Quotulatiousness

May 4, 2026

QotD: Saint Hillary

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

If Michael Kelly can rise from the grave, this will be the week. He’s been summoned.

Kelly was the most relentlessly savage chronicler of the Clinton administration, and of the Clintons personally, but his opening shot was so subtle you had to squint to see what he was doing. In a long feature story that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in May of 1993 under the that’s-not-a-compliment title, “Saint Hillary”, Kelly very quietly mocked Hillary as a preening know-it-all who didn’t know much of anything. He wrote that she represented “the message of the preacher”, with a way of speaking that delivered a stream of moral lectures, as if she had the authority and the wisdom to direct others in the act of moral reconstruction. If you click on the link and read the whole story, you’ll want to watch for the transitional paragraph, the switch from mostly description to mostly derision. It begins with the words, “It is at this point that some awkward questions arise”. Next paragraph: “If it is necessary to remake society, why should Hillary Rodham Clinton get the job?”

It becomes less kind from there. Kelly described a meeting between Hillary Clinton and the progressive Jewish editor and activist Michael Lerner, who (Kelly says) offered a vision of “unintentionally hilarious Big Brotherism”. And then: “The reason Lerner’s proposals for the application of the politics of meaning focus so heavily on bureaucratic irrelevancies is the same reason Mrs. Clinton is struggling still with words”. Self-delusion, unawareness of political realities, hard-headed self-importance, unaware bumbling in an unearned sense of certainty. A moralizer, but not moral, unwise but committed to the appearance of wisdom.

Remember, this story appeared in 1993, in the opening months of the Clinton presidency. Michael Kelly was opening a political era with a dismissal, rolling his eyes at the Clinton project as it began. “Saint Hillary”, they called it. The New York Times used to publish things like this.

Chris Bray, “Saint Hillary the Bluntly Obtuse”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-01-30.

Update, 5 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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!
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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.

May 2, 2026

“… a New York Times bestseller!”

Filed under: Books, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I thought this was well-known years ago, but it still apparently surprises people to learn that the famous New York Times bestseller list is … not actually in any way a valid measurement of book popularity and sales:

For those of you not familiar with the total scam that is the NYT bestseller list, as a NYT bestseller myself, it’s utter bullshit. It’s not an actual list of bestsellers. It’s “curated editorial”.

As in, stuff they like gets on there, and stuff they don’t like doesn’t. Or stuff they like places higher, and stuff they don’t like but obviously sells too much to deny its a bestseller gets on there lower.

I still tell people I’m a NYT bestseller because most regular normies think that actually means something impressive, and it’s just quicker to say that to establish that you’re a certain level. Within the actual publishing industry its fairly meaningless and everybody knows it.

In reality I made it on there a couple of times early on in my career before they realized who I am and what I’m into (the totally wrong politics, loudly!), because then it was like a post it note got stuck on the wall there saying FUCK THIS GUY, because after that no matter how many copies I sold, even if I was mud stomping half their list in actual sales, I wasn’t getting on there ever again.

Everybody is aware of this scam. The key to getting on the list is the NYT wanting to promote you. They don’t actually track all book sales. They track certain “reporting stores” (which are supposed to be secret but we all know how they are). But then the NYT takes whatever reality is and massages it to fit their narrative.

It isn’t just to keep wrong thinking pariahs like me off there either. I’ve got friends who are apolitical or even mildly liberal who still make the list, but who get bumped down a bunch of spaces from what they should be because there’s somebody else with a new book out the NYT wants to fluff.

Even when the NYT isn’t putting its finger on the scale, it also only measures velocity, as in how many books sold that week. So if you sell 20k copies that week, but never sell another book again, you’re a bestseller. But a guy who sells 1k copies a week every week for an entire year, is not.

Also, I don’t know if it is still this way, because I quit paying attention to what makes the NYT list years ago after I understood what a joke it was, but it was only for physical books, not ebooks, not audio. And there are authors who crush it in ebook who sell very few physical copies in stores. I don’t know if this is still the case on what they claim to track or not today.

So basically it is a biased list of what one small part of the industry sells in a short period of time that the NYT then tweaks to ignore reality if they feel like it anyway. And this isn’t just my opinion as a disgruntled former NYT bestseller, this has gone to court. Authors have sued the NYT which is where the “editorial” thing comes from.

This gets some attention periodically when somebody really famous raises a stink about it. A couple years ago it was Elon. Before that it was Mike Rowe. Etc. But then regular people all forget and go back to thinking the NYT‘s bestseller list isn’t as full of shit as everything else the NYT does.

Cancelled chancellor?

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The German Chancellor’s future looks unhappy, and eugyppius notes that even the lapdog mainstream media outlets who praised him last year are now publishing calls for his ouster:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.

Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.

Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.

Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.

Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.

Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.

Progressives instinctively side with the “oppressed” side of any argument

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a posted talking point:

Someone once observed that in any conflict, leftists will always side with whichever demographic causes the most social harm.

This creates a hierarchy, with White men (the primary civilization-builders) at the bottom, and third-world Muslims at the top.

Here’s why how this works.

In a healthy society, people who build civilization are revered, and people who cause social harm are despised. And there is a hierarchy that runs in the opposite order, with respect and resources going to those who serve civilization.

This creates a natural opportunity for power-hungry subversives. They can recruit each layer of this hierarchy by exploiting their resentment against those above them. All they must do is frame their merit-based status as unearned “privilege”.

White women were recruited to leftism by stoking their resentment of White men, and promising elevation above them.

What the White women were not told is that they would be placed beneath everyone else.

Often literally.

Black people were recruited by exploiting their resentment of Whites … but they weren’t told that every benefit they received would eventually be taken away and given to third world immigrants.

Homosexuals were promised elevation above the “breeders” (because children are needed for civilization, and sodomy is not), but no one told them that the trannies would rule over them.

And no one told the trannies that Muslim community would be allowed to segregate and oppress them far more brutally than the most ardent of White bigots.

The most brutal irony of all is that all of these groups who are recruited to fight for leftism end up far more brutally oppressed that they ever were by mainstream prosocial White society.

Because natural civilizational hierarchies are based on contribution.

There’s a certain amount of prejudice which exists because people can reason inductively, but if you are a mixed race lesbian engineer who can actually who build useful shit, then it’s at least possible for people to eventually overcome their surprise, and break you off a nice house in the suburbs and some forbearance wherein people don’t really talk about the real relationship between you and your “roommate”.

Under leftism inverted hierarchies, you have no such chance.

Sure, during the transitional phase you’ll be elevated for being a mixed-race lesbian, regardless of whether you can do anything useful or not. But then, the Muslims will be allowed to throw you off a roof when it’s time to pander to them, in turn.

This White (or White-passing) woman probably voted straight democrat and cheered for “MeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeToo”, to avenge her resentment against White men in general. She probably never dreamed that she would, in turn, not only be thrown under the bus, but that she would be targeted by the precise same weapons her sisters were given to unseat White men with.

And @jk_rowling found out in vivid, larger-than-life detail what happens to White feminists when the left has a new darling to cater to, who can be used to unravel some still-intact piece of civilization.

You see, by the early 21st century, the left had no more use for White feminists, because everything the left wanted to use them to destroy was already destroyed. Women were already spending their twenties and thirties on cubicle jobs and abortions, instead of marriages and children. The workforce was already doubled, and the price of labor had already crashed. Fertility rates were already dropping, and people were already marrying late, or never.

It was time to recruit a new wrecking ball, to turn against some other corner of the edifice of order, and the price of that was easy to pay … just confiscate everything you once gave them, and give it to the trannies instead.

The actual bodies of the White feminists (as well as all other women, and their daughters), could be used again, sold out to third world men who want to rape them, all by simply turning a blind eye.

And the best perk of all of this is that they’ll still vote for you.

Because reversing course requires admitting a mistake.

Making Real English Toffee from 1881

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Dec 2025

Rich, sweet pieces of Victorian Era toffee

City/Region: Everton, England
Time Period: 1881

Around Christmas, my house is full of candy and baked goods, and for me, toffee is one of the quintessential Christmas treats. Possibly invented by Molly Bushell in 1753 in Everton, just outside of Liverpool, toffee can be hard like the recipe we’re making here or of a softer, chewier variety.

While either option is delicious, this recipe is specifically for the hard style of Everton toffee. It’s a really simple recipe (the hardest part is waiting for it to come up to temperature), and is such a rich, decadent treat. The lemon extract adds a layer of acidic complexity to the toffee, but it doesn’t taste of lemon.

Feel free to dress yours up by adding some nuts to the dish before you pour the toffee over it, or sprinkle some chocolate chips over the toffee while it’s still hot so that they melt.

    Everton Toffee.
    Put one pound of brown sugar and one tea-cupful of cold water into a pan well rubbed with good fresh butter. Set it over a slow fire, and boil until the sugar has become a smooth, thick syrup, then stir into it half a pound of butter, and boil for half an hour. When sufficiently boiled, it may be tested by dropping some on a plate, and if it dries hard and can easily be removed, the toffee is ready for flavouring. For this purpose, add twenty or thirty drops of essence of lemon. Pour the toffee into a wide well-buttered dish. If liked, vinegar may be substituted for the water, then the lemon may be omitted.
    — Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, England, 1881

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QotD: Yes, the US Civil War was about slavery

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

… it might be useful to have a primer on the events leading up to the […] US Civil War. This is not the stuff they teach in school, kids, so don’t copy/paste it for your term papers, lest you get sent to the school psychologist and get put on all kinds of happy pills.

Preliminary: Yes, the […] Civil War was about slavery. I know it’s fashionable for the Very Clever Boys […] to deny this, but that’s the difference between “a grownup’s understanding of complex events” and “being a sperg that should’ve been shoved in a lot more lockers in high school”. There’s a difference between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions, as well as between “proximate” and “final” causes.

Slavery was the proximate cause of the First Civil War, the sufficient condition. The final cause, the necessary condition, was the same one that causes pretty much all the really nasty wars — two not-dissimilar-enough peoples living too close to each other. It’s the same reason English and Scots have never gotten along (feel free to go re-read Albion’s Seed here) — familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes. They’re close enough to each other that outsiders really can’t grok what the big deal is, which is always a recipe for disaster.

Same thing between the Puritan religious fanatics of New England and the honor-obsessed planters of the Old South. Had the US developed horizontally instead of vertically — if they’d been able to put the Rocky Mountains between them, say — they’d be two separate nations, with fairly cordial relations …

Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.

May 1, 2026

We are much more Brave New World than 1984

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Culturally, we had lots of warning from George Orwell and Aldous Huxley about their future — our present — and while we have had some success avoiding what Orwell feared for us, we’ve had much less success avoiding a Brave New World culture:

As the curtain of totalitarianism descended across much of the globe, in the mid-twentieth century, the Western intellectual class pointed to George Orwell’s 1984 as a blueprint for societal ruin.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with Orwell’s magnum opus, but for those who don’t know the gist: Orwell envisioned a dystopian future governed by a panoptic state, where an externally imposed oppression would ruthlessly strip humanity of its autonomy, its history, and its capacity for critical thought.

It is a great novel and many believe it was prophetic (I certainly believe parts of it ring true), but, as the cultural critic Neil Postman astutely observed in his foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, it was not Orwell but Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, who accurately mapped the specific destiny of the modern collapse.

Huxley recognised a far more insidious threat:

    What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

No “Big Brother” is required to deprive a populace of its cognitive liberty. He foresaw a society that would come to adore the very technologies that undid its capacity to think.

Where Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley feared there would eventually be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one left who wanted to read one. Where Orwell feared the truth would be actively concealed, Huxley feared it would be drowned in an endless sea of irrelevance. Ultimately, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us, while Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

[…]

The Collapse of Literacy in the Intellectual Elite

The symptoms of this cognitive counter-revolution are visible not only in the general populace but at the very apex of the educational system, signalling a crisis that threatens the reproduction of the intellectual class itself. Over the past decade, professors at elite academic institutions have sounded the alarm regarding a precipitous and bewildering decline in student literacy. In a widely discussed exposition in The Atlantic, Nicholas Dames, a professor of Columbia University’s required Literature Humanities course since 1998, noted that his undergraduate students, the supposed academic elite of the nation are now “bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester“.1

Two decades ago, Dames’s classes effortlessly engaged in sophisticated, week-to-week analyses of lengthy texts like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Today, the landscape is unrecognisable. In 2022, a first-year student confessed to Dames that during her entire tenure at a public high school, she had never been required to read a single book cover-to-cover.2 Instead, her education consisted of excerpts, isolated poems, and fragmented news articles. This is a systemic failure; middle and high schools have largely ceased assigning whole books, breaking them down into easily digestible, context-free fragments to accommodate dwindling attention spans. High-achieving students can still decode words, but they struggle to muster the sustained attention or cognitive ambition required to immerse themselves in substantial texts. As technology provides instant gratification, the sustained labor of reading feels deeply unnatural to a generation raised on screens.

This anecdotal evidence from the highest echelons of the academy is overwhelmingly corroborated by a mountain of empirical data. The decline in sustained reading and linguistic proficiency is measurable and accelerating.

  1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
  2. Ibid

Spain joins the awkward squad

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Conservative Woman, Bepi Pezzulli outlines a few ways that the Spanish government is moving in quite different directions than their NATO allies and fellow EU members:

Torre del Oro (Tower of Gold) – Calle Almirante Lobo, Seville – Spanish flag” by ell brown is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wants the privileges of alliance without the duties of one. Madrid remains in Nato, hosts critical American military infrastructure, and speaks the language of Atlantic solidarity – but only when convenient. On the central strategic questions of the age – Russia, Israel, and the wider Western posture in the Mediterranean – it increasingly behaves like a spoiler. What is troubling is that Spain is not merely posturing: it is rewriting its entire conception of statecraft, treating alliance as a shield, hostility as leverage, and strategic ambiguity as a governing doctrine.

When Washington needed alignment, Sánchez offered obstruction. When Israel faced existential war, Madrid offered moral lectures. When the West sought energy discipline against Moscow, Spain found room for Russian gas. All while preserving the old imperial obsession with Gibraltar and extracting advantages from London over the Rock.

Spain has discovered the pleasures of consequence-free hostility. That needs to end.

Anti-Americanism with diplomatic immunity

Sánchez has carefully cultivated the old European left’s anti-American reflexes: Nato when subsidised, moral neutrality when sacrifice is required. His government publicly resisted support for American military operations linked to Iran escalation and signalled clear reluctance to facilitate use of Spanish bases such as Rota and Morón for operations that might implicate Madrid politically. The message was unmistakable: American security guarantees are welcome but strategic co-operation is negotiable. The rhetoric matched the policy. “No to war” was not merely a slogan for domestic consumption. Sánchez is deliberately positioning Spain as the righteous dissenter against Washington’s harder strategic line.

At the same time, Spain maintained substantial imports of Russian gas well into the European sanctions era. While pipeline politics consumed Brussels, Madrid benefited from a convenient moral distinction: condemning Moscow loudly while continuing commercial accommodation where useful. The formal sanctions architecture left open some loopholes, and Spain was happy to live inside them.

An ally that profits from ambiguity while others bear the strategic burden is not an ally in the full sense. As US War Secretary Pete Hegseth noted, “An alliance cannot be ironclad if in reality or perception it is seen as one-sided”.

From criticism of Israel to open diplomatic hostility

On Israel, Sánchez has moved beyond criticism into active diplomatic confrontation. Recognition of Palestine was presented as humanitarian principle. In practice, it rewarded maximalism at the worst possible moment. Madrid helped transform October 7 from a terrorist massacre demanding strategic clarity into another European seminar on Israeli restraint. Spain became one of the loudest governmental amplifiers of the anti-Zionist campaign in Western Europe. Ministers normalised rhetoric that blurred the distinction between criticism of Israeli policy and systematic delegitimisation of the Jewish state itself. Arms restrictions followed. Then diplomatic actions. Symbolism became policy.

Gibraltar: Madrid’s imperial nostalgia

Spain’s sanctimony would be easier to tolerate if it were not paired with its own colonial fixation. For decades, Madrid has pursued sovereignty claims over Gibraltar with theological persistence. Brexit offered a fresh opening. With Brussels behind it, Spain extracted a remarkably favourable negotiating posture over the future relationship of the Rock with both the European Union and the United Kingdom. London, in the hands of the most Europhile government in recent history, conceded far more than many British voters imagined when they heard the word “sovereignty”. Spain never abandoned the long game. It simply learned to play it through institutions until a weaker opponent appeared. Madrid insists Gibraltar is unfinished history. Fair enough: is it not time then to conclude the same about Ceuta and Melilla?

“Second Dawn”, Childhood’s End, and the Nuclear Age

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 5 Dec 2025

A quick look at two Arthur C. Clarke stories from the early 1950s that pair well as allegories for the still-new Cold War fears of the time.

00:00 Intro
03:03 Psychics and Nukes
03:37 “Second Dawn”
09:13 The Phileni
11:50 New World, New Dangers

Audio note: On the previous vid (Riddick) I used some new tools for post-processing the audio. It was much cleaner, removed almost all the noise … and the response has been entirely negative. It seems people don’t miss the wind and the birds until they’re gone. So I’m back to the old approach of using essentially raw sound.

EDIT: If you’re not seeing a link to the old Childhood’s End video on the pop-up card or the end screen, here’s the link. • Childhood’s End (Youtube Copyright Edit)

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QotD: Socialism

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The prime fact of human nature which the wise statesman must take into account is that men will exert themselves for their own benefit, or for that of their families, regarded as an extension of themselves, as they will exert themselves for no one else; and, in particular, men are not prepared to work for the state or for any other collectivity as they will work for themselves or for their families … If it is made impossible for him to advance himself or his family by his exertions, the average man will cease to exert himself. No motive comparable in its effects … has yet been known in the history of the human race … Because socialism expects the average man to exert himself for the state as he would for himself, … the socialist is doomed to disappointment when he comes to put his ideas into practice.

Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.

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