Have you heard about the post of this sad, lost loser who realized he was about to marry a woman he didn’t love but whose Daddy manipulated him into marrying her anyway? Now this victim of patriarchy has written a post about the experience:

With a knowing smile [the father] said, “Seth, you’re being totally selfish. So I’m going to make this really simple: marriage isn’t for you. You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself, you’re marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children. Who do you want to help you raise them? Who do you want to influence them? Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.”

In short, a castrating Daddy at his emasculating best.

Of course, there are many such sad schmucks in the world, so 26 million people in miserable marriages linked, re-blogged, tweeted and posted this testament to masochism. And they didn’t do it to ridicule the idiot who wrote it.

Somewhere, a group of divorce lawyers is dying to get its hands on the names and addresses of these people because here are 26 million very nasty divorces about to happen.

The patriarch’s advice is not completely useless, though. If you want a really happy marriage, do the exact opposite of what this guy suggests. And then the divorce lawyers will never get any of your money.

Anthony Beevor says that Spanish fascism differed from Nazism “in its profoundly conservative nature” and in being “fundamentally reactionary.”

Unless by “conservative and reactionary” Beevor means only and exclusively “religious”, then I have no idea what he is saying. Hitler came up with the 4 Ks that were supposed to define a woman’s role in society: Kinder, Kuche (sorry, there needs to be an um-laut to preserve the meaning), Kirche and whatever is the German for dresses. How do you get any more conservative and reactionary than this?

Or do British historians still hold on to the geriatric canard about the modernist impulse at the core of the Soviet Communism and German Nazism?

People from countries that have experienced (or still experience) Communism prostitute themselves with an eagerness that is unmatched in countries with no direct knowledge of Communism. When I speak of prostitution, I mean, or course, both male and female sale of sexual services, so please don’t annoy me by referring to prostitution as something that only women do.

In my opinion, there is an enormous difference between what I call “sex work” and “prostitution.” A sex worker is an honest professional who provides specified services for money. Far be it from me to judge sex workers for the way they make a living.

Prostitution, however, is a term I apply to a very different kind of activities. What shocked me most in Cuba, for instance, was that you could start talking to people – other students, people just like you – about literature, religion, life, anything, but before long, they would succumb to the temptation to offer sex for compensation. This kind of prostitution is dishonest, sneaky, and it bastardizes human relationships by blurring the line between a financial transaction and friendship, affection, love, etc.

I’ve been to Mexico and the Dominican Republic and, of course, there is prostitution there but it exists nowhere near on the level of Cuba. Or Eastern European countries.

The reason why Communism leads to massive prostitution is the following: work that doesn’t benefit and enrich an individual feels absolutely unnatural to human beings. You can dupe people into working for the benefit of the state, the society, the collective, the group, etc with a bunchy of attractive slogans, but that will only work for a very short time. The longest this will work is one generation and that is only if you slaughter people by the million to keep their enthusiasm alive.

Soon enough, people will begin to detest the very concept of work if work is divorced from personal, individual, competitive self-interest. They will conceive such a hatred of the very concept of work that even after their society abandons its Communist dreams, they will do absolutely anything whatsoever to avoid working.

Then, of course, prostitution becomes their answer to everything.

Severe trauma makes one want to crawl under a blanket and lie there, trembling and terrified. If, however, you manage to overcome this understandable impulse, you might find that the trauma has radicalized you, given you a powerful impulse, transformed you into an arrow shot into the skies.

It is fashionable to try to deaden the pain of trauma with psychotropic drugs. This approach denies that tragedy is part of human experience. It castrates survivors, turning them into zombies who reject a big part of their humanity for fear of feeling, living, and being.

There is no life without pain, and hiding from pain in artificial contentment equals a refusal to live.

Tragedy can be transformative, if we allow ourselves to face it.