Quotulatiousness

May 3, 2026

Reasons people romanticize their college experience

Filed under: Education, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to comments about people wanting the world to be like they remember their time at college:

People romanticize college because for four years of their lives they:

1. Had all the rights of adults but none of the responsibilities.

2. Lived in a closed community with sealed borders that kept out low IQs and anti-socials.

3. Were young, energetic, healthy, and attractive.

4. Were thrown together with a bunch of similar people who had no predefined power- or need-based relationship with them, which is how friendships form.

This last is the important one, especially as fertility rates decline.

People with children transition to making friends with other parents of children in the same age group, because events and networks centered around those children throw them together with other parents in the same way.

But childless people have few or no opportunities to make friends after college. So they are left with a slow dwindling circle of college based relationships, remembering the days when it was all easy, and they weren’t so isolated, and they didn’t have to work so hard.

Couple that with having to complete with infinity immigrants in the job market, so they can pay taxes to support infinity boomers and government bureaucrats, while being passed over for the best jobs and careers in favor of infinity DEI incompetents, who they also have to support …

Well, for a lot of people born into what was once the American middle class, college was their first and last experience of an adult life wherein they weren’t being systematically and deliberately routed into the formation of a new underclass.

A special form of underclass who are still expected to be productive enough to materially support all the non-producing people who were positioned as their social superiors despite being their intellectual inferiors.

So, yeah, they wish they could go back to college.

Is anyone surprised by this?

How to Declare a Live Person Legally Dead – Death of Democracy 14 – Q2 1936

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 2 May 2026

In Q2 1936, Adolf Hitler consolidated power after the Rhineland gamble, tightening the machinery of dictatorship while projecting strength abroad. As Hermann Göring took control of Germany’s economic lifelines and Heinrich Himmler centralized the police, the regime accelerated its transformation into a fully integrated police state.

Behind Olympic pageantry and propaganda triumphs like Max Schmeling’s victory, the Nazi system deepened repression. Courts enforced the Nuremberg Laws with chilling logic, reducing Jewish citizens to a state of “civil death”, while Joseph Goebbels expanded total control over media and public discourse.

At the same time, Germany’s economy bent further toward war, with dwindling foreign reserves and rising dependence on autarky. Yet domestically, resistance remained minimal as propaganda, fear, and perceived stability drove growing public support.

Globally, the quarter exposed the weakness of the League of Nations during Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia, saw Léon Blum’s rise in France, and witnessed the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in Palestine — signs of a world drifting toward instability.

This episode examines how dictatorship consolidates not just through terror, but through law, economics, and consent — and why, by mid-1936, meaningful resistance inside Germany had largely vanished.

Useful intellectual idiot case study: Malcolm Caldwell

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Occasionally, Substack suggests a writer or a particular post that its algorithm deems likely to be of interest to me. This post from a few weeks ago by Mark Manson definitely fit the bill. He ranges over a variety of cases starring intellectuals suddenly discovering reality, starting with a particular British useful idiot’s collision with reality:

On December 19th, 1978, Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London boarded a plane to Cambodia for a historic trip. It was an opportunity so rare, so special, that Caldwell genuinely believed it could potentially change the world.

Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable.

Malcolm Caldwell was the consummate intellectual. He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. He had written hundreds of articles and over a dozen books on the subject. He was a professor and researcher at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and was celebrated and supported for his views.

Much of his work dealt with English colonialism in Asia and its dire political consequences. As a result, Caldwell evolved into a staunch Marxist, far to the left of the leftiest leftist who ever lefted.

Just to give you an idea how far left we’re talking, Caldwell visited North Korea in the 1960s and came away saying good things about it. When the Vietnam War started, Caldwell tried to host a fundraiser in London … for the Vietcong.

So when communist revolutionaries took control of Cambodia, Caldwell showed enthusiastic support. The new communist leader of Cambodia was a man by the name of Pol Pot and he had radical new ideas of how to achieve a communist utopia — ideas that had existed in Marxist thought but had yet to actually be attempted in any communist country. Caldwell had been waiting for decades for a communist revolutionary who fully implemented his Marxist dreams. Caldwell came to believe Pol Pot was his man.

Bones recovered from the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s regime killed nearly 2 million people in less than five years.
Image from Mark Manson.

But the truth was that Pol Pot was as insane as he was cruel. And it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. Upon taking power, Pol Pot nationalized the all land, kicked out or killed all foreigners, and began a sweeping genocide against the educated class. In the four years Pol Pot was in power, it’s estimated that he was responsible for the death of more than 20% of the country’s population.

But when news of the genocide and atrocities began to leak out of Cambodia, Caldwell refused to believe it. He defended Pol Pot’s regime and wrote off the atrocities as simply more western capitalist propaganda. His unwavering support eventually earned him an exclusive invitation to visit Cambodia by Pol Pot’s government. Caldwell accepted. And in December of 1978, he boarded that fateful flight to Asia.

Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.

Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, a world-class mind with powerful thoughts, and yet absolutely no idea how to apply any of it.

The Extremely Rare Folding Stock Beretta 38/43

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Dec 2025

The Beretta Model 38 SMG was a very successful design, and a folding-stocked version of it was a natural development. Beretta first made a prototype of such a thing in 1941, but it never went into production — possibly because Italy ceased to have an effective paratrooper corps after El Alamein. However, many of the design elements from this experiment saw use in the simplified 38/42 and 38/44 models of the Beretta SMG. Late in the war, a small batch of folding-stocked guns were actually produced (one source says about 200) specifically for the RSI. This was the puppet government Germany operated in northern Italy after the country surrendered to Allied forces.

This particular example came out of the Balkans, and managed to acquire a Yugoslav national crest along the way — although I don’t know the details of how. Thanks to Limex for giving me access to this extremely rare piece to film for you guys!
(more…)

QotD: Communism, nationalism and literature

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Literature as we know it”, Orwell wrote in “Inside the Whale”, “is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship”. It’s the “product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual”. This is why Orwell argued that “a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up.”

According to Orwell, “As early as 1934 or 1935 it was considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less ‘left’, and in another year or two there had grown up a left-wing orthodoxy that made a certain set of opinions absolutely de rigueur on certain subjects”. In other words, many writers became communists, which meant they constantly had to decide whether to toe the line or shut up, depending on the circumstances: “Every time Stalin swaps partners”, Orwell wrote, “‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape … Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.”

Orwell also explained how communism replaced the patriotic and religious feelings that members of the English intelligentsia believed they had transcended: “All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, savior — all in one word, Stalin”. Is it any wonder that Orwell, witnessing these endless intellectual and moral contortions, the shameless propaganda, and the constant stream of wartime lies and distortions, was drawn to a writer who didn’t regurgitate any orthodoxies or toe any lines? Miller gave his readers “no sermons, merely the subjective truth”.

Matt Johnson, “George Orwell, Henry Miller, and the ‘Dirty-Handkerchief Side of Life'”, Quillette, 2020-10-05.

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