In Russian, the word “doctor” shares the root with the word “liar.”

This happens because “to lie” and “to talk” were originally the same word. A doctor, in the early Middle Ages, was a person who talked to you and tried to talk the illness away.

And then some people say that talk therapy is a modern invention.

“Anti-semitism is not just one among many ideologies; it is ideology as such. It embodies the. . . pure form of ideology, establishing its elementary coordinates: the social antagonism is mystified or displaced so that its cause can be projected onto the external intruder.”

And now just consider how often we see this little game played out in all collectives where conflict brews. How often does a symbolic “Jew” appear to hide the true causes of the trouble from its participants? You understand, of course, that the symbolic Jew can easily be a symbolic Muslim, immigrant, or even a lover, if we are talking about the tiny collective of a couple.

Zizek is a fucking genius. He is not in my ideological camp but I can’t avoid admiring somebody who packs so much brilliance into every sentence.

In his most recent book he says that Ayn Rand’s fantasy of creative capitalists on strike came true during the Occcupy Wall Street protests. Of course, the protesters were not the exploited and the downtrodden like they claimed to be. Rather, they were the exploiters upset that their chance to exploit was slipping away. Which is also what I was saying from the start, albeit not nearly as elegantly.

N. and I are watching a Soviet trivia quiz from 1982. (And discovering that we both remember it from watching it back when we were 6 years old. Which is very creepy.)

“Thanks to this plant, the Soviet people can see sausage, candy, milk, and other foods in our grocery stores,” the show’s host announces. “Please name this plant.”

“Wow, I had now idea hashish was discussed so openly on Soviet television,” N. says.

He is right, the only way of seeing all of that stuff in Soviet grocery stores was by getting stoned out.

There were two branches of science that were fiercely condemned in the USSR, cybernetics and genetics. Stalin’s favorite biologist Trofim Lysenko persecuted Soviet geneticists, putting many of them to death or sending them to concentration camps.

Lysenko believed a variety of really bizarre things. One of the weirdest among them was his insistence that one species can spontaneously produce a completely different species. If you leave a pile of dirty laundry lying in a basket, the laundry might give birth to mice. Mind you, the idea wasn’t that the mice would get attracted to the dirty laundry and come to live in it from outside the basket. No, the belief was that the laundry would spawn the mice. According to this theory, wheat and rye gave birth to weeds. And a pine-tree could give birth to an apple-tree branch if it felt like doing so. This process was given the name of “a dialectical jump.”

Yes, this was the kind of scholarship the USSR produced in the 1940s-1950s. Soviet biologists would visit international conferences and cringe with shame while delivering these Medieval “discoveries” about bedclothes producing mice and wheat giving birth to weeds. Imagine how the scholars felt reciting this sort of thing in front of their more enlightened colleagues from other countries. They had to do it, though, to save their lives.*

Lysenko, however, was not as simple as he sounds. He also believed that genetically modified foods were inherently dangerous and that the early promise of GM could lead to unexpected and tragic results in the future. He believed that nature had to be studied and treated with respect and care. He passionately rejected the idea that nature existed solely so that human beings could use it for their own benefit. He warned that we would one day be very sorry for our uncontrollable exploitation of nature’s resources.

Everybody laughed at his suggestion that our planet is a single organism, whose every part was interacting with other parts, and that you can’t sacrifice one species without damaging other species. Everybody laughed when Lysenko said we cannot exploit nature without facing serious consequences as a result. These ideas seemed as funny as his belief in mice-producing bed sheets. They don’t seem as funny any more, do they?

* There is a beautiful novel called White Garments by Vladimir Dudintsev that tells about this in detail. I highly recommend it because it is amazing.

I’m pruning my blogroll as I’m moving it over to The Old Reader, and I’m discovering how many blogs closed down in 2012. Was 2012 some sort of a fateful year of blogging?

The 800+ blogroll turned out to be much smaller than it was supposed to be. I will need to populate it with robust blogs that are not about to die.

Instead of the word “myth” a student used the word “meth” twice. Should I read something into it?

So Feedly turned out to be incapable of handling my enormous blogroll. It freezes up and takes forever to scroll down. And it isn’t the fault of my Internet connection because, with a gamer in the house, we have the fastest connection available in the area.

I’m seeing that many people are reading the blog through The Old Reader, so now I’m trying it as a place for my blogroll. It also gives me a chance to prune the blogroll because it has grown huge and wild.

Two stupid, brainless, idiotic creatures stopped their stupid, ugly, idiotic van right in front of my door and decided to sit there with the van door open. They also had a huge dog in there that was obviously neither muzzled nor leashed. Most people seem to think that dog ownership puts them outside the requirements of civility and polite co-existence with humans.

I had no idea about the van, the losers or the dog when I decided to leave the house to take a walk. So I opened the door and saw this enormous creature literally flying at me. Its brainless, idiotic owner was mewling pathetically in the animal’s wake as the brain-dead loser that she is, “Buster, get back. . .” Because animals understand language and really care what their stupid owners want them to do.

I barely had the time to step back and slam the door in front of the beast.

And now imagine what would happen if I were pushing a pram* with a baby in front of me. I would have never had the time to turn around with the pram. Or if I were carrying the baby. Or of the kid ran out first, like kids like to do.

I could have also been disabled or elderly. This vicious thing can easily knock a smaller or a frailer person off her feet.

The two stupid flower-power losers batted their idiotic eye-lashes at me, sang “Sooooorry. . .” and pretended to leash the creature. Of course when I was coming back from my walk, the animal was unleashed again, and the whole scene repeated itself. The freaks drove off fast to avoid the need to explain their behavior.

It was super cool to see all this great female solidarity from two freakazoids who are still young enough to think it’s entertaining to scare pregnant women with dogs.

The are two categories of people who always turn out to be cruel and heartless to the point of complete sociopathy: the vocally and showily religious and the so-called animal lovers.

* I’m stressed out and I’m shaking, so I don’t remember what you call it in the US.

Let’s all admit the painfully obvious already. In the 8 years that Bush Jr. was President, the Republicans got incomparably more of what they wanted to see happen than the Democrats will get out of Obama’s 8 years in the office. And before you blame that on the Congress, think back to the way Obama worked with a Democratic Congress and the way Bush worked with a Democratic Congress. Bush was getting more out of the Dem majority in the House than Obama was.

A very interesting article in The Nation explains very well why that is:

Open to all, the Democratic Party has no ideological requirements for membership. Anyone can register, making it little more than a coalition of social forces in which various groups contest for influence under a common banner. The American left, without a natural base and condemned to support the Democratic “lesser evil,” has traditionally conceded legitimacy to forces governing in the center.

In all the years I have lived in the US (CT, MD, IN, IL/MO), I have met two people who voted Republican. For obvious reasons, the absolute majority of people I meet are not Republicans. And even though I’m not very sociable, with all this moving around, the number of people ends up being significant. Among all these people, there has been one single person who voted Democrat because she really liked the party, admired its leadership, and was hugely enthusiastic about it. Everybody else – and I mean, everybody – voted Democrat because the other guys were even worse.

Just ask yourself, isn’t it true that you have been voting Democrat for quite a while simply because you disliked the Republican candidate even more than the one you felt forced to support?

As a result, even though the majority of the country dislikes “the other guy” and resignedly votes Democrat, the Republicans are still much stronger as a united forces. And why? Because they are a united force:

House Republicans bind themselves to an ideological code, enforcing a set of standards that ironically resemble that of European socialist parties: dues are paid, commitments made explicit and members occasionally expelled. Declarations like Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” unite conservatives in Congress, while a network of think tanks, political action committees, grassroots activists and organizations at the state level keep them setting the national discourse, even as the demographics continue to skew in the Democratic Party’s favor.

As I have been saying forever, the Republicans have an agenda. They believe in it and defend it passionately with the kind of enthusiasm that the Liberals in this country have not been able to muster for, I’d say, about 30 years. (I haven’t been in the country for 30 years, so I might be wrong here. Please feel free to correct if you remember more recent instances.)

The Nation’s new contributor is absolutely right when he says that:

The conservative program is not only “on the agenda,” it is often enacted, and for good reason: the right is generally more confident, more ideologically consistent and better organized than those who oppose it.

 

I don’t like a single thing on the Republican agenda. However, I do admire the consistency, the strength and the dedication the party exhibits time and again. It is so refreshingly different from the impotent mewlings of the Dems who always have an excuse for not delivering. Jeez, folks, after the gun control legislation that enjoys an enormous popular support failed pathetically in the Democratic Senate, I don’t think it makes sense to take the Dems seriously at all. The only reason they still have a place in politics is that the Republicans are unwilling to dump the religious freaks with the velocity this noble action deserves.

This could be the perfect moment to reorganize the party completely. Create a program, an agenda, put it in writing, pledge to carry it out by a certain time. There is a window of opportunity while the Republicans are still incapable of getting rid of the religious crazies.

The Democrats need to start believing in something more defined than the vague “change.” Let’s remember that if you really want change – and this works for absolutely any area of human existence – you need to visualize specifically and concretely what you want the result of the change to be.

Read the linked article, it’s very refreshing, compared to what The Nation usually has on offer.