Of course, everybody is entitled to their own reading of any text but I find the following reading of Gilmore Girls (one of my most favorite TV shows ever) to be very puzzling:

The obvious one Phoebe overlooks is Gilmore Girls: a very young mother who raises her daughter as an equal, the daughter is growing up much more responsible and mature than her mother.

The character of Rory in the TV show is anything but “responsible and mature.” She finds it extremely hard to separate from her mother, she can’t handle school, at the slightest contretemps she hands her life over to her rich grandparents, she can’t preserve any identity of her own in relationships with men, she turns into a mirror image of whatever guy she happens to date at any given moment. This is an extremely infantile character, and it is no mistake that an actress with such a childish face was cast for this part.

Rory’s extreme immaturity can easily be traced to two main causes: a very infantile absentee father and extremely wealthy grandparents. They are in the habit of pouring huge sums of money on top of every minor issue she confronts, so she never feels the need to grow up.

The final episodes of the show where Rory refuses to marry her domineering rich brat of a boyfriend and finally departs away from her relatives to work as a journalist covering the campaign of the yet largely unknown Barack Obama are very hopeful because they indicate that the 23-year-old Rory is finally ready to start growing up. 

OK, I now want to drop everything and go watch the entire show from the start.

Ukraine is not as much of an oligarchy as Russia but the economic stratification is still outrageous. If we add up the fortunes of Ukraine’s 100 richest people, they will equal 22% of the country’s entire GDP. As a comparison, in the US the richest 400 people possess the equivalent of the 13% of the country’s GDP (which is, obviously, still a lot but not as bad as in Ukraine.) 

The war with Russia, however, is making an impact on the economy. The Ukrainian oligarchs have lost over $13 billion since the beginning of the Russian invasion. Since they were not creating any wealth for the country, it’s hard for me to feel bad for them.

An article I read on the subject today (the link is in Russian) points out that an average Ukrainian with the median monthly salary of $267 would have to work for 3,370,786 years and 7 months to make a fortune similar to that of Ukraine’s richest ban, the Donetsk bandit Rinat Akhmetov. 

Some freak of nature threw a plastic bottle into the Ondatra Creek. You really have to be a disgusting creature to throw around plastic bottles or other sorts of garbage. The nature we have around here is truly majestic. I don’t get people who find it too hard to walk to a garbage can with their plastic bottles.

N is now trying to fish the bottle out of the creek.

I was asked to comment on the following:

Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev could not be more different as leaders. But they are both proud Russians who don’t think their nation is getting its due. They are like “ bent twigs springing back after being stepped on,” in the phrase Isaiah Berlin used to describe how resentment and aggressive nationalism are rooted in the backlash against humiliation.

The narrative of the Russians’ hurt feelings is spreading like a forest fire. For the past 20 years, Russia has done nothing but invade, torture and persecute its neighbors. Today, a massive number of Russian troops is edging closer to the border with Ukraine.

For some reason, though, there are no articles about the hurt feelings, resentments or humiliations of Georgians or Ukrainians. This is the weirdest situation anybody can imagine: everybody is fussing over the hurt feelings of victimizers while paying no attention to the victims.

” Not getting their due” is the central organizing idea of Russian national identity. As all national identities, it’s a fiction, a myth. If every other country on the globe were to disappear, Russians would still feel aggrieved and slighted because that’s the foundation of their identity building.

This is all so clear and so obvious, yet the idiot Liberals are joyfully lapping this shit up because the narrative of aggrieved Russians feeds into their intense negative – vector patriotism. They find it intolerable that the US was omitted from the narrative of Putin ‘ s invasion of Ukraine. The story of aggrieved Russians allows these American Liberals to return to their favorite pastime of delicious, narcissistic self flagellation.

Found it at the Epicene Cyborg blog which is a treasure trove of great links:

In 2001, soon after George W Bush was inaugurated, I called the White House press office for comment on the latest IRS income data. The deputy spokesperson expressed disbelief at the official figures I read, so much so that I asked, “What do you think is the median income shown on tax returns in America?” The answer: $250,000. The actual figure at the time: $28,000.