𝐍𝐄𝐋𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐋𝐀– 𝙰 𝙻𝙸𝙵𝙴 𝚃𝙷𝙰𝚃 𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙽𝙶𝙴𝙳 𝙰 𝙽𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽

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  What if I told you that plants were never truly silent?

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• Is there any conservative ideology left to recognize in the Republican party?

  I used to think I understood what I was part of. Not in a blind, devotional way, but in the sense that there was a rough consistency to it. Free markets, free trade, small government. Respect for institutions, personal responsibility, suspicion of concentrated power, especially when it showed up in Washington. Remember that? You didn’t have to agree with every position, but you could at least recognize the shape of the ideology.

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  There is a common trend of young men being interested in the Roman empire out of movies and populat history, and imagining it as a militaristic, right wing hyper-masculine empire that was great for men. Spartacus, Rome, Gladiator... to different degree all give a perception of Rome being a sort of warrior-culture, sometimes bogged down by decadence. Gladiator II takes this to a ridiculous extreme. For that particular movie, I recommend reading Brett's, from acoup.blog , critique:

• Is Canada better off for having skipped its revolution?

  Most nations remember a morning they would die to defend: a Bastille, a Boston, a shot that started everything. Canada has no such morning, and that is the point most easily missed about it. On 1 July 1867 the British North America Act took effect and the Dominion of Canada existed. No declaration was read to a crowd, no army had to be beaten, no king was overthrown. A handful of colonial politicians, John A. Macdonald among them, had argued their way through a series of conferences and…

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  We carry an unexamined assumption that culture follows power, that the great age of an art is the great age of its army. Renaissance Italy refutes it cleanly. Between roughly the fourteenth century and the sixteenth, the peninsula produced linear perspective, humanism, the recovered ancients, the secular gaze, and a recognizably modern idea of the individual person. It also failed, completely and humiliatingly, at the one task we usually call the test of a civilization. It could not unite,…

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  For nearly the whole of human history, the standard of living did not move. A peasant in Roman Gaul, a peasant in medieval England, and a peasant under the early Stuarts lived at roughly the same material level, because any surplus a society produced was eaten by the mouths it then fed. Good harvests bought more babies, not better lives, and population climbed back to the edge of hunger. Economists call this the Malthusian trap, and it held without exception. Then, in a damp corner of England…