The reason why the Trump administration failed to bring about a regime change in Iran is, as I said from the very beginning, that Iranians like their regime and are not interested in changing it. The only two ways towards a regime change are:

1. The people massively hate and despise the existing system (Ukraine 2013).

2. Somebody from the outside bombs the country into dust and rapes the entire population (Germany 1945).

The idea that the Iranians dislike their regime is a Western projection. In the two scenarios outlined above, regime change happens because the existing regime loses legitimacy in the eyes of the population. You cannot rule without the consent of the ruled. Once the majority of the population thinks that the regime is ridiculous and believes none of the regime’s ideology, the regime falls apart (USSR, 1991). You don’t even need to nudge it for it to fall apart. None of this happened in Iran.

There is an old saying: where there is nothing you can do, there should be nothing that you want. There is nothing we can do for Iranians or in Iran. It’s time to learn the lesson, close this chapter, and move on.

This is Danilo Yefimov. He’s 21 years old. He is currently being tortured in a jail by Russians for making a small donation to a Ukrainian charity:

Danilo was sentenced to 12 years in jail. He is deeply religious and his faith is the only thing that keeps him alive. Danilo is trying to build an iconostasis for the prison chapel. He hopes to survive long enough to complete it.

There are endless stories like that. The victims always look like Danilo.

As I’ve been saying.

The reason why I post images and not actual tweets is that WordPress is, once again, refusing to let me embed links. It happens every once in a while and then clears up.

Going back to my point, Putin doesn’t like white people.

I’m not a particular fan of Sundar Pichai, but these are such insufferable spoiled brats:

Rude, entitled little fools. They have a really famous person who achieved an enormous lot, coming to speak to them, and they are so full of themselves that they think he’s incapable of offering them anything even a little bit valuable.

These same graduates are going to whine incessantly about how there are no good jobs and they can’t afford anything.

I didn’t want to shit on everybody’s celebrations yesterday, which is why I’m only posting it today.

The Lavra was founded in 1051. It survived Mongols in 1210. It will survive Mongols in 2026. It still hurts, though. This is the patrimony of humanity, the true culture, a miracle of faith that has been destroyed.

I don’t understand the Emily May phenomenon. She is a divorced mother, one of whose children is disabled. She’s a world-class nag who believes that she’s entitled to live like a little girl forever. She expects a man to be her servant. She feels very unfairly done by because of mental load. She dislikes sex and turned this into an enormous part of her public persona. She’s not terribly looking, but she’s not a ravishing beauty either, especially because she thinks that it’s below her dignity to make any efforts to look nice.

You’d think that there would be no takers for a nagging, permanently exhausted and permanently unhappy woman who isn’t offering any children of one’s own or any sex. You’d be wrong, though. Emily May is engaged to a very nice-looking firefighter who is apparently happy with her plastering her repulsion at the idea of having sex with him all over the internet. Why would a man agree to this? Is the shortage of women so bad? Ok, let’s say it is so bad. Why isn’t it better to remain single? How can it be worth it to come to work knowing that all of your buddies have spent the evening laughing at your fiancee’s social media posts where she explains how rarely she agrees to have sex with you?

Remember when I wrote about Anthony Trollope’s description of male characters who take responsibility for the emotional health of their marriages?

I have a much more recent example of this phenomenon in the novel titled Nothing But The Truth by a San Francisco author John Lescroart. The book was published in the late 1990s, but a man’s role in the emotional well-being of his marriage that it describes is much closer to Anthony Trollope’s than to anything we can see today.

Dismas Hardy, the main character of the novel, discovers that his wife Frannie has gotten herself entangled with another man, which ultimately lands her in jail and places their marriage at a great risk. Without pouting at the ditzy blockhead that the wife is, Hardy proceeds to remedy the situation. He takes responsibility for having allowed the situation to get this far and not staying in control of the emotional environment of the family. There is no question for him of not saving the marriage. Hardy acts with the same dignity and seriousness as Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser and proceeds to undo the damage to his marriage. Throughout all that, the wife keeps acting like a surly toddler, but none of her acting out manages to shake Hardy’s resolution to save the family.

This is not something we see depicted any longer. I could list books and TV shows for hours where the wife is the adult and the husband is an emotional teenager in need of her constant correction. We forget that for the longest time and until quite recently, it was not like that at all. The idea that men have to be managed emotionally by their women is something we invented fifteen minutes ago and have made true simply by virtue of repetition.

Chirbes writes about why a novel of happy love is impossible:

The happy moments of love—fortunate loves—are difficult or impossible to turn into a novel. I would have to search my memory to find convincing literary portrayals of happy love. Narrative is change, a transition from one state to another, whereas love is a suspension.

—Rafael Chirbes, Diaries

This was also the idea behind Isaac Rosas’ brilliant novel Feliz Final. Love is about permanence. Fluidity, thus, is anti-love.

Rafael Chirbes, reading and writing in his small, messy house in Beniarbeig. Me, reading and writing about Chirbes in a college town in Southern Illinois. You, wherever you are, reading and thinking about what I write about Chirbes. All of us together, we are sustaining and preserving the edifice of culture.

All of us are putting a little sliver of our effort and time into making culture possible. When we read authors like Cervantes, Balzac or Anthony Trollope and create a window of possibility that our children will also read and love them, this is how we make culture. It is one of the most important things we can do, yet somehow it seems strangely self-indulgent.

If you start feeling guilty about spending too much time reading and thinking, tell yourself that you are doing one of the most important things a human being can do. You’re creating culture.

Chirbes about writing as a form of self-inflicted violence:

I feel like copying out Cicero’s entire paragraph on wine, simply for the pleasure of doing so: it is so beautifully written. It possesses that kind of harmony that only a well-ordered mind can impart to writing. The words seem to flow effortlessly, creating an illusion of ease for the reader, as if writing were an activity as natural as breathing, rather than the painstaking construction of an artifice demanding a significant degree of self-imposed violence. The order and precision of writing arise from an unnatural exercise, from an inhuman mental discipline, just as dance or song relies on the display of that same violence inflicted upon the body’s limbs and organs.

—Rafael Chirbes, Diarios

This is a reminder that if you’re writing and it’s painful, that’s fine. It’s supposed to be painful. You’re trying to extract order out of chaos, like a sculptor who tortures a chunk of marble to drag a beautiful form out of it. You’re wrestling meaning out of a jumble of words.