Shared Article from thebulwark.com

Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong

Online bigotry masquerading as a love of history in the fever swamps of Elon Musk’s X.

Bret Devereaux @ thebulwark.com

IT IS THIS VERY IDEOLOGICAL PROJECT that demands the flattening down of the real historical Greek and Roman tradition and demands hostility towards classicists who actually cherish it, because the study of the ancient world does not conform neatly to modern bigotries or hard-right ideology. The irony is that it is precisely this complexity that has drawn generations of readers and scholars to the Greek and Roman classics and ensured their continued place in the pantheon of great works. Indeed, as Stanford classicist Reviel Netz notes in Why the Ancient Greeks Matter, it was the very fractious, discordant, individualistic nature of Greek culture—clearly visible in their literature—that set them apart from previous and contemporary societies.

For its part, Rome was a diverse society from its foundation and regularly extended citizenship to foreign ethnic groups and even freed slaves. Roman authors like Livy, and even foes of Rome like Philip V of Macedon, recognized that this liberality was a foundation of Roman strength. While the Greeks and the Romans could certainly be bigoted, their stereotypes map poorly onto the modern racism demonstrated by X’s unworthy defenders of Western civilization. Herodotus thought Egypt the oldest of all peoples, in some ways more civilized than Greece, with a better calendar and an older and deeper religious tradition. Homer imagined the mythical Ethiopian king Memnon as a cousin to the hero Hector and also the most beautiful man Odysseus had ever seen, a stark contrast to racialized claims that actress Lupita Nyong’o could not possibly play the famously beautiful Helen. Meanwhile, the Greeks and Romans felt little kinship with other European whites. If anything, Gauls, Britons, and Germans could be far more alien and barbarous to ancient writers than Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, or even Ethiopians.

The classical canon does not present a single vision of greatness, but many. It even questions the value of greatness itself. Even in Homer, Achilles’s vision of greatness through glory in the Iliad conflicts with Hector’s dogged defense of his home. The poem does not render a clear verdict on who is right, only who won. Homer doesn’t end with the triumph of Achilles, but wistfully notes such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses. Even if we take the Iliad and Achilles’s victory at face value, what triumph he has is undermined in the Odyssey: Achilles’s shade appears in the Underworld and rejects Odysseus’s declaration of his greatness. I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, he laments, than be king over all the perished dead.

Homer is hardly the only figure in the classical canon to question the sort of violent masculine greatness to which the statue accounts aspire. Sallust famously concludes that the great military achievements of the Romans merely served to undermine their morals and domestic politics, while he extols the greatness of writing history. Tacitus, in the midst of praising his father-in-law Agricola’s military achievements, in turn questions the fundamental morality of Roman conquest itself through the famous words he attributes to Calgacus: robbery, butchery, and plunder they call by the lying name empire and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace. Unless we view the ancients as if they were cartoons, it should not surprise us to find classical views on both violence and masculinity were complex and varied.

— Brett Devereaux, Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong
The Bulwark, 4 June 2026

Reading: Matthew Petti, A Pointless War in Reason (June 2026).

Trump still expected a quick and unambiguous surrender when he and Netanyahu launched the war a few days later. Israel assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a first strike, and Trump said that he was anticipating a situation like with Delcy in Venezuela.

A month into the war, Trump admitted at an Easter dinner that he had told the British prime minister the war would last only three days. He gave a similar timeline to skeptical Middle Eastern leaders before the war began, telling them it would only take 100 hours, according to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a pro-diplomacy nonprofit, who also broke the news of Iran’s 2003 offer.

. . .

Whether or not the truce holds past April, Trump has lost control over the conflict he has entangled the U.S. in. With its back to the wall, Iran discovered that it holds a lot of leverage over the world economy. Israel and the Arab states, meanwhile, found that they can push the U.S. to adopt maximalist goals.

The war has led to an outcome that neither Iranians nor Americans wanted. But it has fulfilled the vision of Netanyahu, who declared from the rooftop of the military headquarters in Tel Aviv that bringing the U.S. directly into the war allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years.

Ironically, it has also fulfilled the vision of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who foreshadowed his plans in a 2022 speech: By God, I see it with my own eyes, a war that will change the face of the globe, a regional religious war that will burn both the green and the dry. The American political class helped pile a lot of the kindling, and it doesn’t know how to put the fire out.

— Matthew Petti, A Pointless War
In Reason (June 2026).

Shared Article from Reason.com

A pointless war: How Iran hawks finally got their way

President Donald Trump and his predecessors spent decades putting the U.S. on a path toward war against Iran.

Matthew Petti @ reason.com

It is easy to look at this appalling mess and come away with the conclusion that Donald Trump is especially foolish, rash, inconstant or callous and dangerously careless with deadly fights he cannot control. Donald Trump is all of those things, but his rudderless war is not just the latest expression of his peculiar vices or malign influence. The real fact, whether about Trump’s wars or the decades of American wars in the Middle East before this one, is that whether the War President is a fool or a mastermind or just some guy, they never have the control they think they have over the wars they bring into the world. War is not a tool you can wield; war is not a weapon you can aim. War is a fire, which grows out from where you set it, and burns on with a life of its own.

What I’m Reading: Scott Alexander, “Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care”, Astral Codex Ten (Feb. 18, 2026).

Shared Article from astralcodexten.com

Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Impr…

...

Scott Alexander @ astralcodexten.com

Violent crime (and most other forms of victimizing crime) in the U.S. is much less common now than it used to be. It was getting much less common for a long time, then in the last few years it got a little more common again. Now it’s gone back to getting more and more uncommon than it has ever been. Of course it could be even better, and where violence and victimization continue to happen they are serious issues that should be taken seriously. But there has never been a safer time to live in the U.S. or in U.S. cities than right now. (Really, really really. This is robust even when considering what we can find out about reporting rates over time, or changes in mortality from violent crime due to improvements in emergency medicine.)

What I’ve been reading: This is from Introduction, one of two samizdat essays written in the late 1970s by an East European official occupying a high managerial position, writing in French under the pseudonym Felipe García Casals. The author was later revealed as the Romanian Marxist intellectual Pavel Câampeanu. The essays were circulated in French and reached the West through academic channels, then published in English translation as The Syncretic Society (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1980, trans. Guy Daniels).

Casals uses the term Stalinism to refer not just to Stalin’s dictatorship, but to the characteristic mode of production under classical Soviet models of central economic planning from the introduction of the Five Year Plans until perestroika and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. One of the ideas he especially wants to develop is that totalitarian politics and the cult of personality are integral parts of, and downstream consequences of, the economic planning system. He also wants to argue that system is really not characterized by worker ownership as in the revolutionary slogans, but also not by a form of disguised ownership where the Party or the State effectively takes on the role of a capitalist proprietor as in some left-wing critiques of actually-existing communism as a form of state capitalism. Instead, he argues, the system is characterized by an ongoing, perennial, systematically-sustained form of property vacuum, and a great deal of other consequences, follow. He writes (footnotes are by the translator, Guy Daniels):

Stalinism does not act on necessity, but in its name. Such is its basis for solving the fundamental problem left unsolved by premature socialism: that of organizing ownership, the decisive premise of industrialization. That organization consists largely in the productive utilization and multiplication of the means of production, whose form of ownership is essential to this process. The convulsive form of ownership that was typical of premature socialism had defined the terms of the problem: the premature but effective elimination of the private ownership of the means of production creates the risk of establishing their premature but ineffective social ownership. Being intolerable in its private mode, and inaccessible in its social form, ownership becomes volatile.

Stalinism did not create this ownership-in-abeyance. Rather, [12] it represents an economic and social system which is centered not on a transition of that state of abeyance toward social ownership but on the former’s perpetuation. Having acquired an historical existence because of its duration, ownership-in-abeyance must also acquire a conceptual existence. It is quite possible that such a role could be assumed by the formula of a property vacuum. In the light of that concept, Stalinism can be viewed as a mode of production based on a system of organizing ownership which is doubly negative: anticapitalist (because capitalism has been eliminated) and nonsocialist (because social ownership was never tried out). Those interpretations which attribute to proprietorship under Stalinism a univocal and/or positive character overlook the essential uniqueness of that multivocal society.

At first glance, the concept of a vacuum of ownership makes for a certain distrust. It represents, however, phenomena that are perfectly familiar from the historical viewpoint but overlooked from the conceptual viewpoint; e.g., the land reform that followed the October Revolution. Promulgated by the Second Congress of Soviets after the take-over of the Winter Palace, the Land Decree proclaimed that land was … a national patrimony put in the possession of those who worked it. Land ownership was made completely vague: control was separated from possession. One historian of the USSR rightly stated that … the Land Decree introduced a principle that was quite the opposite of ownership in rural areas (Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, L’Union Soviétique de Lénine à Staline: 1917-1953, p. 77). The concept of a property vacuum is aimed at grasping the phenomenon while avoiding its definition by negation.

The property vacuum represents the absence of autonomous economic mechanisms securing for one social stratum the complete ownership, juridically ratified, of the means of production. Complete proprietorship makes it possible to control both the organization of production and the appropriation of the product. In this sense, the absence of proprietors is the best proof of a property vacuum. The latter consists in an [13] incomplete control of the prerogatives of ownership; viz., a control limited to organizing production. As such, it results not from the action of an autonomous economic mechanism but from a perpetual extra-economic intervention. Finally, it is not ratified juridically, since laws can legitimize ownership but not its absence. That is why, under Stalinism, law does not merely proclaim ownership: it supplants the latter.

Under the conditions of a property vacuum, the means of production can neither be sold nor bought: they are not commodities. Consequently, they do not have an economically determined value. Yet they do have a conventional price–one intended to serve only the purposes of accounting. That noneconomic price is assigned to them, necessarily, by an extra-economic authority possessing that prerogative. The production of means of production is not aimed at their profitable sale. Hence the mechanism of its regulation is not the economic stimulus of a viable demand but an extra-economic order [commande]: the plan. For Stalinist industrialization, this substitution of an order for demand plays an essential role. That is why it becomes, spontaneously, the general model for organizing social relations.

The property vacuum has the result that the means of production are shifted into an extra-economoic sphere. This means that they are not susceptible of appropriation, since ownership does not exist outside of the economic sphere. Thus the means of production have a real existence as regards technology, and only an apparent existence as economic phenomena.

According to the Stalinist dispensation, the means of production are owned by the producers themselves. According to most of Stalinism’s critics, the means of production are owned by the State or the bureaucracy. Although it dismisses both of these assertions, the concept of a property vacuum does not equate them with each other. First, there is already an important equalizing element: the two categories of presumptive owners share in the appropriation of the social product via the same mechanism, the wage. (Here one must except collectivized agriculture.) This form of appropriation–which is indirect, [14] nonspecific, and independent of the appropriating subject–does not confirm, in economic terms, the proprietary character ascribed to the two categories. The elements of their inequality do not involve the amount of salary but rather its connection with the work done, and the degree to which ownership is inaccessible to them. The incomplete control of certain prerogatives of ownership, which is typical of a property vacuum, remains strictly inaccessible to the producers, and constitutes a monopoly of power. Hence it is solely with respect to that monopoly that the property vacuum is manifested as separation between the possession and control of property. The monopoly, therefore, is not one of ownership but of its incomplete control founded on nonpossession.

The limits to this incomplete control are set by the common form of appropriation: the wage. Hence there is a lack of connection between the nature of that activity and its remmuneration, which engenders yet another nonrelation: between the amount of activity and the amount of remuneration.

That brings us to the second inequality between the two categories. Although equalized by the mode common to both, the wage, they are differentiated by the varied action of that common mode. If one is willing to apply the term management to the incomplete control of property, one can state that the general principle to each according to his work applies to the nonmanagerial producers but not to the managers, who are not producers. From this angle of vision, the latter are also favored as compared to capitalists, since profits express precisely the dependencec of appropriation on the economic results of management.

In the monopoly of management, Stalinism has created a specific type of activity without at the same time creating a specific mechanism for its remuneration. In so doing, it has provided the objective basis for the separation between management and responsibility. Lacking any economic standard of comparison, managerial activity is subject to no audit on the social plane. The fact that it is protected against any regular economic [15] penalty represents the economic basis of its infallibility. A system of management which is unaffected either by production or by its economic valuation, is in fact not subject to any evaluation. Thus infallibility expresses, not an evaluation of the managers’ abilities, but the society’s systematic inability to evaluate this kind of activity. Perfection being incommensurable, the incommensurable is perceived as perfection. This attribute is possessed, not by the different individuals performing a certain function, but by the function performed by those different individuals.

After a while the property vacuum, being artificially maintained, engenders the objective necessity of this subjectification: the function of infallibility. Criticism of Stalinism on the level of the ecult of personality only perpetuates the confusion between the objective necessity for that function in a property vacuum and the historical agents who perform that function at one time or another. Actually, all those figures who lose that function–whether through death or political change–lose at the same time that infallibility which they personified without possessing it. The function of infallibility perdures, regardless of those ephemeral figures who perform it, and who are usually found, a posteriori, to have been personally unfit to fulfill that function. It is not the providential leaders who produce the function of infallibility: it is the function of infallibility which produces the agglomeration of providential leaders. The true message brought by the providential leader is that of a society dominated by providence; i.e., by the most tyrannical form of necessity: chance, which is the natural result of failure in the matter of theory. The infallible leader is the institutionalized negation of theory, although he claims to be its sole incarnation. But the best that theory can do is to be adequate. The moment it is declared infallible, it is already dead, having degenerated into mythology.

The result is an evident confusion of values of which the infallible leader is only one of the consequences. Its most general consequence is incommensurability, which spontaneously [16] gives rise to a lack of proportionality [démesure].^[1] The latter represents the lack of a system of values that is coherent, adequate, and hence socially operative. Such a system can unify elements that are diverse yet mutually conditioned. It cannot, however, unify elements that are disjunct by reason of their incompatibility. The syncretism of the society is echoed in the syncretism of its values.

— Felipe García Casals [Pavel Câampeanu], Introduction
In The Syncretic Society (1977/1980), pp. 11-16. Translated from the French by Guy Daniels.

1. ^[1]Casals seems to be using démesure (a rather arcane word) in overlapping senses, to suggest both a lack of proportionality and immeasurability.—G.D.↩

Shared Article from freddiedeboer.substack.com

Real Feelings for Fake Beauty

the desire to live in a beautiful built environment can't be snarked away

Freddie deBoer @ freddiedeboer.substack.com

What I’m Reading: Freddie deBoer, “Real Feelings for Fake Beauty” (6 April 2026).

What’s remarkable, when you sit with all of this long enough, is that the Yale campus essentially answers the Twitter debate all by itself. The YIMBYs are wrong that beauty is prohibitively expensive, but the debate is asking the wrong question anyway. The real question isn’t whether we can build beautifully, it’s whether we’re willing to admit what we actually want, which is to be surrounded by things that feel old and storied and earned, even when they aren’t. Yale understood this and built a fantasy, and the fantasy worked so well that a century later they felt compelled to extend it, and even their imperfect extension will probably fool people in another fifty years. The desire isn’t really for Gothic architecture specifically, or for Art Deco, or for any particular style. The desire is for the feeling that a place has been cared for across generations, that it meant something to the people who built it and to the people who came after. Beauty is the signal. Permanence is the message.

Which I know is an odd thing for me to say, given that I am a committed proponent of The New. A lot of those Twitter accounts that call for aesthetic commitment and intentionality of design in new buildings hate Brutalism, while I love it. And it’s odd, when you think about it, because whatever Brutalism may be, and no matter how much many people might hate it, it’s an architectural school passionately dedicated to aesthetic commitment and intentionality of design. It’s just that the people who want beauty in buildings don’t see it in Brutalism, and maybe they also see the style as an example of the decadent decline of the West, and I’m sure some of it them see it as a consequence of the pernicious influence of communism or the Jews…. There’s a lot going on, in calls for the beauty of the past. But at the core of all of this is the simple fact that taste is subjective and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I can almost believe that some people love the Corporate Modernism that’s expressed in so many hideous apartment buildings that stuff the DC suburbs. Almost. We are that which we are inspired by. Above this paragraph you’ll see an image of Beinecke, Yale’s rare books library, where one can find priceless works of art like a Gutenberg bible. Beinecke is not Brutalist in design (New Formalist, I reckon), but it is decidedly modernist, and it’s nestled in the very heart of Old Campus. And yet it works, somehow, in its environs, for the same reason I buy into the artifice of its neighbors, the architectural cosplay: because it looks good enough to earn that respect.

And here’s where I find myself making a kind of peace with the whole business of beautiful lies. I know that Old Campus is a stage set, that the gargoyles are props, that the medievalism is a borrowed costume from universities that were themselves borrowing from an even older tradition. I know all of that, and I go back anyway, baby on my chest, to walk among the Gothic opulence. My friend was right about the timescales, but I think he was pointing at something bigger than he intended: authenticity is itself a function of time. The new colleges at Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray feel fake not because they are fake — Old Campus is equally fake — but because they haven’t yet had the time to make us forget that we’re in on the trick. Beauty, it turns out, requires a kind of willing amnesia. We have to be allowed to forget the scaffolding. And maybe that’s the real argument for building ornately and lavishly right now, today, in our own cities and neighborhoods: not that we’ll love it immediately, but that someday, if we build it with enough sincerity and enough craft, people will walk past it and feel, without quite knowing why, that human beings once cared about beauty enough to live and work inside of it, and might still.

— Freddie deBoer, Real Feelings for Fake Beauty
Substack, 6 April 2026