) Green New Deal to Black Lives Matter, can trace its genetic roots back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who almost single-handedly upturned centuries of Western philosophical and theological wisdom.

Instead of believing that man is fallen, fatally flawed, and prone to selfishness and evil, Rousseau denied the reality of thousands of years of human history and posited that man is inherently good. Further, this goodness could be maximized by engineering society away from individual rights and liberties, prioritizing communal good, communal needs, and the communal will.

Thus civilization built according to how man actually behaves in real life fell out of favor; and eventually, Karl Marx’s collectivist ideology predicated on the subversion of individual human souls to the common interest (as defined by political leaders) gained steam.

Like an ideological scrapbooker, Marx picked and purloined the ideas of others to build his theory. Socialism is but a temporary stepping stone towards the eventual and inevitable end-state of all mankind, the utopian “Worker’s Paradise.” Marx stole the “inevitability” factor from Hegel and his eponymous “dialectic.”

Hegel, a profoundly religious man, unlike the rabidly and militantly atheist Marx, saw the history of man as a perpetual progression, a series of qualitative improvements in our collective lot as one new idea (antithesis) impacted upon an existing idea (thesis) and resulted in an improved conceptualization (synthesis) that has more truth value than the previous two ideas combined. This progression, so Hegel believed, would increase our enlightenment, until we perceived the ultimate synthesis, the purest version of truth’s expression, which is God himself.

Marx took Hegel’s key inevitability dynamic and removed the metaphysical elements. For Marx the intangible was irrelevant. His “dialectic materialism” posits that thesis and antithesis are instead expressions of the inherent conflict within society — the clash between the have and have nots, the oppressor and the oppressed, the capitalist and the exploited workers — which will result in a final revolution permanently removing class distinction and conflict from society.

This garbage is what Karl Marx sold the world with his books Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. And incredibly, some people believed this rubbish. So much so that they used it as a blueprint to sabotage and subvert multiple nations around the world, starting with czarist Russia and stretching all the way to Cuba and China. But then there was a problem. In all their attempts to effect a Communist revolution west of the Russian Empire, Marx’s followers would fail. America was an especially tough nut for Marxists to crack, because of how our nation was born.

America’s Founders, knowing full well that man is fallen and tends toward the selfish and the bad, built America with a system of separation of powers and also bequeathed us a written Constitution founded not on some absurd utopian collectivist vision of society, but built upon the recognition of the liberty of the individual and the unalienable God-given rights we each possess. Despite the advent of Progressive presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, America remained staunch in its resistance to socialism. Marx’s disciples, however, were not ready to surrender.

This is where the influence of a hunchback Italian cripple comes in.

Antonio Francesco Gramsci is the ideational grandfather to all that threatens modern America and our freedoms today, from AOC’s Green New Deal to the violence of Antifa. His writings, penned in an Italian prison cell, would be leveraged by the Hungarian Jewish writer and politician, Gyӧrgy Lukacs, each sharing the same conviction: Communism had failed in established Western democracies — as opposed to the backward and mostly peasant society of czarist Russia — because these societies are too resilient and too developed. For Marxism to flourish in the rest of Europe and America, these “bourgeois” societies must be dismantled piece by piece. From the inside.

The conceptual progeny of that realization leads straight to the panoply of Democratic Party articles of belief today — from Obamacare’s unprecedented intrusion into private healthcare choices to the anti-scientific insanity of transgenderism and beyond. This isn’t a random accusation, devoid of context. It’s not some accusation floating in space. The path from Gramsci and Lukacs to Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is a path that may be mapped historically, geographically, and institutionally.

Sebastian Gorka, “From Alinsky to AOC: Will Communism Finally Win in America?”, American Greatness, 2020-07-29.

Update, 3 January: 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.

December 15, 2025

How to Eat Like an Ancient Stoic

Filed under: Food, Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 8 Jul 2025

Lentil soup with leeks, coriander seeds, and herbs

City/Region: Greece | Rome
Time Period: 3rd Century B.C.E. | 1st Century

The ancient stoics were all about being happy with what you’ve got. If one could learn to take pleasure in eating simple foods like lentil soup and barley bread (usually eaten by the poorest members of society), then they would have more happiness than if they constantly craved luxurious food. Granted, most of these philosophers were wealthy, so they didn’t actually have to live like the very poor.

The ancient Greek stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium was known for carrying around lentil soup in a clay pot, and that was probably just lentils boiled in water. This recipe, adapted from ancient Rome’s Apicius from a few centuries later, is a little fancier, but still rather simple and uses ingredients that would have been available to Zeno. Despite its simplicity, it’s surprisingly delicious with a hint of sweetness, oniony leek, and the cooling effect of the mint.

    Boil the lentils; when skimmed, put in leeks and green cilantro. Pound coriander-seed, pennyroyal, silphium, mint, and rue, moisten with vinegar, add honey, blend with garum, vinegar, and defrutum. Pour over the lentils, add oil, serve.
    — Apicius, de re coquinaria, 1st Century

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November 22, 2025

QotD: The value of a human life

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

Once, passing a second-hand bookstore, I spotted in its window a book I very much wanted to acquire. Knowing the bookseller, I dashed into his shop, grabbed the book and, while advancing towards him at the cash desk, exclaimed that I had been willing to kill for it.

“How much?” I asked, catching my breath.

“Eighty dollars,” he replied, nonchalantly.

I told him I could not possibly pay that, and sadly released the book from my grip.

“Well,” the bookseller observed. “Thanks to this exercise, we know the value you place on a human life. Less than eighty dollars.”

In those days, I think I would have drawn the line at thirty. But to his moral credit and mine, the bookseller and I were finally able to agree on fifty-five dollars (plus sales tax).

David Warren, “Virtual March for Life”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-05-14.

November 14, 2025

QotD: A modest Utilitarian proposal

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

I’m really into utilitarianism lately, especially reducing suffering, and two big numbers have stood out:

– An avg person eats ~3,500 animals/yr (including shrimp)
– A human body has ~125,000 calories of edible tissue

So you only have to eat six humans/yr to meet your calorie needs, assuming you’re a good cook and don’t waste too much. Maybe 5.5 with veggies and sauces. And this saves the lives of roughly 150,000 animals, assuming you can catch a 30-year-old. But even if you just prey on the old and infirm, you’re still at bodhisattva levels of reducing suffering.

Anyway, I’ve tallied up the units of suffering and the logic is unassailable. The single best thing you can do — for the climate, the environment and the end of suffering for all sentient beings — is to switch to an all homovore diet. I’m shopping for chest freezers right now and plan to phase out all animals by the end of the year. Who’s with me?

Vivid Void, Twitter, 2025-08-11.

October 7, 2025

Antifa and the “propaganda of the deed”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR examines the irrational behaviour of Antifa as an inheritance from their chosen historical models:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

An important concept for understanding why the behavior of Antifa is not strategically rational is “propaganda of the deed”.

This is a concept with a long pedigree in left-anarchist theory, transmitted to Antifa via its minority “black flag” left anarchist faction

19th-century romantic anarchists viewed the state and capitalism as powerful illusions that could be shattered by bold, exemplary acts, thereby proving their vulnerability and offering hope to the oppressed. These deeds were intended to ignite the spirit of revolt by alerting the masses to the possibility of revolution, much like a spark that could set off a larger fire — thus, the emphasis on symbolic targets over objectively effective ones.

This kind of political communication could be effective if a majority of society, or at least a critical minority, are seething cauldrons of resentment just begging to be triggered against their oppressors. It also assumes that the revolutionary rage of the masses can, once unleashed, be effectively directed against Antifa’s enemies.

Both assumptions are highly questionable, but the important thing to understand for purposes of predicting Antifa’s behavior is that (a) Antifa behaves as though it still believes them, and (b) Antifa’s aboveground allies don’t have the capacity to restrain its behavior in detail.

The Gramscian infiltrators in the U.S.’s institutions need to keep their links to overt terrorism deniable, so they manage it mostly by raising or lowering the temperature of public propaganda. For example, when a Democratic politician says “Abolish ICE”, describes government actions as “fascism”, or wishes death on the children of a political opponent, this is raising the temperature. The effect, the intended effect, is to license increased propaganda of the deed by Antifa.

Reminder: unceasing damnation of conservatives as fascists and Nazis constituted instructions to stochastic terrorists like Tyler Robinson that the time had come to do something like shooting Charlie Kirk through the neck.

One problem with this is that because of Antifa’s psychology and doctrine, raising the temperature is easy, but lowering it is hard. Thus, it’s not a process the Gramscians want to start unless they believe either that they have escalation dominance over their opponents, or their political position is deteriorating so rapidly that they’ll never get a better chance to induce a legitimacy collapse.

It is out of scope for this essay to analyze to what extent those conditions are true. The point is, we are in a situation where the limited control Antifa’s aboveground allies can exert is all directed towards escalation, and Antifa’s belief in “propaganda of the deed” makes this very difficult to reverse.

Antifa has probably lost sight of the fact that escalating to insurrectionary violence is premature — it doesn’t have an army or a sufficiently powerful and nearby state sponsor for that.

Thus, absent serious degradation of Antifa’s capacity by law enforcement, expect increasing violence. Including, but not limited to, the deliberate murders of law enforcement personnel and opposing politicians.

QotD: “That wasn’t real communism …”

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

Leftism has always been a ridiculously reductive creed, but the One Thing all Leftism reduces to has undergone a radical shift. For Marx, of course, the One Thing was that thesis-antithesis-synthesis Hegelian schmear. Hegel’s ontology claims that the universe is talking to itself. Literally. That thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, summarized by the untranslatable German word Aufheben (“self-transcendence”; something like that), is literally a debate the World Spirit (or whatever) is having with itself.

All Karl Marx did was bring that down to the material level — it’s not the world spirit having a debate with itself, it’s the world, the material object. Both the debate and its conclusion are made manifest in History, capital-H, which is why Marx was one of a long line of gurus who claimed to make History into a hard science. That “wrong side of History” stuff the Left is always going on about? That’s why they use that phrase so much, and why it has such emotional resonance for them. If you’re a Dialectical Materialist, being against Socialism is like being against gravity. What could possibly be the point? You’re just being perverse, comrade, and on some level you must know that …

Alas, History isn’t a hard science. There are patterns, of course, any fool can see that, but those patterns are the intersection of human nature and emergent behavior. The proof is in the writings of Karl Marx himself — every prediction the man ever made was not just wrong, but ludicrously so, and after getting burned a few times he admitted in his letters to writing in such a way that he could never be “proven” wrong. See also: The complete history of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991, and as a side note, you can tell the intellectual caliber of Socialism’s defenders by the fact that they trot out the excuse “That wasn’t real Communism; real Communism has never been tried.” Ah, so Lenin — he of Marxism-Leninism — wasn’t a true Communist. They’ll shoot you for saying that in, say, China, but do please go on …

Severian, “Power”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-02.

Update, 8 October: 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.

July 15, 2025

“A Cloak of Anarchy”: Gradations of Statelessness

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 21 Feb 2025

“A Cloak of Anarchy”, written by Larry Niven and published in 1972, is a simple story. But it offers us an entry to examine the basic ideas of Anarchism without diving head-first into the political theorizing of the big anarchist philosophers. This one is a 3-minute look at a simple short story wrapped in a 20-minute attempt to cast aside the most basic misunderstandings of what anarchism is.

I don’t consider myself to be an anarchist, but by most standards I’m damn close. Take what I say here in that light.

00:00 Intro
01:00 Cops-Eyes
03:09 Absence of Rulers
06:37 AnComs and AnCaps
10:07 Is Anarchism Leftist?
11:30 Practical Considerations
16:17 Anarchism and Environmentalism
19:00 Closing Ramble

July 14, 2025

QotD: The inevitable endgame of power-for-power’s-sake

Filed under: Books, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One reason Hobbes’s “state of nature” thought experiment is so seductive is because, though the premise is glaringly false, the conclusions are true. Every Dissident should memorize this, it’s the most important passage in modern philosophy (if not the whole of philosophy, from Socrates on):

    I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

Or, if you prefer it in slightly more modern English:

    Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

That’s the bedrock of human existence, right there: Power. Everything that isn’t Power is nothing, until Power requires it; when it’s no longer useful to Power, it becomes nothing again. Nietzsche would’ve understood O’Brien perfectly.

But please note: Human existence.

Human — animals aren’t like that. They can’t be. They’re not mere automata, as Descartes would have it, but they’re obviously not self-conscious, either. All that Green hooey about animals living in harmony with their environment is, nonetheless, true. They can’t do any other, because they’re animals. Only humans can see that extra step ahead, all the potential dangers that will never let him rest content with the power he has.

And existence – not life, existence. The world Hobbes and O’Brien describe with such terrifying eloquence isn’t life, it’s mere existence. O’Brien couldn’t see where his philosophy led, but Hobbes could:

    Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

This is the end of power-for-power’s-sake. O’Brien was wrong about that boot stomping on a human face, forever. The “state of nature” doesn’t actually exist IN nature, but Big Brother’s Party created it artificially.

But for such a creation to continue, as O’Brien shows, it must be completely static … and that’s impossible. The opposite of Power is Entropy, and Entropy always wins in the end.

Severian, “Salute the Hat”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-07.

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 4, 2025

Everyday Life in the Roman Empire – Culture and Literacy in the Roman Empire

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

seangabb
Published 28 Dec 2024

This is the eighth video in my series on Everyday Life in the Roman Empire. In this, I wander about at the beginning, with talk of poetry and philosophy, before realising that the real theme is the extent of ancient literacy. The whole of the remainder is given over to this, and how it enabled a literary civilisation wholly different from our own.

Introduction – 00:00:00
Our perceptions of culture in the Ancient world – 00:01:40
Virgil – 00:03:45
Catullus – 00:05:17
Philosophy in Rome – 00:06:23
The Romans and Stoicism – 00:08:40
The Romans and Epicureanism – 00:10:27
Pretty silver things from Roman Britain – 00:16:25
Broad-based cultural participation in the Ancient World? – 00:19:26
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (no spectacles) – 00:28:27
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (expensive education, expensive books) – 00:35:40
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (economic imperatives) – 00:42:35
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (expensive writing materials) – 00:44:44
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (difficulties of reading) – 00:49:16
The Ancient memory – 00:53:14
The primacy of oral communication – 00:55:23
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (the Second Sophistic and linguistic change) – 00:59:53
Bibliography – 01:08:10
(more…)

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