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BurdensomeCount

Misinformation superspreader

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joined 2022 September 05 16:37:04 UTC

The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.


				
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BurdensomeCount


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Misinformation superspreader

				
				
				

				

					6 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 16:37:04 UTC
				


				
					

					
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Eulogy for the École nationale d'administration: Or, How the West Forgot That Leaders Need to Be Forged and Not Merely Sorted


Just so we don’t all get bored with Iran war and its fallout I thought I’d write up something I’ve been meaning to do for a while but kept putting off:


Macron killed the École nationale d'administration (ENA), France's legendary civil service finishing school, in 2021. This from the man who is himself an énarque, married his teacher, and governs France with the populist credibility of Marie Antoinette at a soup kitchen (long may he continue). The irony of course wasn't lost on anyone except himself.


He replaced it with something called the INSP, which is the institutional equivalent of renaming Blackwater to Academi and hoping the Iraqis don't notice. The same people from the same arrondissements now attend the new thing and get the same jobs afterwards. The nameplate changed. Little else has changed, except that France lost something it didn't know it had until it was gone.


I want to argue that what died with the ENA matters far beyond France, because its death represents the final victory of a particular model of elite formation, the American model, over a rival continental model that was straightforwardly better. And since I seem to have developed a reputation for critiquing the Americans here, you know the drill…


I.


There are two kinds of elite institution. The first kind is hard to get into. The second kind is hard to get through. Today almost nobody distinguishes between them, and I would submit that the failure to do so is one of the great undiagnosed pathologies of modern Western governance.


Harvard is the archetype of the first type. Three to four percent acceptance rate. You get in, you are among the Chosen. Your parents update the Christmas letter. Mazel tov. But what happens once you're inside? The median grade is an A-. You could sleepwalk through a Harvard undergraduate degree and emerge with honours, which is precisely what a lot of people do, and we all know which people I mean, even after Affirmative Action has technically been banned.


The degree doesn't certify that Harvard made you better. It certifies that you were smart at 18 and your parents had the resources, or the connections, or the correct demographic profile, or all three, to package you correctly for the admissions committee. The brand does the heavy lifting for the rest of your natural life. The institution is simply a filter and not a forge.


The SCOTUS clerkship is the same logic at its apex. Thirty six slots a year, drawn from a pool already prefiltered through Yale Law and a "feeder" circuit judge. The most prestigious legal position in America. Sure the actual work isn’t easy and you’re grappling on a daily basis with some of the biggest constitutional questions of the year but we all know the real prize is what comes afterwards, the $400k signing bonus with a BigLaw firm to do Associate level disclosure work and template drafting which any competent lawyer could do just as well, isn’t given to them because of what they learned in those 12 months. The prestige is entirely in the selection.


Nobody emerges from a SCOTUS clerkship significantly transformed as a lawyer; they emerge networked and credentialled. The credential then entitles them to a $400,000+ signing bonus at a BigLaw firm, because the American legal market has decided that having been chosen by a Supreme Court Justice is worth half a million dollars in pure signal value. You were chosen, therefore you are saved. The Calvinism would be amusing if the people it produces weren't currently standing on the sidelines pretending everything is fine while a bunch of charlatans are running the most powerful country on earth into a ditch at speed while congratulating themselves on their own brilliance.


I'll call this the Filter Model. The institution's purpose is to identify pre-existing talent, sort it into tiers, stamp it with a brand, and release it into the wild. The actual content of what happens inside is secondary. The selection is the product.


II.


ENS Ulm does things differently. For the Americans in the audience: the École normale superieure is the institution that produced Sartre, Foucault (Michel, not Leon) , roughly a third of France's Fields Medallists and an absurd proportion of the country's serious intellectuals. The entrance exam, the concours, is savage. Harder in raw mathematical terms than anything the Ivy League administers, and I say this as someone who knows what hard mathematics examinations look like. But the concours is the door, not the room. What happens after you walk through it is the point.


The programme is designed to take talented people and remake them. Normaliens produce original research almost immediately. The agrégation preparation is an intellectual ordeal with no real Anglosphere equivalent. Imagine spending two years preparing for a single examination so difficult that the pass rate among some of the smartest people in France is routinely under 10%. People who survive the ENS think differently at 25 than they did at 21, not because they accumulated more facts but because the institution reshaped the machinery they think with.


The ENA worked the same way, but for governance instead of scholarship. "Formation" in French means both education and shaping, as in the shaping of metal. That's not an accident of language. Two years of intensive work in law, economics, public administration, and actual governance: stages in prefectures and embassies where you had to run things and not merely study them. The people who came out were a specific product: technocratic, institutionally minded, arrogant (let's not pretend otherwise) but genuinely formed for the task of operating a complex modern state. You can argue all day about whether the thing they were shaped into was good. Plenty of the yellow vests would tell you it wasn't. But you cannot argue that the shaping didn't happen. An énarque at 27 was a categorically different animal from the one who entered at 25. Harvard College cannot say this about the majority of its graduates, and the truly contemptible thing is that it isn't even embarrassed by the fact.
I'll call this the Formation Model. The institution's purpose is not to sort but to shape the raw steel that comes through into a sharp blade.


III.


The connection to American civilisational failure is, I'm afraid, not subtle. But then again I've never been accused of subtlety around here and I'm not about to start cultivating it now.


The Filter Model is characteristically American (but now spreading throughout the world). America's founding myth is about breaking free of inherited structures, not building new ones. The whole premise of the American experiment is that you don't need to be formed by an institution to lead. You just need to be talented, survive the right selection process, and your innate qualities will carry you. This is, at bottom, a Calvinist proposition in Enlightenment clothing: the elect are chosen, their election is its own proof of grace, and no further formation is required. Predestination with a diploma.


In the early Republic this worked, because the Founders were themselves men of extraordinary formation. Classical education, deep reading in philosophy and history, practical experience in governance. Formation Model products who built a Filter Model system. It functioned as long as enough formed people were still coming through the pipeline to actually run things. The moment the pipeline dried up, the moment the system started producing people who had been filtered at every stage of their lives and never once forged by anything, the rot set in. And rot, once it starts, moves faster than you expect.


A Filter Model system, left to its own devices, selects for people who are good at being selected. Not people who are good at governing or thinking or leading under pressure. People who package themselves brilliantly for admissions committees, who say the right things at the right dinner parties, who land the right internships and clerkships, who optimise every life decision for the next credential on the CV. They have been sorted relentlessly since age 14 and shaped by absolutely nothing, regardless of how much Mummy and Daddy may like to pretend the non-profit they funded for their precious darling helped. Perfect résumés, zero formation. And when the moment comes that requires genuine judgment, the kind that can only come from having been put through something that actually changed how your mind works, the poor tempering shows through and the blade shatters.


I've made this argument before about American institutional depth and I'll compress it here because I don't want to repeat my entire screed from two weeks ago: the speed at which American institutions are being hollowed out right now is itself diagnostic. If the cultural root system had the depth that Americans believe it has, what's happening would be much harder to do. Instead a single administration has done more institutional damage in a year and a half than most people thought possible, and the Supreme Court, staffed entirely by Harvard and Yale alumni, the crème de la crème of the Filter Model, has folded on every serious test of courage like the invertebrates they are. These are the people the Filter Model selected as the finest legal minds in America. These are the people who were chosen, and chosen, and chosen again at every stage. And they have the institutional spine of a jellyfish.


Meanwhile here in the UK we don't have a written constitution. Parliament is sovereign and a majority can do literally anything it wants up to and including reinstating slavery (modulo certain comments the judiciary has made about the Rule of Law, lets hope they never need to be tested out). And yet Boris Johnson, with a massive majority and real public support, couldn't bulldoze the norms he wanted even with a massive public referendum backing what he was gunning for because the institutional immune system fought back at every level.


The difference? Britain still retains traces of the Formation Model in its governing culture. The civil service Fast Stream. The Bar, where pupillage is genuinely a formation: twelve months of being broken down and rebuilt as an advocate before you are trusted with taking real cases for real clients before a real judge. These institutions still carry some residual memory of the idea that you must be shaped before you are trusted. The US has replaced formation with filtration almost entirely, and is now discovering in real time that filtered people with no formation are extremely good at performing competence and catastrophically bad at exercising it.


IV.


So what actually died when Macron signed the decree?


Not a school. The French state can produce schools. What died was the proposition that governing a country is a métier, a craft, a trade requiring apprenticeship, and that the people who presume to practise it should be subjected to an intellectual and practical ordeal before being handed the keys. The counter-proposition, the American one, is that anyone sufficiently clever and well-credentialled can govern, that selection is sufficient (either by the elite or the people), that being chosen is identical to being prepared. I invite you to contemplate the current state of American governance with its parade of Filter Model all-stars and tell me with a straight face that this proposition is working.


The social mobility critique of ENA was real. The intake had become too narrow, too bourgeois, too 16ème arrondissement. But this was a problem of admissions, not of the institution. You fix a school whose intake is too narrow by widening the intake. You open the concours preparation to the provinces, you fund bursaries, you recruit actively from backgrounds that don't traditionally produce énarques. What you emphatically do not do is destroy the forge and replace it with something deliberately less rigorous and less prestigious, because that sends a specific message: that formation doesn't matter, that the forge was the problem and not the queue outside it.


Destroying the ENA because its intake was too Parisian is like burning down a hospital because the waiting list is too long. It's a specific kind of stupid that only makes sense if you've already internalised the Filter Model assumption that the institution's only function is selection. If you think the institution actually transforms people, if you take seriously the idea that an énarque at 27 is better at governing than the same person would have been without ENA, and not merely better credentialled, then destroying the institution over an admissions problem is an act of civilisational vandalism. Which is exactly what it was.


Every time a Formation Model institution is diluted, streamlined, or abolished in the name of accessibility or modernisation or equity, the Filter Model wins by default. And every time the Filter Model wins, we get more leaders who were brilliantly selected and never once forged. More people with credentials and no character. More people who can navigate a selection process with preternatural skill and cannot navigate a genuine crisis to save their lives because no institution ever demanded anything of them beyond showing up and being impressive.


The people currently dismantling American institutions either have impeccable credentials themselves or are assisted by teams full of such people. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, everything in the works. They were filtered, and filtered, and filtered again. They were never once formed. They emerged from the most elaborate sorting mechanism in human history without having been changed by it in any meaningful way, and they are now busy proving, with considerable energy and to the great horror of people who confused selection for preparation, that being chosen is not the same as being ready. MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIM, if only they could understand what was being said.


The cages are still hanging from St. Lambert's Church in Münster, 490 years later. Empty now, but everyone who visits the city knows the story. A permanent public record of what happens when people who are supremely confident in their own election turn out to have no formation whatsoever. An interesting factoid about the Münster Rebellion is that Jan van Leiden, the self-proclaimed King of the Anabaptists whose bones ended up in those cages, was a failed tailor's apprentice. He didn't finish his formation either.


Rest in peace, ENA. You deserved better critics and a better death.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not saying that I'm going to go sit in my little corner and chuckle smugly at the usual suspects, but this quote comes to mind after seeing recent developments (and it's by an American too!):




They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.




Life imitates Art, as they say; now if only the inflation rate here in the UK wasn't about to spike up because of "careless people"...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


He doesn't know about the secret esoteric knowledge linear time factorisation method which breaks almost all modern cryptography...




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The only psychedelic worth doing is DMT and its analogues, which don't rhyme with Rushdie. I am disappointed in your friend...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My nephew’s high school in the rural midwest just spent $20,000 on costumes for one play this year. An old man in the woods recently told me medicare paid for his $400,000 penis implant to correct ED.




Both of these are crazy. Here in the UK the first would be a scandal if somewhere like Eton did this, and Eton et. al. are the only people with enough free cash to be able to do such a thing. The second would be an NHS scandal, it would never pass NICE. American decadence knows no bounds.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Joe Rogan has always been mid, and I will fite anyone who disagrees.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How sure are we they're both ending up in the same place?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ah, I am particularly Muslim when it comes to intoxicating liquors. Canary Wharf is a nice place overall, I wouldn't mind meeting up for some 0.0% when the time is right if you are around, but in the short term my attention is mostly focused on making as much money as possible from Trump's antics (they tend to generally be very profitable for us).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Goodness, am I that reliable a contrarian? I shall have to agree with you more often, if only to keep you on edge.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This makes perfect sense. There are lots of reasons to not like the rich gulf states, taste (or lack thereof) is one of the big ones. Actual systematic real bad bait and switch exploitation of unwitting migrant workers from south asia (which while I am sure does happen more than zero times) is not one of them. Neither is the whole "their legal system is terrible, you can't do XYZ" where XYZ is something westerners think they have a god given right to, argument a good one.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have been highly recommended to visit Chongqing by multiple people. I'm also interested in travelling around Yunnan province and experiencing life away from the big cities. One day...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Fertile Crescent used to be a lot more green back in the times of the Sumerians, there's a cycle of roughly 25,000 years in which the Sahara and that region as a whole transitions from being a lush green fertile land to becoming a desert and back. Plus those people who built those civilisations weren't really Arab, either culturally (which really arose with Islam) or to a large extent genetically.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No, I genuinely like Salman bin Saud and think of all the gulf nations Saudi Arabia is the most on the "righteous path": not being too fundamentalist but also not going full hedonist like some of the other countries. Plus the fact that they control Mecca and Medina helps too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


has no taste; a crime worse than being a bastard




Absolutely based.


I have a soft spot for Saudi Arabia, but Dubai can go and do one.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


One of the Westminster system's better features, which has achieved its final perfected form in Australia, is by explicitly not tying the political ambitions and fates of would-be political leaders to that of whoever sits in the chair at a given moment. If there's no real way to self-correct a year into the term, everyone is sink-or-swim through any insanity.




Yeah, Starmer has turned out to be a bit of a dud here, so he's probably out after the May elections and there will be a new Labour PM and a new Labour government and life will continue in much the same way (or perhaps even better) for the 90% of Labour MPs who aren't very closely tied to Starmer. The Labour MPs themselves will be the ones to get rid of him and there's very little Starmer can do to hit back against them; can you imagine the republicans in the US House or Senate voting to get rid of Trump?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You say America has institutional depth and continuity, and that the Founders drew on English Common Law and the whole Western tradition and I agree. I never said otherwise and I'd have been stupid to. The US Constitution is a remarkable document (worth reading even as a non-American), the Federalist Papers are some of the best political thinking ever committed to paper, and the early Republic was built by men who were as educated and sophisticated as anyone in Europe, there's no argument to that.


But I think you're collapsing a distinction that matters: there's a difference between having institutions and having the deep cultural substrate that makes those institutions self repairing. England didn't develop parliamentary norms because someone wrote a brilliant constitution. It developed them over centuries of messy, bloody, often accidental practice until they became so embedded in the culture that violating them felt viscerally wrong to enough people to make it politically suicidal. That's what I mean by institutional depth: not the documents, not the structures, but the thickness of the cultural root system underneath them.


And you've actually conceded the key point yourself when you say they're being hollowed out right now. My reply is simply: how fast and how easily? Because that speed is itself diagnostic. If American institutional culture had the depth it lacks, what's happening right now would be much harder to do. I agree that European institutions are under strain too, especially from the hard right and parties like AfD and Reform here in the UK but they're harder, the damage is slower and meeting more resistance at every level. See how Europe managed to co opt Meloni in Italy into a standard right wing European party from the far right. Orban's getting kicked out very soon as well just to give you another data point. Europe is able to deflect and absorb the attacks to its institutions in a way the US hasn't shown any signs of doing.


Instead what we're seeing over there is that a single administration with a sufficiently bloody minded approach can hollow out norms that were supposedly two and a half centuries deep in what, a year and a half? The US has a proper full constitution and an extremely strong supreme court which could block all this with ease but it has folded like a marzipan deckchair. That's not what deep roots look like. That's what a brilliant structure built on shallow cultural soil looks like when someone finally decides to test the foundations. It sinks at the first real challenge. Compare to the UK where we don't even have a written constitution and parliament is technically sovereign and a majority can do anything they want, including reinstating slavery if they so wish and yet our institutions mean that even a government with strong support from its MPs can't do whatever it wants (as Boris Johnson found out with Brexit).


To put it differently: the Constitution told Americans what their institutions should be. What it couldn't do, because no document can, is make Americans feel that violating those norms is unthinkable rather than merely illegal. The "we don't do that" instinct, the one that in a deeply rooted institutional culture makes norm-violation politically radioactive even when it's technically possible, that's the thing I'm saying is thinner in America than Americans believe. And I don't think that's a controversial observation at this point. You yourself seem to agree the hollowing is happening. We're just disagreeing about what it reveals.


So to your final challenge "you haven't described anything America doesn't have, just political decisions you don't like" I would say that I've described exactly the thing America is currently demonstrating it doesn't have enough of. The decisions I don't like are the evidence, not the argument.


And briefly, since I've already made this case and don't want to repeat myself: this is precisely why the leverage question matters. You don't extend unconditional trust to a partner whose institutional immune system is failing this visibly. You negotiate. That's not sneering, it's prudence.


				

				

						

							

								
    
									
									
									
									
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Replying to both you and @Shakes:


I'm not saying America has no achievements (obviously it does, and listing them like Shakes did doesn't refute the point). Nobody denies America has produced extraordinary things, half the things I use on a daily basis were made by them, and that's probably an underestimate (though I'd add that a lot and an increasing proportion of this is from immigrants who became Americans or their near term descendants, rather than "founding stock"). The telephone, jazz, the moon landing etc. etc. are yes, all real, all impressive. But a catalogue of inventions and monuments is not what civilisation means in the sense I'm using it, and people should get that from my post.


What I mean and what Clemenceau meant (however priggish you may call him) is something closer to what you might call institutional depth and cultural continuity: the slow accumulation of norms, restraints, and social trust that make a society self regulating rather than dependent on raw dynamism (which is something that Americans seem to prize above all else, even when it's the wrong tool for the job, hammer and nail come to mind). Europe didn't get that from being clever. It got it from centuries of catastrophe and making mistakes and importantly learning from them. The point isn't that Europeans are better people (I wouldn't even agree, even though I'd probably choose to spend an evening with a randomly chosen European over a randomly chosen American, never mind that they might not even speak English). The point is that the European political tradition, through sheer painful experience, developed a certain instinct for restraint, compromise, and institutional preservation that the American tradition never prioritised in the same way and is likely to very soon come back and bite it in the ass. America's founding myth is about breaking free of those constraints, not building them. That's not an insult, it's a description.


And the "civilised Americans exist, the problem is't All Americans but Enough Americans" line was doing work you both skipped past. I'm not painting 330 million people with one brush. I'm saying the political culture, the median and especially the current leadership of the country, trends in a direction that makes America an unreliable partner and that Europeans should act accordingly rather than sentimentally. Think Mark Carney, but with more spice.


Which brings me to the part of my post that was actually the point, and which neither of you addressed: the strategic argument. Forget whether Clemenceau was rude. Forget whether I'm being snobbish, I won't try and justify that further as I know it won't work (and no, Spengler didn't put me up to this). The question on the table is simple: should Europe give America unconditional support in its Iran campaign, or should it use its leverage: basing rights, logistics, diplomatic cover, to extract concessions on Ukraine and tariffs? The "American" would say "use the leverage", the European might say "we're all gentlemen here", except that that's no longer true, so might as well give them a taste of their own medicine.


The argument that America "pays for European defence" cuts both ways. If European bases are so essential to American force projection that Spain's wobble caused a crisis within days (which it's still not allowing to my knowledge despite what the Americans are saying), then those bases have price, and Europe is a fool not to name it.


The claim that America could walk away tomorrow and it would be Europe's problem, not the Americans well right there you're making my argument for me. If that's how America sees the relationship, then Europe has no obligation of loyalty either, and should negotiate accordingly. You can't simultaneously say "we do this for you" and "we don't need you." Pick one. The cakeism is very "American".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I risk sounding like a broken record here but that old Clemenceau quote is relevant again: "America Is the Only Country That Went from Barbarism to Decadence Without Civilization In Between".


When you look at things through this lens everything explains itself perfectly. The Americans as a nation have never been properly civilised, their national myth includes things like the Frontier man and the taming of the wilderness, but in one of those rather all too common twists of irony I'd say the wild has transformed Americans far more than they have ever transformed it.


Once you realize that America as a country has never had civilisation in the sense a European, a Chinese, or even dare I say, a Persian, would understand it, (I mean as a country, many many Americans are perfectly civilised people, the problem is not All Americans, the problem is Enough Americans) everything starts falling into place and making sense.


The way to deal with such a country is to treat it like it is: rather than trying to support the US or help them in their war against Iran out of some misguided gentlemanly obligation, Europe now has an excellent opportunity to twist the knife and extract huge concessions from the US on Ukraine and tariffs in return for them being allowed to use European bases to run their war. And make your demands and the concessions you get public as red meat for your domestic base. It's no different to what the Americans would have done to you had the shoe been on the other foot.


				

				

						

							

								
    
									
									
									
									
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Trump has managed to replace Ayatollah Khamenei with Ayatollah Khamenei, except that this one is thirty years younger and just had his parents, wife, sister and son killed in an American/Israeli attack. The mind boggles...




Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.




- Sun Tzu.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Turn up as a male follower. They exist (and are getting more popular), usually taken by experienced men who want a new challenge (it also helps you understand the leader steps better if you know what your follower has to endure when you do a certain figure).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Depends on the dance, leading a jive is easier than being a follower, the follower steps are much more complex depending on the choreo.


Leading properly (instead of just doing the leader steps/choreo) is a skill as well, but it takes like 4-5 years to learn how to do correctly, you're not going to learn it by going to 1hr weekly social dance classes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Getting corrupted by the westoid mindset is just as bad in the long run because it's contagious. She might not have been a leech and may have had a background which could fund her behaviour, in which case more power to her, she's not the sort of person who I'd want in my life but that's fine, different people are different. What's not fine are the people who are like this and fund it off the taxpayer's teat and then lecture us for our values. Neighbour, have you looked at your values???


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You've already guessed the punchline. I commiserated with her over the failure of her date plans and she looked at me like I'd dribbled on her shirt. "Obviously I'm going. He's hot," she huffed, and flounced away.




And then people accuse me of hating "natives" when I express the (justified, I submit) contempt I have for these people. And my tax money is going on funding this shit. People complain about their tax money going on migrants with different values here in the UK, never mind that these migrants make up a small portion of society and there are lots of "natives" that don't even pay much tax in the first place, so the per "native" price they are paying is relatively small. On the other hand the tax there aren't that many people like me, I pay a shit ton of tax and there are a shit ton of these "natives" who make bad decisions that society (read: taxpayers like me) end up subsidizing and we're supposed to just sit and take it. I'd wager I'm personally paying 6 figures in GBP each year directly subsidizing the likes of these people. Few things make me seethe as much as seeing the government's yearly breakdown on where the money I spend paying tax ends up going.


I have at least 1.5 orders of magnitude (closer to 2 actually) more justification to be pissed off at the "natives" than the average "native" has to be pissed off at a poor migrant care worker. And yet...


				

				

						

							

								
    
									
									
									
									
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I also do dancing (competitive though, not social), our classes are 3-4 women per man, and have stayed this way or if anything the most recent new cohort is even more female dominated. I highly recommend dancesport to any men who are interested, at intermediate+ levels almost all couples end up 1 man + 1 woman so as a man you don't need to be as amazing to make it up there. I wouldn't recommend using this as a way to meet partners though in the short term, that's gonna get noticed and you'll be ostracized very quickly (and for good reason, we do this because we want to get good at dancing, not because we're horny, it's actually a surprisingly sexless sport, despite what the rumba may appear like to you). Longer term once you're actually good and in a stable dance partnership plenty of couples end up marrying each other, but this is a very different thing than hitting on women after 4 weeks of slow waltz.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm really liking Hal Incandenza so far, sort of reminds me of Quentin from The Sound and The Fury.