It is shocking to see how naive people can be:

In just the past week, rebel antiaircraft missiles have struck at least three Ukrainian air force planes in the region — two Sukhoi-25 fighters, and an An-26 military transport plane. . . Almost as soon as the plane [Malaysia Airlines] was downed today, Russian state news agency ITAR-Tass boasted“Donetsk People’s Republic militiamen shoot down Ukrainian Air Force An-26”. That makes it a little harder for Russian propagandists to turn around and blame it all on the Ukrainians.

Ha. Ha. Ha. The world wants to believe Ukrainians did it. So the world will believe just that.

Sixteen years and two weeks ago I was standing at a bus stop next to my building in Ukraine, knowing that I was seeing that street, those houses, that city for the very last time. The van was coming to take me away forever. And it couldn’t come soon enough. All I felt was hatred, alienation, disgust. It had been my organizing principle for years to leave. Never to see those people, those streets, never again. It didn’t matter where I’d go or what would happen next. Leaving was the entire point. The only point. There was nothing beyond that.

On the airplane, I was waiting for the moment when the flight attendant would announce that we had crossed the border. And once we heard, “We are now flying over Poland,” I had the distinct thought in my head, “I don’t care if the plane crashes now. As long as my remains don’t lie in that ground, I don’t care about anything else.”

In the first weeks in Canada, people kept dragging me from the roads because I kept walking into traffic. I’d lost the fear of death. The entire goal of my existence had been achieved and I felt the kind of ecstasy that obliterates any concern with life. Since then, of course, I formulated other goals and found other organizing principles, but let me tell you, that was one potent feeling.

I haven’t been back to Ukraine and I’m not planning to go. I’m not in touch with anybody there, not even relatives. I only go back in nightmares, the ones where my only concern is that I will not be able to escape before I die. In those nightmares, I desperately try to cross a border, any border, just to make sure I don’t get buried in the ground I hate so much.

I’ve written about all this many times before. None of this is new to anybody. (Here is one post, for instance. And here is another. And one more.) But my naïveté is as shocking to myself as anybody else’s. I honestly hoped that this personal history – which is pretty bizarre as immigrant histories go – would prevent people from dismissing me with the condescending, “Oh, who cares what you say when you are so obviously blinded by irrational patriotism.” But that didn’t happen.

It is very disturbing to be so misunderstood. And so naive. People have been so infected by patriotism that they project it onto everything and everybody, and evidence be damned. Given that the nation-state is dying, this intense attachment to a corpse doesn’t bode well for the planet’s future. What won’t people do to keep it around?

Just finished reading Sophie Hannah’s brilliant new book The Telling Error. There is an interesting question in the book:

Why is sports doping worse than stoned writers?

It is true that athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs are disqualified and vilified while artists who do the same thing never are even marginally criticized.

My answer is that so very little is required of professional athletes in return for enormous amounts of money they get that people feel cheated when even that turns out to be fake. Artists, on the other hand, give so much that nobody really cares how they arrive at creating their gift.

What do you think?

What I don’t understand is why the Malaysia Airlines plane was flying right over the war zone and precisely in the area where terrorists have been shooting down one plane after another yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Is the world even aware of what is going on in the region?

The terrorists, of course, weren’t planning to shoot down a passenger airplane. They were sure it was yet another military airplane of the Ukrainian Army, like the ones they have been shooting down for weeks. They bragged about it minutes after shooting it down (“This will show those Ukrainians how to fly in our space! We warned them we’d shoot them down”). And when they realized the mistake, they tried to destroy the evidence. They shouldn’t have even bothered, though, because people only believe what they want to. No amount of proof will persuade those who need to believe the missile launch was ordered by either Poroshenko or Putin.

Deputy chairman of the State Duma International Affairs Committee said, “Will it make anybody feel better to know who shot down the plane?”

Yeah, like, whatever, man. Enough with the stupid plane already.

Horrible news:

Malaysia Airlines reported Thursday it had lost contact with a flight bound from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur over Ukraine.

The Interfax news agency said the airliner, with 295 people on board, crashed in Ukraine near the Russian border and that it may have been shot down.

The Interfax report said the plane came down 20 miles short of entering Russian airspace.

Terrorists are desperately trying not to let the conflict die down. This is the latest in their efforts to involve as many parties as possible in it.

I took a short break from the blog and, after coming back, discovered that people want to talk about the developments in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Everywhere on the Internet, bunches of mentally disturbed people use the conflict to exhibit their own, completely unrelated pathologies. Compared to most online spaces I’m aware of, we are a haven of psychological health here. So if readers want to talk about Israel / Palestine here, I’m open to that.

Since most people in the world (and I’m being generous with “most”, I think it’s more than that) dislike either the Jews or the Arabs (or, even more frequently, both), the Israeli-Palestinian hostilities give everybody a way to act out these feelings in a socially and psychologically safe context. Observe how the Russia-Ukraine conflict never elicits the same intensely emotional response in anybody who is not Russian or Ukrainian. There are nuclear weapons present in both conflicts, but just ask yourself who is scarier to you personally, the enormous Russia with its anti-West hysteria of ridiculous proportions or the tiny Israel / helpless Hamas. If the answer is the latter (and you don’t live in the conflict zone in question), see above on the subject of pathologies.

The current eruption of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is not being analyzed intelligently or insightfully anywhere. And I’ve read a lot of stuff on it, in a lot of very different places*. There is something going on that we don’t know, and all the mass hysteria is simply obscuring that fact. Both sides are trying harder than ever to ensure the hostilities don’t abate. By both sides I, of course, don’t mean the regular folks both in Israel and Palestine who just want to live their lives. But Hamas breaks the cease-fire almost as soon as it’s declared while Israelis shell a beach where kids are playing, as if bent on ensuring that Hamas retaliates even harder than it has been.  And I believe I could have easily dropped the “as if” from the previous sentence.

We should all be collectively and massively grateful to Israelis and Palestinians for providing us with regular opportunities to expel the bile of racism, contempt and hatred while feeling self-righteous and moral. Every article and book I have ever read on the subject of the conflict screams, “I’m so better than these hopelessly vile creatures!” Of course, the only way in which anybody is “better” than Palestinians and Israelis is that one’s ancestors did the dirty work of nation-building a while ago, thereby allowing one to feel hugely superior to those whose progenitors were not as considerate.

In every class, there is an official trouble-maker whose unspoken duty is to come up with a prank at the time when everybody needs it. In every collective, there is an evil-doer, loser, bad-ass or trouble-maker whose “job” it is to embody the badness others can’t afford to practice. Any permanent role, any chronic situation exists because everybody involved – everybody, I repeat – needs it. 

So let’s stop congratulating ourselves on being so much better than the direct participants in the conflict and ask ourselves, “Why do we need this conflict right now? What purpose is it serving for us at this particular moment?” I have a tentative answer that I will offer later but what really matters is that the discussion of the conflict starts to be reoriented away from “those bad, evil them” towards ourselves.

* For now, the most idiotic piece on the conflict I have seen is this one. Feel free to share the links that impressed you.

I have another huge translation order, so I turned the TV on. I can’t translate without somebody chattering in the background.

On one of the channels, Dr. Phil tells a woman with a domineering, controlling mother that the mother cannibalizes her life for her own good and out of love.

On another channel, there is a marathon of Law & Order: SVU.

I choose SVU because this show at least never presents torture and degradation of women as something cute and positive.

People are too funny:

Please note: this conversation starts about 10 minutes in — by this point my wife and I are both completely flustered by the oppressiveness of the rep.

So! Last week my wife called to disconnect our service with Comcast after we switched to another provider (Astound). We were transferred to cancellations (aka “customer retention”). . .

What I did not know is how oppressive this conversation would be. Within just a few minutes the representative had gotten so condescending and unhelpful I felt compelled to record the speakerphone conversation on my other phone.

And this is the comment from the website where I found the quote:

Trigger warning for anyone who’s ever been through this. You will have a raging PTSD episode.

Some folks have neither shame nor sense of proportion.

The whole thing reminded me of the old joke about a sadist and a masochist. The masochist says, “Torture me, torture me, I beg you.” And the sadist responds, “No, I won’t, no, I won’t.”

P.S. I really hope not to get any comments about oppressed customer reps.

Bureaucrats in Montreal are trying to shut down a pre-school for autistic children:

A private preschool in Montreal West for children with autism is facing possible closure, because the Quebec government says it doesn’t have the proper permit to operate.

The Little Red Playhouse caters to children with an autism spectrum disorder, giving them the special attention they need, so they can eventually transition more easily into the public school system.

Parents call the school a godsend.

There is absolutely no reason for the closure except that the bureaucrats can’t find a category for this school in their paperwork. Whatever that means.

Let’s sign this petition to tell the government of Quebec that closing the school is simply wrong.

It’s been said many times that if the GOP doesn’t dump the religious freaks immediately, it will go out of existence in the matter of just a couple of decades. This is self-evident to everybody, except for the most extreme of the Republicans. And, I mean, good for us because this self-immolation is funny to observe.

Here are some excerpts from a really good article explaining how massively the Millennials are detesting the GOP. It isn’t like this needs any proof because anybody who has met a young person realizes that the anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-gay, anti-pot, anti-government, anti-immigrant agenda does not even remotely resonate with the younger generation of iPads, YouTube, Tumblr, and texting. Still, it’s always fun to kick somebody when they are down.

Republicans were already destined for piecemeal decimation due to the declining numbers of their core constituency. But they don’t just have a demographic problem anymore; they have stylistic one. The conservative strategy of outrage upon outrage upon outrage bumps up against the policy preferences and the attitudes of millennials in perfect discord.

The point about the stylistic problem of the Republicans is well-taken. The ugly, vociferating older people who roll their eyes and stick their tongues out, promising fire and brimstone visited on anybody who wants to have a good time are just not cool.

The GOP has long staked a claim on The Disappearing Angry White Man, but they have apparently ever-narrowing odds of getting a bite at millennials, who appear to be more like The Somewhat Concerned Multicultural Moderate.

“The Somewhat Concerned Multicultural Moderate” is probably the best description I’ve ever seen of the Millennials, and this is a very good way to be.

The Rupe-Reason poll teases out some of the thinking behind the surge of young people abandoning the GOP, and finds a generation that is less apt to take to the streets, Occupy-style, than to throw a great block party: lots of drugs, poker and gays! Millennials don’t want to change things, apparently – they want everyone to get along.

This is also spot-on. Even at the Occupy protests, younger people sat there with beatific smiles and posters asking for “compassion.” Which, again, is a very valid life choice that is enormously better than the apocalyptic worldview of the Gen Xers (my generation.) I’d take an “everything is fine, let’s just all get along” youngster over “the world is about to end, oh the endless drama of my blighted existence” of my peer any day of the week.

There is a single problem I’ve seen in the article that I need to point out. Observe the contradiction inherent in the following statements:

74% of millennials, according to Reason, want the government to guarantee food and housing to all Americans. . . this next generation is not just inclusive, but conflict-adverse.

Conflict-adverse people will not be able to make any money, so who will provide guaranteed food and housing for everybody? I don’t know if the article’s author is unaware of this glaring contradiction in her own piece or if she left the issue hanging on purpose. However, the issue remains.

The backlash that the Millennials are offering to the apocalyptically-minded previous generations who sought reasons to be miserable is a refusal to tolerate any unpleasantness whatsoever. If Boomers and Gen Xers avidly searched for misery, the younger generation wants absolutely no misery at all. I understand them because my own tragedy-courting generation is getting on my nerves, as well. But I hope that the Millennials have enough fight in them to kick the GOP out of the political arena to let somebody less dinosauric come in.