I’m watching the one-sided political debate between Tymoshenko and Tymoshenko in Ukrainian while translating a text about oil containers from English into Russian.

In Ukrainian (and Russian), the word  for “courage” is “manliness.” It sounded really funny when Tymoshenko wished that her male opponent were as “manly” as she was and had come to the debate. Of course, nobody in  Ukraine (and Russia) would identify the situation as funny.

Only a Ukrainian Jewish woman can look like this at the age of 53 and after being tortured in jail for several years. I’m not a fan of Tymoshenko politically, but I have to admire the resilience.

Of course, Ukraine remained Ukraine, so this election’s front-runner didn’t show up for the debate, leaving his opponent to debate herself.

I think if would be cool if she won because her opponent is not only corrupt (everybody is) but also a man. And between two corrupt leaders, I’d choose a woman because at least having a female president will give us international prestige.

Some Portuguese-speaking freakazoid has accused me of promoting totalitarianism because I said I celebrate the freedom from identities imposed by birth. But what can you expect from a loser who take Regnerus’s anti-gay “studies” seriously?

The Russian terrorists in the occupied territories in Ukraine have started a campaign against alcoholism. They go into stores, demand at gun-point that the store owners hand over their stock of alcohol, and imbibe it. They keep saying they love Ukrainians and want to save them, which must be true since they are ready to sacrifice their  own health to spare Ukrainians the dangers of alcoholism.

Blogger Z writes:

Academics say you must be able to live anywhere but I think it is because they do not know what it is to form a deep connection with land. They feel that to have preferences about places is a form of snobbery or a lack of hardiness.

I think this is more than just a belief that is sustained by academics. Isn’t the American identity based on the idea that attachment to a specific geographical space is a sign of weakness?

This is a country of immigrants, and everybody who wanted to survive here needed to get rid of the nostalgic attachment to home. The national symbol is that of a settler who keeps moving to the West because “someplace else” is always better than “right here.” People move away for college as a matter of course, everybody has a dream place where they’d like to live which is always located thousands of miles away, businesses shut down and move overseas with extreme ease, and even in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere anybody who says “I’m from here” looks apologetic and uncomfortable with being such an unusually rooted individual.

I’ve led a nomadic existence for decades but now that we are buying a house here in Southern Illinois, I want to discover what this region is really like. It looks like I might spend the rest of my life here, which is a novel and not unpleasant idea, so it makes sense to know what “here” actually means.

Soon, I will have a car and I will drive around, visiting neighboring towns and observing life there. I have no doubt that this will be a fascinating process.

Everybody is linking to some boring study that is supposed to prove that Americans are growing less religious:

The study, by the Public Religion Research Institute, used an intriguing method to try to measure exaggeration: It asked the same set of questions in telephone interviews, and in an online survey, and compared the results. Researchers say that online surveys, with their lack of human questioners, significantly reduce “social desirability bias” in polling — the tendency of people to exaggerate behaviors that they think will impress others. In this study, the group that took the online surveys reported much lower levels of worship attendance than those interviewed by telephone.

All such questionnaires demonstrate is that people have chosen to say something or other for a completely unknown reason at this particular point in time. Using them to prove anything beyond that is sheer idiocy. Landline telephones and the Internet are used by very different kinds of people, which can also have an influence on the results.

Besides, the US is predominantly Protestant. And for Protestants church attendance does not correlate with religiosity.

The only things such “studies” prove is that sociology is a pseudo-science par excellence.

“It is the salience of gender and gender-related norms, rather than gender per se, that lead to differences between women and men.” (Seger, C. R., Smith, E. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2009). Subtle activation of a social categorization triggers group-level emotions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(3), 460–467.)

My friend Entrepreneur and I have conducted a fascinating social experiment this week. In response to Entrepreneur’s provocative post, I received over 900 comments and emails. Out of these comments, I have had to ban over 300. But it is precisely out of those banned comments that I learned the most important lessons.

The 300+ comments that I deleted without reading them all started with the proclamation I warned people would get them banished: “men and women are different!” The most curious thing about these comments was how long they all were. Most were over ≈500 words. I copy-pasted the longest one into Word and discovered that it was over 3,500 words. It started with, “I know this will not get published, but still I need to say this. . .”

Just imagine this: people are sitting there, composing veritable essays THAT THEY KNOW NOBODY WILL EVER READ. They are speaking into a void, trying to fill it with words. They void, of course, is not located on this blog. It’s located inside them.

Sadly, many people are too stupid and lazy to work out their own individual identity, their own unique worldview. This would be a life-long project of self-improvement and learning, and many people choose not to think or make an effort. In the absence of an individual philosophy of life, they allow outside authorities to fill their inner void with content. The easiest way to organize your existence in the absence of a personality of your own is by adopting some collective identity. Gender roles work beautifully for this purpose because zero effort is required to practice them. Why figure out whether you like pink, blue or orange when you can always allow some manipulative salesperson make that decision for you and make you feel like you actually have a meaning as a result of adopting this “preference”?

As to Entrepreneur’s problem, here is what was causing it. She was so dedicated to offering her workers the maximal autonomy and freedom from hierarchy that she ended up confusing them. Entrepreneur was convinced that everybody wants a workplace where they can choose their own hours, working style, attire, way of handling responsibilities, goals, etc.

But that isn’t true. People do not want that in the least. Just like many do not want a world where they are free to emote, think, act and exist without the constraints of idiotic gender norms. In Russian, we call this, “Put back on my muzzle, because my face gets too cold without it.” Freedom is so terrifying that people feel the need to defend their captivity from anybody who encroaches upon it.

Entrepreneur’s employees were left by her without strictly defined roles. In the absence of punch cards, dress codes, pink slips, employee manuals and other attributes of a rigid hierarchical structure, they didn’t know who they were. So they grasped for a collective identity to inform their behavior, and the one that’s most easily accessible was gender.

Traditional patriarchal gender roles are designed in a way that makes men great workers and women horrible ones. Both men and women at Entrepreneur’s company were resorting to (non-innate, completely manufactured, not in the least hard-wired) gender roles to fill the vacuum she left with her easy-going managerial style. The results were different because these norms obligated men to work well and women to act like infantile princesses.

When I forbade the wordy affirmations of gender identities on my blog, I created the same void for the commenters that the one Entrepreneur created for her employees. Since collective identities are artificial constructs, they are in need of constant and very verbose reiterations. The empty shells of human beings who left these 300+ pathetic “men and women are different” comments perceived an existential threat in my assertion that what they see as personality is actually nothingness.

Seventy years ago today Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars from the Crimea in an act of racist genocide.

Every year, the Tatars come into the streets in a peaceful demonstration to honor the memory of the victims of Stalin’s deportation.

This year, the occupational Russian authorities have prohibited the peaceful memorial service and have spent all day trying to intimidate the Tatars into not holding it.

Russia has been rewriting history and labeling Stalin “an effective manager” and the world’s savior instead of a bloody tyrant, so the demonstration to remind the world of his crimes is not allowed.

It is an unspoken rule of military procurement that any IT or communications technology will invariably be years behind what is commercially available or technically hobbled to ensure security. One case in point is the uncomfortably backronymed NeRD, or Navy e-Reader Device, an electronic book so secure the 300 titles it holds can never be updated. Ever…

I wonder how it was decided that 300 books were all a person ever needed.

An old Jew sits in the corner of the Russian store in St. Louis.

In emigration, “Russian” always means Jewish. If you want to say that somebody is an actual Russian, you say “He’s Russian Russian,” to which the reply is always, “Like, Russian Russian?” And you have to answer, “Yes, Russian Russian.”

The old Jew at the store is the owner’s father.

“Young lady, look at your husband,” he tells me. “He is wandering round the store, he looks sad. I know what he needs. I will tell you what he needs because you are a young lady and you don’t understand these things. He looks like he needs a cake. See? He is nodding. Let’s go get him a cake. Wait, why are you taking that old thing? Put it down, put it down, I have a fresh one hidden right here behind all this old, stale stuff. Here it is. And you see? It’s cheaper! Ah, what did I say? I know what you need!”

The old Jew’s daughter-in-law emerges from the back room.

“Father, do you want tea? Sofa is making tea. Do you want tea?”

“No, I do not want tea,” the old Jew replies.

“Father, think, just think about it. Do you want tea? I think you want tea.”

“Ah, leave me alone, I don’t want tea.”

“What am I going to do with this man?” the daughter-in-law exclaims. “Sofa, Sofa, did you hear this? Father says he doesn’t want any tea. Sofa, where have you gone and hidden yourself? Come here, you need to hear what father is saying.”

Sofa comes out of the back room.

“What did you say, what? You want tea?” she addresses the old man.

“No, leave me alone, I said I don’t want tea, I don’t, what have you come out here for?”

“Have you thought about it?” Sofa asks. “I think you need to think about it. Basia, have you told him to think about it?” she turns to her sister-in-law.

“Yes, I told him to think about it,” Basia responds.

“And what did he say?” asks Sofa.

In the midst of this exchange I push the overwhelmed “Russian Russian” out of the Russian store to spare him a culture shock that would be too heavy.