… while I was on the road, I went to visit a buddy who’s still deep cover in academia. He teaches at a really SPLAC-y SPLAC, the kind that bills itself as “Minnesota’s answer to Princeton”. He’s part of a team running this course that, back in my undergrad days thirty years ago, would’ve been called “Paideia” or something similarly pretentious, taught to the “honors college” (or equivalent). Twenty years before that, it would’ve been called “Western Civ I” and required of all incoming freshmen, regardless of major.
Twenty years before that, and it would’ve been called “basic cultural literacy”; the kind of thing any college man — indeed, any graduate of a remotely decent high school — would know cold. I’ve written many times that the not-elite-but-certainly-very-respectable school which awarded my PhD wouldn’t have admitted me as an undergrad as late as 1960; they would’ve been sticking me in some serious remedial classes as late as 1980. Watching my buddy struggling mightily — and failing miserably — to get even the ridiculously watered-down, extremely fake and utterly gay version of this stuff across to the brown-nosing test-acers of the Current Year sent me sobbing into the arms of Jack Daniel.
Not because I would’ve done better, mind you, but because I would’ve done so much worse. The only way I got through my last few semesters in academia was to regard it as acting. The University is paying me to stand on stage and say my lines, so I’ll stand there and say them. Aside from that, all they want to do is check the appropriate box: Students have attended thus-and-such class, taught by someone with a PhD (crucial for those “best college” rankings!), and … there it is.
What actual knowledge am I supposed to be conveying? What skill set? What world view?
Category error. If it doesn’t fit on the standardized test, which is the only thing that matters to the bottom line, then it’s useless.
Severian, “On the Absurdity of Life”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-12.
October 6, 2026
QotD: The decline of academic standards over the years
September 30, 2026
QotD: “Have you ever been surprised to learn that someone was a Leftist?”
It never happens, right? Like vegans and Harvard alums, you never have to wonder if someone is an SJW — they’ll tell you, right off the bat. Usually they don’t even have to tell you; the hair and the tats and the fishing tackle in the face do that. Like putting the “Bernie 2024” sticker on the bumper of the Prius or the Subaru Outback, actually declaring yourself an SJW is overkill. So much so that it’s a cliché — of all the budding shitlords I mentored in my years in academia, none of them “came out” to me because of anything I said or did. It was all the stuff I didn’t say or do — I didn’t spend half of each class period ranting and raving about The Current Thing, which was so unusual that they figured I must be on the other side.
The Left, I think it’s fair to say, enjoys total freedom here in AINO. Total liberty, too, and that’s a distinction we should probably make at some point, but for right now let’s hold fire on that. Whichever one you want to use, though, it’s obvious that the Left have it, with pretty much zero restraint. Nothing is too weird or gross or obnoxious that the Left won’t champion it.
But even more than that, all the traditional restraints on behavior — what we should probably call decorum — have been systematically destroyed, and that’s the heart of what I want to talk about. Since we’re discussing the Left here, let’s use one of their favorite terms: Privilege. I think we can take it as read that there has never been a more privileged person, in any sense of the word “privilege,” in all of human history, than Karen (or her JV version, the Basic College Girl). And what battleaxes they are! Constantly lecturing everyone else about their privilege while plowing through every social situation like a tsunami. Like the Clintons, Karen triumphs because you just can’t believe anyone has the sheer brass-balled audacity to pull the antisocial shit they do.
Have you no shame, madam? At last, have you no shame?
Severian, “On Liberty”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-12.
September 24, 2026
QotD: The perpetual progressive underdogs
To the autist, each car must be inspected in detail, with full attention … and while the autistic’s attention is laser-focused on one particular parked car – “1998 Ford Taurus, midnight blue, left front tire is a little low, right taillight out, bumper sticker near muffler”, etc. — he fails to notice the moving car that hits him.
As opposed to the non-autistic, who is capable of “abstracting” that situation into a realistic threat assessment. He can’t even give you a ballpark guess of how many parked cars are in the lot, much less any details about any of them, because he has abstracted them out: “a bunch of parked cars” = no threat, so his attention is free to roam around looking for moving cars.
I instinctively want to argue against this, because it appears to me that Leftists are nothing but abstraction. They don’t see individuals; they see huge identity groups. That’s why they see an anti-feminist woman or a conservative homosexual or whatever as not really X. It makes sense to them, somehow, to say that Amy Coney Barrett isn’t really a woman, Clarence Thomas isn’t really black, and so on.
[…]
The non-autistic sees [a child’s drawing of a train as] a rectangle, two wheels, some lines underneath, and thinks “train,” because he’s boiled it down to the essentials — a train is a wheeled vehicle that moves on tracks. That’s good enough to cover pretty much all “train” situations; we can add or subtract details as needed to get to this or that particular train (e.g. electric vs. steam), or a wheeled vehicle which moves on tracks that’s not a train (e.g. a rollercoaster).
So, applied to people: I see a black man walking towards me on the street and I have one set of assumptions in my head. First I see just “person”; then I realize it’s a man; then I realize it’s a black man; then I realize it’s an elderly black man; then I realize it’s Clarence Thomas. All the while I’m dialing in both my perceptions and my behavior — I’m not at much physical risk from an elderly man, and I’m at nearly zero risk from Clarence Thomas, specifically, so I modify my behavior. When I was still just at the “black male” stage of the recognition process, I behaved very differently.
If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the autistic would do something like the reverse. He wouldn’t be able to make any judgments until he’d fully inspected the individual man in front of him at close range and verified that yes, this is Clarence Thomas. And then the confusion kicks in, because he — the autistic — has memorized the rule “black man = Liberal” and here’s Clarence Thomas. Error 404.
Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.
September 18, 2026
QotD: Higher education as a vast money laundering racket
But when you consider just how much money is involved, it’s a lot harder to laugh. Your average tenured prof makes north of $100 K, and for every one of them, there are at least two administrators, four outreach coordinators, and uncountable Special Assistants to the Assistant Provost’s Special Assistant for Diversity and Inclusion. Not to mention all the classroom space, office space, etc. that this requires (including paying the very real people who have to coordinate that stuff — no easy task — the custodial staff and so on). I’d bet that just one of these programs, all in, runs at least a million dollars per year when you throw in bennies and whatnot.
That’s a LOT of scratch, for one or two classes a semester that barely even make their enrollment numbers.
I dunno what nefarious purpose the Angry Studies programs serve (aside from the obvious, perpetual one of “burning down ambient civilization, just because”), but the “national security” ones I’m sure are basically just “diplomatic” cover for cloak and dagger shit. They used to use academic conferences like that back during the Cold War — who else but an officially credentialed diplomatic representative gets to travel around his enemies’ territory? In this case, of course, none of these people are actually going anywhere near war zones (with the exception of Mx. Kagan, of course, who decided to take command of American forces in the field). But academic “conferences” are good ways to make contacts and pass suitcases full of cash and other goodies around …
… I suspect.
Severian, “Klown Kollege”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-28.
September 12, 2026
QotD: The spiritual immune system
But first, keeping them totally away from anything is doing them a disservice. I think Escriva would strongly agree with this — we are commanded, after all, to be IN the world, not OF it. It’s a two-part command. The Poz is a disease, yes, and diseases can kill, but look at the aftermath of covid. Who are the unhealthiest people in society right now? The folks who got vaxxed and triple-boosted and spent two years hiding under their beds in a hazmat suit. Every minor sniffle hits them like a sledgehammer now, because they spent two years screwing up their own immune systems.
Second, and closely related, the fight is in the small things. People see you avoiding everything and you look like a wimp. Where I grew up, every high school had the Bible Camp Kids. They were their own little clique. They went everywhere together and tried to live as Amish-ly as possible. And everybody knew what happened to the Bible Camp Kids when they went off to college. You could set your watch by it: Two semesters in, and she’d have a tattoo and a face piercing and would either be knocked up or out of the closet.
They had no spiritual immune system.
Fighting and failing in the small things builds up your defenses for the big things. Not only that, people respect fighters. You failed, but you fought — you can hold your head high. As opposed to “You didn’t fail, but only because you tucked tail and ran”. Nobody respects those guys. It sucks to lose. But it’s far worse to “win” by never trying. Worst of all is to wallow in your defeat. Get up! Fight!
Severian, “The Way Ch. 10: Scruples”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-10.
September 6, 2026
QotD: 90s music
[Not to be confused with Disintegration, which as we all know is the greatest album ever].
Nirvana’s genre-defining hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a deconstruction of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”. Pearl Jam were the deconstructed Doors (though this is more because of Eddie Vedder’s “kinder, more sensitive Jim Morrison” act than for the music). The Counting Crows were deconstructed Sixties folk, the Smashing Pumpkins were deconstructed Pink Floyd (I like Smashing Pumpkins), the Gin Blossoms were the deconstructed Eagles, and so on, finally reaching its nadir with Oasis, the “deconstructed” Beatles who were so deconstructed, McCartney et al could’ve sued them for plagiarism and probably won.
Severian, “Alt Music Thread”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-06.
August 31, 2026
QotD: India, “coasting on inertia”?
Moreover, if I happened to witness a crime … well, that wasn’t going to happen. I’d make sure of it. Pro wrestling referees got nothing on me. But if somehow I did get roped into an investigation, I was going to flee to the nearest Western embassy and hole up like Julian Assange. As with the Tubmans-in-the-passport thing, this is not because I condone or encourage crime. I really hope they find the guy whodunit, and nail his balls to the wall … in the abstract. But in the concrete, my main concern is that Officer Friendly-ji will have much less paperwork, and far more business opportunities, by pinning it on the burra sahib, so sahib — that would be me — is making his pasty pale ass scarce.
This is not a blanket condemnation of the Indian police. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of reality. India is a huge country of over a billion people, in which there are at least 30 major languages (= “spoken by over a million people”) and a thousand minor ones. There are at least six major religions, the adherents of which are always bickering with each other. Even granting that every single national official in India has the wisdom of Solon, how the hell are they supposed to pass laws that mean anything under those conditions?
The administration of “justice”, then, devolves to the lowest common denominator in the localities. About which I know nothing, which makes me a nice fat target, so … yeah. How many dolla dolla bills to make this go away, Inspector?
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-22.
August 25, 2026
QotD: “… and called it macaroni”
I don’t know whether you need much in the way of background, but since some of you seem to enjoy the “inside baseball” stuff … History, as an academic discipline, has always suffered from a “source base” problem. We deal with artifacts; more specifically with documents. If it ain’t written down … see what I mean? This is why whoever-it-was wasn’t wrong when he said that History is just the biographies of Great Men. It’s the biographies of the best-documented men, anyway. I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, but you see what I mean.
So when, in the Seventies, we had the “cultural turn“, a whole new series of techniques had to be developed to expand the source base. Some of those were good and necessary. Others … well, Wiki quotes Frederic Jameson, one of the most prominent early-90s obfuscators (Indie band name?):
The very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but it is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the image of culture.
Translated from the PoMo, it’s your standard, tiresome stuff about “critique”. Culture just IS Capitalism, which IS Consumerism, blah blah blah, you know the drill. It’s tedious, but it’s not entirely wrong — what people “consume” (in the egghead sense, not the biomechanical sense) can give us important clues about their world. So long as you avoid the teleological temptation (didn’t they tour with EVC?) of attributing everything to “Capitalism”, you can do good work.
The “problem” with recent history is that the “centers of cultural production” do seem to be identifiable, and so are their motives. They are “Madison Avenue” and “to make money”, respectively, and so it’s easy — and profitable!! — to do the tiresome PoMo CultMarx thing. The further back into The Past you go, though … well, consider this:
As you can see from the caption, that style is called “macaroni” — like from the old song “Yankee Doodle,” which the Colonials appropriated in an early example of “owning the insult.” Wiki sez:
Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually epicene and androgynous manner. The term “macaroni” pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his British nature …
… The macaronis became seen in stereotyped terms in Britain, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality – which was then legally viewed as sodomy. At the time, homosexuality was frowned upon, and was even punishable by death. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th-century British society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification, and consumer capitalism.
You see the typical “critical” blah blah blah there at the end, and it’s not wrong, just tedious, predictable, and tediously predictable. It’s also much harder to find a “purpose” for this behavior. It’s easy to do for the modern analogue of the macaroni, the hipster […] which Wiki documents extensively, because of course they do, it’s right there underneath “macaroni”. But the whole “culture industry” thing wasn’t there yet in the 18th century, so it might actually be down to an individual person. It’d be theoretically possible to find “the first macaroni” — it was the Marquis de Whatever, and he decided to dress like that because reasons, and all the best people decided to copy him, also because reasons, and that’s pretty much all your “cultural turn” can do, because that’s the only documentation we have.
Since we here are not bound by the canons of scholarship, however, we can speculate. I want to focus on this bit about macaronis:
In the 18th century, wealthy young British men traditionally took a trip around Europe upon their coming of age, known as the Grand Tour. Italy was a key destination of these tours. During their trip, many developed a taste for maccaroni, a type of pasta little known in Britain then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 by those returning from the Grand Tour. They would refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as “very maccaroni”.
That’s Information Velocity, preindustrial-style. They had to go there personally — or, at the very least, have access to the in-house journals of those who did:
The song “Yankee Doodle” from the time of the American Revolutionary War mentions a man who “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. Dr. Richard Shuckburgh was a British surgeon and also the author of the song’s lyrics; the joke which he was making was that the Yankees were naive and unsophisticated enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a macaroni.
In America, only a select few persons would have access to that kind of thing, because only a few would move in those circles.
Go back a bit further, and cultural trends are far less traceable, but “centers of cultural production” are much easier to find, in one specific sense: They’re monasteries. And there you have a group which speaks a common language — extremely rare in the Middle Ages — is literate (ditto), and has something close to, if not caloric surplus, then at least “chronic caloric sufficiency”, I guess we’ll have to call it. Monks worked hard in the Middle Ages, by our standards, but not as hard as the peasantry. They were well-fed, or at least consistently fed, in a way the peasantry weren’t.
In other words, whatever Information Velocity existed in the Middle Ages, they had it. They made a virtue out of circulating books, and all those books were in a common tongue. Since they also produced books — indeed, were pretty much the only ones who did — they were also, by definition, au courant with whatever the high fashions were, because they illustrated the books that were such a crucial part of the aristocracy’s gift-giving culture.
Severian, “Monastic Vices”, Founding Questions, 2026-01-13.
August 19, 2026
QotD: The Kwantung Army was the tail wagging the Japanese Imperial dog
The Lytton Commission was commissioned by the League of Nations to investigate the Mukden Incident, which was one of those false flags the Kwantung Army was fond of. They used it to seize Manchuria — technically a province of China — and set up a puppet government they called “Manchukuo” (under the Qing Emperor who was deposed in 1911 — who was 5 at the time — thus giving it a veneer of historical legitimacy). The Lytton Commission concluded that the Mukden Incident was indeed a false flag; that Japan was the aggressor; and that Manchukuo was a puppet state that should be dissolved, with Manchuria returning to Chinese sovereignty.
That’s bad, because if you’re Japan and you do any of that, you’ve now knuckled under to not just the West, but the worst hypocrites of them all (“Lytton” was Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the 2nd Earl of Lytton, formerly governor of Bengal and Viceroy of India, and oh, by the way, how exactly did Britain come to rule in India? The shit they pulled makes the Mukden Incident look like very small beer indeed). And it’s bad from the Chinese side, too, because now you’ve basically tied their hands in any peace negotiations — they can’t conclude any kind of honorable peace without getting Manchuria back, and as should be obvious from the above, you must pry Mantetsu from Japan’s cold, dead hands.
Still, Japan might’ve disciplined guys like Ishiwara … but how? You can’t cashier him; the Army would go insane. You can’t really transfer him — as much trouble as he’s causing in Manchuria, if you bring him home you might well have another February 26 Incident, and it might work this time. You certainly can’t execute him, because a) you’d have to take his entire faction with him, which would decimate your officer corps, and b) perhaps more importantly, the seizure of Manchuria was pretty popular. Mantetsu’s Media boys hadn’t been sitting on their hands during all of this, of course, and the Army’s Media people had been going nuts too.
In the end, the Japanese pretty much had no choice: They gave the League of Nations the finger. Which of course emboldened the KA even more, such that they cooked up an even faker and gayer false flag, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and WWII was on.
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
August 13, 2026
QotD: Marx was right about “class consciousness”
Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses” for a reason — by dulling their pain, it prevented them from realizing their true class position, thus achieving class consciousness, thus sparking The Revolution. What religion really does, of course, is satisfy a deep yearning in the human soul. There is more to life than shit, shoes, and bread. Karl Marx didn’t want to hear that, because his religious yearning was satisfied by his substitute god, Dialectical Materialism, and the half-assed (but very real) ceremonial it produced. Again, there’s a reason every Leftwinger practically from the French Revolution looked like [this]
I don’t know how you say “fake and gay” in Russian, but every single thing in that photograph is fake and gay. A pose. An affectation. And as with their look, so with their behavior. Leftwingers are, and always have been, famously boorish. They have no idea how longshoremen actually act, but they sure think they know, and so that’s how they act — like the worst caricature of a crude, illiterate, drunken longshoreman.
(I don’t know any longshoremen either, but I do know some folks who make a living from the sweat of their brows, and they’d turn Lenin’s head around for him if he came to their neighborhood and started acting like that. The Laboring Masses might indeed be “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare’s sense — meaning, without too much formal education — but they’re surely not rude in the behavioral sense, because in their world, running your mouth gets you punched in it).
Dressing and acting like that is, quite literally, a religious ceremony for them … and ceremonial can only take place in a designated space, a liminal space that the community respects. A priest can indeed hold a mass on a street corner, but only if the passersby have enough residual respect for the institution of religion not to beat and rob the worshipers while their backs are turned.
The intelligentsia never understood that consciously. They sure as hell understood it unconsciously, though, which is why they immediately self-segregated — getting “sent down to the countryside, to reconnect with the laboring masses” was one of the worst punishments Mao’s boys could dish out to one of their mandarins, and again, there’s a reason for that. The upshot is, the intelligentsia, the Apparat, the Cloud People, whatever you want to call them, are the only ones who developed “class consciousness” in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary sense …
… and their class consciousness is entirely oppositional. They are not us. That’s their sole criterion for virtue. Whatever we like, they dislike. Whatever we do, they must not do; and whatever we eschew, they must embrace.
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
August 7, 2026
QotD: A provisional taxonomy of “stupid smart guys”
If we assume this is a universal mental process, I suggest, then saying someone has a low-normal IQ does not mean he’s always going to do stupid things. He has those three-B flashes too. It might take a while for him to cotton to something that seems obvious, but cotton he will, in three-B fashion.
Moreover, Jaynes is good on the complexity of unconscious tasks. The mechanical parts of driving, once learned, are completely unconscious. Try teaching someone to drive and you’ll see it right away. You’ll find yourself literally side-seat driving — your foot pushing down on an imaginary brake, unconsciously. And you never really forget those unconscious patterns, either. You may not have ridden a bike in 30 years, but you could go out and do it right now. Same way with swimming, or the manual of arms — if you’ve been through Basic, a guy with the proper tone of voice can have you twirling around like a marionette, even if you got out of uniform decades ago.
The actual low IQ guys might be the most dangerous cogs in the machine.
The Dunning-Krugerrand. That’s Larry Correia’s phrase, and it’s great. This is the person who believes he’s way smarter and more competent than he actually is. Which on the one hand, they all do. But on the other hand, there are levels above D-K, so please hold fire for now.
The Artiste. It’s been my great … fortune, actually, to have been around a lot of Media people in my youth. I dated a gal who did production work for one of the big tv news programs in a fairly large city, so I saw the video side of it, at least, from close range. The on-camera bobbleheads are all Ron Burgundy, of course, but the production people are usually quite bright … but in a very odd way. They have what I came to think of as “the artist’s eye”. They naturally see everything in terms of camera angles and visual presentation, and training develops this to a very high degree.
This leads to wildly divergent takes on things. You or I see the police approaching a stopped car with their guns drawn, or firemen pulling up in front of a burning building, and we think something like “Damn, crime is out of control!” or “I hope everyone’s ok.” News people — video people, at least — think “What a shot!” They frame the visuals first, then start processing the propositional content … if they ever do. The longer they work in “news”, the more the propositional content — “the cops are arresting a bad guy”; “there are real people in real danger in that burning building” — drops away.
Same thing, I imagine, with the folks on the verbal end. They have a novelist’s sense of pace, structure, and so on. Is what they’re writing true? Of course not! At one point about 30 years ago they felt the need to justify this, and created a whole new category of writing: “creative nonfiction“, aka lies, aka “the news”. The “creative nonfiction” people will tell you, in Wiki’s words, that it “uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives”. Emphasis mine, because like the cameraman who ends up exclusively focusing on the shot and never thinks about the life behind the shot, so the writer of “creative nonfiction” gets caught up in the creative part, and just kinda forgets the “nonfiction” part.
Medicalization. Not a category of people, but a technique. We say smart people tend to be spergy, and stupid smart people tend to be really spergy, but that’s mistaking effect for cause. They’re not very good at reading people, and have no social savvy, but that’s because they don’t practice — because they don’t need to practice. They medicalize their deficiencies. Instead of acknowledging a weakness in their game, they attribute it to a pathology.
Severian, “The Stupid Smart Guy”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-13.
August 1, 2026
QotD: The “tiers” of US post-secondary education
Level two is your SPLACs [Small Private Liberal Arts College (the denizens of a SPLAC are of course Splackavellies, in honor of the stupidest song of the 1990s, which is an amazingly high bar)]. The Ivy League schools are SPLACs, and the rest of them are their lesser (sometimes extremely lesser) imitators. You don’t need to publish squat to get tenure at Yale or Harvard if you bring something else [visible diversity, for example] to the table.
The third level is the junior college level. They call themselves “community colleges” in most cases — can’t use junior, it’s able-ist or age-ist or some shit-ist — but you know what I mean. Lots of kids do their first two years at one, getting all the BS “liberal arts” requirements out of the way before they transfer to Ohio State (etc.) to do their major classwork, so lots of History (etc.) profs work at JuCos. (This is the way to do it if you feel you must go to college for some reason, which 90% of the time you mustn’t).
I’ve done time at all three, because of academia’s worst-kept secret: Something like 75% of ALL classes, nationwide, at all levels and in all disciplines, are taught by non-tenure track faculty. Lots of these instructors are grad students, who will theoretically go on to get tenure-track jobs, but there’s a vast floating pool of scab labor known as “adjunct professors”, and I was one of those — a guy with a PhD who isn’t on the tenure track …
… and now never will be, because “adjunct professor” is like “sex worker” — yeah, it’s theoretically just a job now, but good luck getting hired to do anything else once it’s on your resume.
In my case that was by choice, as I loved my field, I loved teaching, but I did NOT love all the rest of the shit that goes along with university employment, and since I had (and have) an ad libitum gig that pays the bills I could follow my bliss, as they said back in the Sixties (I’m told). And since all eggheads are tech-illiterate I was able to do a lot of “online ed”, too. Which is the easiest money you’ll ever make as a professor (yep, I was one of those guys, not University of Phoenix but similar, and y’all, I have stories … oh, how I have stories. Everything you think about “online ed” is true, in spades. If you’re a few credits shy of that AA degree and just need a rubber stamp, then by all means go that route. If not, the University of YouTube has you covered).
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-01.
July 26, 2026
QotD: Progressives know they’re on the “right side of history”
Whatever happens, then, happens either exactly as they foretold — even if they never bothered to actually prophesy, or to even think about it at all until just this second — or is a temporary victory by the forces of evil, a temporarily successful holding action against the inevitable Triumph of Progress.
It’s a fascinating chicken-and-egg conundrum: Did the Left take to Marxism because they’re so invincibly self-righteous, or does their sanctimoniousness come from their dedication to Marxism? It doesn’t really matter, because the practical effect is the same either way: Their consciences are completely short-circuited. They can do the most awful stuff with a smile on their faces, because “awful” is relative, comrade – as you’d know if you had the proper proletarian consciousness; if you understood things from History’s perspective, as they do.
Severian, “Escriva Ch.8: Examination of Conscience”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-26.
July 20, 2026
QotD: The real, but unacknowledged, Global American Empire
Not for sentimental reasons, I hasten to add. What am I, a Liberal, and / or a girl? I’m an Historian; I have no problem with Empires.
What I do have a problem with — an enormous problem, yuuuuuge, the biggest — is empires that don’t acknowledge themselves as such. A LOT of the 20th century would’ve gone very, very differently had the USA either acknowledged herself to be an Empire starting in 1898, or stuck to her anti-Imperial rhetoric and bowed out of the international power game. But — as we always do — we tried to have it both ways, acting like the most bellicose Empire on the planet while deliberately undermining the Imperial policies of everyone else. Woodrow Wilson, for example, tried to run the entire Western Hemisphere as an American satrapy while promising any micro-group with their own goulash recipe in the Balkans a State of their very own.
Consider what all our Middle Eastern adventures, 1948-present, would look like if the American Empire declared itself to be such. We might still be bombing Iran, but the “exit strategy” is simple: They’ve made sufficient obeisance to the Imperial standard; we’ll be sailing away now. “Air policing” is still retarded — it’s the kind of idea only your best Old School Tie toff could come up with, over tea and crumpets at Eton — but it works ok as a publicity stunt. Things get fuzzy out there on The Fringes of Empire, and while you occasionally have to slap the wogs around, just to remind them that you can, it doesn’t have to be anything more than that.
But alas.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2026-04-03.
July 14, 2026
QotD: Subaltern Studies
You can come at this in a few different ways. In the History biz, a big buzzword used to be “agency”. Not as in “three letter”, but as in “ability to meaningfully affect your environment”. One has “agency” insofar as one is able to get one’s way. It’s a big deal in the ivory tower, because if the grand sweep of History since the Middle Ages tells us anything, it’s that White guys tend to get their way, while brown guys do not. There are entire continents (and Subcontinents) full of millions of people, run by a handful of honkies.
Obviously that’s very very bad for them … but very very good for you if you want tenure, providing you can find some way to prove that the honkies weren’t really in charge. Subaltern Studies, for instance, is a field where, at its worst, literally anything a brown person does, or doesn’t do, is an example of “agency”, because it’s an example of “resistance” — doing exactly what Whitey says is really sticking it to Whitey, because extremely dense polysyllabic theory-laden reasons.
The stated goal of all this being, to give “agency” to the subaltern. But that’s the funny thing: While explaining at enormous length why “doing exactly what Whitey says” is somehow “resistance”, these folks were in fact acknowledging the massive agency — no quotation marks — of the British. They said “Jump, frog!” and seven hundred fifty million people asked “How high?” There’s only so much jargon can do to disguise that basic power dynamic, which is why “Subaltern Studies” isn’t the hot new thing anymore.
Severian, “Externalizing”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-14.
