… this morning I was thinking about monasteries. Specifically, monasteries as the one place in the Middle Ages where you might could test my theories about Information Velocity and Caloric Surplus.
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 25, 2026
QotD: “… and called it macaroni”
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.
July 8, 2026
QotD: The Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso attempted to scotch that, which forced the Senate, at least, to come right out and say it. People always underestimate the power of words and symbols, and professional historians are among the worst offenders. With the newer generations of pros it’s ideological enstupidation that causes it, but the older folks were almost as bad. It’s a structural issue — we rely on documents, so even though “the temper of the times” is real obvious in the aggregate, unless you can pin it down to specific statements in archival sources it’s hard to make your case.
If it helps, think of the couple whose marriage is obviously on the rocks. They fight constantly, they all but live separately, everybody knows their relationship is doomed … but when one of them finally comes out and says “I want a divorce”, things often change radically. Temporarily, most often, but how many people have you seen suddenly make all-out efforts to patch things up only after somebody finally says the D-word?
You can hear the capital letters in their voices. Before, all that stuff — romantic weekend getaways and the like — were attempts to “get back on track” or “spice things back up” or whatever. As soon as someone says Divorce, though, all those things become capitalized — we’re Saving Our Marriage.
The Wilmot Proviso was like that. Somebody finally said the D word.
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
July 2, 2026
QotD: The US federal election of 1848 and the resulting inevitability of the US Civil War
The Democrats’ candidate, Lewis Cass, pushed the idea of “popular sovereignty” in the territories. It wasn’t a bad move — since California was the only soon-to-be-state up for grabs, and since some parts of California are above the Missouri Compromise line, let them decide the terms on which they want to enter the Union. The problem with that, obviously, is that the Senate could become radically unbalanced very quickly, depending on how fast the rapidly-expanding population of the territories got their act together. Iowa and Wisconsin had just entered the Union (1846 and 1848, respectively), as free states under the Compromise. They were counterbalanced by Florida and Texas (both 1845), but obviously the balance was very delicate.
Cass was of course defeated (by Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor), so wrangling over California continued. Taylor wasn’t the greatest leader anyway, and when he died in office he was replaced by everyone’s favorite placeholder, Millard Fillmore. Fillmore gets an undeserved rep for incompetence; in reality, he was exactly the kind of president the Second Party System was designed to produce, even though he was never elected to the office. Most real political power before the Civil War was at the state level, so the President was supposed to be the steward and figurehead of his Party, not a strong national leader. (You can still see echoes of this as late as the early 20th century — William Howard Taft supposedly said “I forgot I ever was President;” he was much more concerned with his reputation as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court).
But slavery was a federal issue, indeed THE federal issue. In the absence of strong leadership at the top — and again, in all fairness to Fillmore and the rest, the system was designed to prevent strong Presidential leadership — it fell to Congress. Which a) is where it should’ve been, under the federal system the Founders designed; but b) meant that it was guaranteed to be a cock-up, because like all debating societies Congress was dominated by Very Clever Boys.
Worse, the immediate antebellum Congresses were dominated by the Very Cleverest Boy of them all, Stephen Douglas. I don’t think there has ever been a Cleverer Boy in American politics than Stephen Douglas, which is really saying something. (A case could be made for Lyndon Johnson, I suppose, and look how that turned out). Douglas’s signature “legislation” was the Compromise of 1850, which did a lot of things, including bringing California into the Union as a free state. It’s easy to get lost in the historical weeds here, so I’m keeping this deliberately superficial. Here are the highlights:
First, it’s important to note that nobody except Stephen Douglas knew they were voting on “the Compromise of 1850”. You have to hand it to the bastard, it’s a really slick piece of politics. He put together a whole bunch of bills, horse-trading parts of each of them among the competing factions to cobble an overarching program together. Nobody would’ve voted on an omnibus bill called “The Compromise of 1850”, but when the dust settled and all the votes were tallied on a bunch of separate measures, that’s what emerged.
Second: Douglas swiped Lewis Cass’s idea of “popular sovereignty” for the new territories (New Mexico and Utah) carved out of the Mexican Cession. At the time, this looked like a band-aid, a procedural quick-fix — those territories wouldn’t be coming into the Union as states anytime soon, and since cotton doesn’t grow so well in the desert it didn’t matter that much anyway. “Popular sovereignty” was just a way to kick the can down the road. Please note, however, that now the precedent was set: The Missouri Compromise is now officially a dead letter, though nobody will come right out and say it.
Third: The Fugitive Slave Act essentially federalized slave-catching. The details aren’t important; the principle is. The US government is now officially the enforcement arm of what many folks were openly calling “the Slave Power Conspiracy”.
Fourth: What looked like a purely symbolic measure, outlawing the slave trade in Washington DC. Here again, we misunderestimate the power of symbols at our peril. The practical effect of this was nil, since DC is tiny and if you wanted to buy slaves, the big markets literally right across the road in Maryland and Virginia would be happy to sell you some. But look at the glaring contradiction — Federal marshals can (and will, and did) dragoon local law enforcement into catching runaway slaves on the planters’ behalf, but the slave trade itself is outlawed in the Capitol’s sacred precincts, because freedom.
The term “fake and gay” hadn’t been invented yet, but since the Compromise of 1850 was the product of the Very Cleverest Boy of all, it was by definition fake and gay, and you can see it clearly with the DC slave trade ban.
So Very Clever was he, that he torpedoed his own signature achievement just four short years later in order to make a buck. Some Chicago railroad boys had him on the payroll, and while the details of the Kansas-Nebraska Act don’t matter, the principle very much does. Remember “popular sovereignty?” It didn’t matter in Utah or New Mexico; it mattered very much in Kansas, where fanatics from both sides flooded into the territory in order to vote.
Think about what kind of guy would uproot his entire life to move across state lines just to vote on shit, and Bleeding Kansas suddenly makes sense.
Here again, one is tempted to blame the President for not showing leadership, and Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan have well-deserved reps as do-nothings … except again, “doing nothing” was pretty much the President’s job description back then. That’s not to let them entirely off the hook — James Buchanan was very much a Current Year Democrat, in that even though he wouldn’t actually take any action he couldn’t stop shooting his mouth off; you have to get well into the 20th century to find a major political figure who stepped on his own dick as hard and as often as James Buchanan.
Finally, the coup de grace, the Dred Scott decision. I’m going to stop with this one, because even though things like John Brown’s Raid and the Caning of Sumner are important, they follow, as it were, from the logic laid down by Dred Scott. Some kind of Really Bad Shit was inevitable after that ruling; the precise form of the Really Bad Shit was incidental (n.b. the Caning of Sumner preceded Dred Scott (May 1856 vs. March 1857), but they were very much of a piece).
Here again, it’s easy to get lost in the details, so here are the two big takeaways:
First, Dred Scott was decided correctly as a purely legal matter. The issues surrounding the case were as broad as possible, but the narrow issue at law was this: In granting Dred Scott standing to sue in a federal court, the State of Missouri had implicitly granted him United States citizenship, which is the sole prerogative of Congress. It’s in the Constitution and everything, and back then the guys on the Supreme Court actually bothered to read the fucking thing, so they ruled against Scott on those very narrow grounds (from which all else flowed, legally).
But that’s the second big takeaway: Chief Justice Roger Taney didn’t stop there. If you only got Dred Scott in school, you got the stuff Wiki spends most of its time on — the whole bit about Taney ruling that blacks aren’t, and never can be, citizens of the United States. But the truly important part is this:
Now, … the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. … Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the [36°N 36′ latitude] line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void.
In other words, not just the Missouri Compromise, but the Compromise of 1850, and indeed the very possibility of compromise over slavery, is now officially unconstitutional. Slavery is now de facto legal everywhere in the United States, because any law prohibiting it runs afoul of the 5th Amendment as interpreted by Dred Scott.
What other outcome could there be at that point? Flip the script in 1860 — let the Democrats have their shit together, and the Republicans split three ways. Stephen Douglas is now President, and while that’s a truly horrifying prospect (never, ever let a Very Clever Boy occupy the big chair), the outcome would’ve been the same, or near enough — it’d be the Yankee fanatics in the North seceding, not the Slave Power Conspiracy in the South, but somebody was calling it quits.
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
June 25, 2026
QotD: Division of domestic work, 1970s onward
The Women’s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from “unpaid domestic servitude at home”.
Again, this is Straight Outta Engels, from 1884. Even back in 1970, we could all yell “Read another book!” Someone ought to rewrite The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State with a few quidditch matches in it; it’d be on the bestseller list until the sun’s a cinder.
Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.
I find this extremely hard to believe. So I checked their source, which is a very scientific-sounding site called “The Conversation”. You’ll just have to click it for yourself, since I can’t figure out how to screenshot just the little graphic they have, but if you do, you’ll notice a couple things straight off:
First, this data is from Australia. Which is bullshit, because look, y’all, I’ve seen the Mad Max movies, and nobody’s doing any domestic labor in Australia. Their main settlement is ruled by Tina Turner, for fuck’s sake, and the Prime Minister runs around in a thong and a hockey mask. Sweet cars, though, I’ll give them that.
The other thing you’ll notice is that the “Australian Bureau of Statistics” — I’m pretty sure that’s the motorized hang glider guy — has obviously been having fun with the scalar functions in whatever post-apocalyptic version of Excel they’ve got down there. The bars for “did no unpaid domestic work” look dramatic … but they represent a mere seven point difference. (And do you see what I mean? Apparently 29% of Australian men, and 22% of Australian women, do no unpaid domestic labor whatsoever. By my math, that’s a quarter of the country stewing in its own filth. I know, I know … I’m amazed it’s that low).
The bars for “5-14 hours”, though, show a fractional difference: Women do a whopping 0.3% more. And again, this is Australia, but even if we assume that “unpaid domestic labor” is stuff like “wiping the blood from the somehow intact windshield of the last of the V-8 interceptors”, 5-14 hours is what you might call “the outer limits of normal for a working stiff”. Admittedly I live in a two-bedroom apartment, not a house, but I’m a bit of a neat freak, and “an hour a day” is about all I do. Vacuum the floors and scrub the toilets on Sunday, that’s two hours tops. I’ll be generous and say I spend another 3-4 doing the squeegee thing to my shower walls after I bathe, and loading the dishes in the washer, and giving the counters a quick wipedown once or twice a week, etc.
The real difference comes in the “15-29 hours” and “30 hours or more” categories, and you have to be very, very Smart indeed to find that “problematic”, since those are stay-at-home moms. In other words, they do that “unpaid domestic labor” by choice. Because “the care and feeding of the next generation”, not to mention “the deep, primal satisfaction one gets from seeing a little life grow that you helped create” don’t really count as pay.
Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?
Gosh, that IS a problem! And as the Australians have shown us, the answer seems to be “just stew in your own filth”. It’s a solution America’s single gals, at least, seem to have embraced with kamikaze-level enthusiasm. Back in the days, I’d always insist on taking a girl back to my place, because condoms don’t cover the entire body and her place was always, and I do mean always, a certifiable biohazard. I’d rather do a striptease in Chernobyl’s reactor core than do anything in an American woman’s bedroom, and their bathrooms are pits of unspeakable Lovecraftian horror.
Severian, “SJWs Always Project”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-08.
June 19, 2026
QotD: The Prince is a … satire?
Let me back up. The occasion where I first heard the “it’s a satire” thesis was an “advanced placement” History class back in high school. They probably don’t have those anymore as part of the regular curriculum — dat be rayciss — so in case you’ve never endured one, it’s a bunch of mega-nerds who only care about pleasing Teacher trying to do History. For our unit on “The Renaissance”, we had to read both The Prince and More’s Utopia, and do our term paper on one or the other.
Naturally I picked The Prince, and since you all know the kind of kids who were in that kind of class, naturally everyone else picked Utopia. I might’ve been the only kid who ever did his paper on Machiavelli; certainly the teacher acted like she’d never seen one before. We didn’t have the phrase “trigger warning” back then, but that’s what it amounted to — Teacher hastened to inform everyone in the class that The Prince was really a satire, and so of course I was just kidding too, ha ha, because otherwise we were in the presence of very, very, very bad thought …
“Yes, kidding, ha ha ha,” I muttered, because while I obviously wasn’t the quickest on the uptake back then — I should’ve just done the stupid paper on goddamn Utopia like the rest of the sheep — even I could figure out that I was gonna get sent to the school counselor if I didn’t get with the program …
… and that’s when I learned the aforementioned lesson. Kidding? You think Machiavelli’s kidding? Didn’t we just do this whole unit on the Renaissance? Your main man Thomas More was burning people at the stake, for fuck’s sake! And as for the Italians, they were straight whacking people out in church, with the active connivance of the fucking Pope himself. Satire, fuhgetaboudit, that’s Godfather shit, Machiavelli’s as serious as cancer. You just don’t want to believe that people are actually the way they so obviously are, so you’ll tell yourselves he’s kidding … and Teacher will back you up on it, because she doesn’t want to believe it either.
(Meanwhile, I’ll get an A for my excellent “satire”, in exchange for which I will never ever bring it up again or I’ll fail the rest of the semester).
Severian, “End States and Inverted Incentives”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-22.
June 13, 2026
QotD: Ecce BCG
Of course BCG stands for “Basic College Girl”, and thus she can be found at any institution of “higher” “learning”, but the most Basic ones of all go to colleges you’ve never heard of. Jonah Goldberg is a good example, and while I know he’s technically male, his act is classic BCG. He famously — or infamously — went to Goucher College, which is the kind of school that likes to pretend it’s a mini-Ivy, when in fact it’s the kind of school bright-enough but directionless young nouveau riche kids go to when they just can’t kick that drug habit.
[…]
Achieving shockingly high rank right out of the gate is another tell, and I know what you’re thinking, because of course I thought it too: Mark Meadows is 63 years old, and in the world we grew up in, there’s only one way for a straight-out-of-college girl to become a “close confidante” of a 63 year old man. In my experience, though, BCGs aren’t socially savvy enough to figure that out.
Yeah yeah, I know, but y’all, as primal as that is, these BCGs are just weird. They have no social skills whatsoever. Two data points. First, from Hutchinson’s wiki page:
Identified as a “White House legislative aide”, Hutchinson was the subject of a nationally-syndicated AP photograph in which she was shown dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” alongside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the end of Trump’s September 21, 2020, campaign rally in Swanton, Ohio.
That is not grownup behavior. No woman who ever hoped to be taken seriously in politics would be caught dead doing that, as recently as 15 years ago. They have absolutely zero idea how they come off to other people.
Second data point: I once taught a night class in one of my Flyover State tours. I had this girl there who was just dying to get to Capitol Hill. She was involved in every possible Poli Sci club, the pre-law club, the Young Legislators (or whatever FNG shit it was), and so on. She emailed me once to say she’d be coming to class late, because she was representing Student Senate (or whatever) in some big to-do the college was hosting for the Governor.
When she shows up to my class, she’s wearing this tight red cocktail dress that would’ve looked trashy on a Vegas waitress. It was slit at the sides and back. and at the midriff. It had sequins, I shit you not. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. You went to a reception. With the Governor. Wearing that.
They have no savvy at all, y’all. None whatsoever. The invitation she got read “formal attire”, so she wore what she wore to the sorority formal. You could practically still see Chad Thundercock’s handprints on her ass.
And that’s the fourth and most diagnostic criterion: utter, complete, hilarious fucking cluelessness. About everything.
Severian, “Alt Thread: Diagnosing the BCG”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.
June 7, 2026
QotD: Undergrad writing
I would always tell students who genuinely wanted to improve that nobody is ever going to fail your term paper for style. Unless you really want to be a novelist — and you don’t; we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you did — pretty much all the writing you’re ever going to do is about efficient communication. Fuck literature, fuck all the tropes of rhetoric. Just lay it out there. Who cares if it’s not a page-turner?
But the few things students are taught about writing in grade school are not just useless, they’re counterproductive, because they focus – for some unfathomable reason — on style. So you end up with crap like this:
This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.
Duuuuuuude … far out!!! It’s not quite as “cosmic” as some of the intro sentences I’ve gotten over the years (one kid said something like “Throughout history, there have been many historic events”), but it’s just filler, very obvious filler, and that’s the very first thing your reader sees. Give me Militarese any day: “At 0500 hours, patrolling near Checkpoint Bravo, 1st platoon encountered an enemy force of approximately platoon strength …” But back in sophomore English, Teacher said that all papers must have a Thesis Statement, and since xzhey never bothered to define “Thesis Statement” I keep getting stuff like this.
Same way with the other crap they teach. There’s the one about never using the same word twice, so I’d get papers with half the thesaurus cut-and-pasted. There’s stuff about alliteration and parallelism and metaphors and passive voice, oh God, the passive voice. I swear, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Passive voice on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Botched alliteration glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain, after I’ve had enough beers to endure grading another batch of midterms …
Yeah, you see what I did there. It’s all so, so unnecessary. The point of writing is communication, and in this instance what you are trying to communicate, above all else, is that you have read and understood the assignment. Every sentence I have to read about how deeply thought provoking you found the article is another moment of my life gone, like tears in the rain. The funny thing is, except for the far-out intro, this girl mostly doesn’t have the “style” problem. Her sentences are short and to the point, and most of them are in that nice subject-verb-object pattern that makes me suspect AI, especially coming from a Current Year undergrad.
In my experience, the Kids These Days either give you tweets — often literal bullet points, to the point where some colleagues actually had to specify complete sentences in their essay prompts — or these long, byzantine things that look like really bad parodies of Alexander Pope. If she really does write like that, good! I can work with that. Outline your response next time, making sure that each paragraph contains at least one direct citation from the assignment, and you’ll be fine.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-05.
June 1, 2026
QotD: The progressive concept of an “American”
“Cis” is “cisgender”, the radical notion that your “gender expression” has some systematic relationship to your chromosomal sex. In other words, an “idea” so uncontroversial that it has to be in quotation marks, because try explaining what “gender expression” means to even the most brilliant mind of, say, fifty years ago. He’d laugh right in your danger-haired, tattooed, multi-pierced face.
“Heterosexual” ties in with “cisgender”, in that it means “the observed sexual behavior of 99% of humanity in all times and places, because it is a biological necessity for the species to thrive”.
“Pat” means “patriarchal”, and see above, it’s the observed behavior of 100% of all human societies that have ever existed heretofore. As I like to quip to obnoxious atheists, I’m the only guy I know who really believes in evolution. Ever seen monkeys in the wild? I have. No society is more based than a chimpanzee troop. They’re so patriarchal, Iceberg Slim weeps salty tears of joy at the thought. It’s hardwired.
“White” of course means “chromosomally Caucasian”, and it’s very important to note that of the earth’s teeming billions, White folks are only a small fraction.
“Rayciss” is worth exploring, if only because they never get around to defining it. Do I believe other human subpopulations are inferior to mine? Heavens no. But see above, about being the only guy I know who really believes in evolution. It’s simply a fact that subpopulations evolve in response to environmental pressures. So are some subpopulations better adapted to their environment than others? Hell yes. Not only do I believe this, it’s a stone cold fact, one so trite that they don’t even bother putting it in the biology textbooks anymore.
Severian, “What’s an American?”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-04.
