The post’s title sounds like I’m trying to be metaphorical but that’s not the case. This is about Stalin’s actual children.

Stalin had 3 children from his 2 marriages: Yakov, Vasily and Svetlana. There are also rumors of a fourth, illegitimate child, a son whom Stalin supposedly helped out and promoted on the sly.

Yakov, the son of Stalin’s early first marriage, always had a fraught relationship with his father. He was clumsy, shy, and married early. Stalin wasn’t happy about any of this.

Yakov was captured by the Nazis during WWII. They tried to exchange him for Friedrich Paulus, the Nazi who’d led the Stalingrad offensive but obviously Stalin didn’t even consider it. Yakov was killed by the Nazis.

Stalin cherished Vasily, his son from his second marriage. Vasily had everything he wanted given to him. He became a military general at the age of 24. After Stalin’s death, Vasily was jailed for a while for getting drunk with foreign diplomats and blabbering stupidly. After his release from jail, Vasily was treated royally but he soon died of alcoholism at the age of 42.

Stalin also adored his daughter Svetlana. She fell in love at the age of 15 with a 45 – year-old married journalist. Stalin was understandably appalled and sent the journalist to a concentration camp. After Stalin’s death, Svetlana kept getting married every two seconds. Finally, she ended up asking for asylum in the United States. She was a very bizarre person, constantly getting into weird religious and New Agey stuff. She had 3 children who hate her. Svetlana died 3 years ago.

All of Stalin’s children had children, so it isn’t like the story of that horrible family is about to end. With the revival of Stalin worship in Russia, the grandchildren have started crawling out of their holes to yell the world what a great statesman their grandpa was.

Too many people are in the grip of a belated and prolonged teenage rebellion. They have assigned the United States to the role of a strict parent. Whatever the parent does,  makes them roll their eyes in exasperation. They get especially angry when they see the symbolic parent assert authority.

Vova Putin is, in their imagination, a bad boy who is daring to defy the strict parent in a way they never managed to do when they actually were teenagers and it was time to do it. They secretly adore Putin and want to be like him. And whenever anybody suggests that their idol is a pathetic little shit,  they get upset because they can’t accept that their dream of liberation should be discredited.

And this is the psychological landscape that gives us people whose vision of global politics is, “Big bad US is victimizing everybody  [read: the introject of my strict parent is torturing me] and somebody needs to stand up to it [read: I like to fantasize about someone defeating a strict parent figure because I never tried and now I’m forever stunted as a result.]”

People are convinced that they are talking about politics when all they do is reveal their psychological defects. This would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.

“Sending arms to Ukraine tells their government exactly the opposite. It tells them that they should keep fighting on and not accept the need to make those concessions.” What concessions, you stupid fuck? Nobody is asking Ukraine for any “concessions.” It’s perfectly OK not to follow the Russian war against Ukraine but if you can’t be bothered to keep up, why chirp like an unhinged parrot?

[In Russian. But it’s a video, and the words are not important.] Students in Russia make fun of their teacher by adding a very dangerous drug to her cigarettes and then watching her very public freakout. This is a new drug that is devastating Russia right now. There are countless videos of people freaking out like this poor teacher while on it. Does anybody know what it is?

“A WaPo opinion piece sets out to debunk Putin’s poll numbers but in fact does the opposite, leading to the conclusion that Putin’s numbers today are real and that he has the resources to stay popular for quite some time.” Yes, they are absolutely real. Russians love him, adore him, worship him.

How come there are so many people who are not vaccinated? I had to be vaccinated 4 times for the same old measles because none of my campuses accepted the previous vaccinations. My shoulders are covered with dents from these repeated vaccinations. Two of them took place within months of each other. They were identical but campuses refused to have me without administering ones of their own. Is it just foreigners who are so insistently vaccinated?

Do you think this is just a pose? Or are there people who are so incredibly dense that they actually feel guilty for being good parents? “Sally may only be in kindergarten, but already she has visited museums in four major cities. Sally may be going to a “poor” school, but the simple act of growing up in our family will give her an advantage over other students, whatever school she attends. And I feel kind of bad about that. It’s easy to talk about “poor” schools and “rich” schools with their unequal funding and the ways kids in poor school district get shortchanged. It is harder, at least for me, to talk about the educational inequalities that begin in the home. Why? Because I am actively transmitting privilege.” When people start with this kind of thing, I feel intense vicarious shame because it’s embarrassing to see these fake holier-than-thou speeches.

Do you think these protesters are for real? Or were they hired to make Kissinger and McCain look good? Because they managed that. I’ve never had such warm and fuzzy feelings about either before.

Another hysterical, weepy manifesto by another academic hysteric. These people are so boring and monotonous.

Why reverse oppression simply cannot exist. And I can’t believe this still has to be explained.

Rauner is an idiot and Illinois is fucked.

[In Russian]. A mother of seven is arrested in Russia for high treason.

“I am so allergic to MFA-generated poetry, and the words “he has good writing credentials, he has an MFA” make me want to run in the other direction with my fingers in my ears.” Same here.

A beautiful post on a search for a former professor. Highly recommended. Not the search, I mean, but the post.

And a very rare good post on stumbling through college on Inside Higher Ed.

Photographs from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center make the whole space project seem like not a total waste of money.

The story that finally convinced everybody of Bill Cosby’s guilt.

Is it true that Burj Khalifa was on fire?? I hope not because I so adore that building. I want to travel to see it for real one day.

Again, I’m wondering, is this a pose, or do people actually believe this sort of thing? “Who else is offering a competing, compelling message? Who else is making sure their lights stay on? Who else is standing up for their right to live in a decent society where we all take care of each other, take responsibility for each other, lift each other up?” Does anybody really want to live in a society where adults “take responsibility” for other adults? This imaginary society sounds absolutely horrifying. And the saddest part is that it was a good post before the author started preaching in this embarrassing way.

The multitude of ways in which people use psychiatric diagnoses to feel good about themselves. Why work on having an individuality when you can always use the DSM to provide an identity?

“Several states are looking into digitizing driver’s licenses for display on smartphones and Delaware wants to be the first to implement the system.” ‘Cause an actual license is so hard to carry around, or what?

A long and wordy illustration that oral traumas shouldn’t be left untreated for too long. Of course, there are sufferers like me, who don’t inflict our dysfunction on the world. And then there are those who derive exhibitionist pleasure from their masturbation around food.

For those who are fantasizing about basic income: here is what life on basic income looks like. You’ve got to hate people a whole lot to inflict it on them. “The rate of depression is 19 percent among people who have been unemployed for a year, compared to just 10 to 11 percent for people who went without jobs for just a few weeks.”

Hilarious bits from student essays.

[In Russian.] The burning of the holy images in Russia on February 2, 1930. And I feel happy every time I think about that.

 

Another blogger notices the phenomenon of the novels of female rage and their extreme popularity, a phenomenon that I’ve been writing about for years.

Do read this post on bullying for an example of somebody who has zero insight and zero maturity. Shocking and disturbing.

A good response to the favorite idiotic argument advanced by homophobes.

One of the many tragedies of Afghanistan.

[In Russian]. In Russia, a ritual murder of Obama will be part of a popular festival.

Get out of the meaningless gender wars! A really good video by our favorite Australian blogger.

“In college, you’re trying to stake out your own identity while navigating complex social situations in a setting that is most likely much more diverse than you’ve experienced in the past. The whole process is pretty stressful, especially when we note that most college campuses are also extremely competitive environments.” I keep forgetting these things because when I went to college, I was shouldering much, much heavier burdens than these lucky students ever get to face in their lives. But it’s important to be sensitive to their hardships.

Some freakazoid whose job title is “the Executive Director of the University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning” is suggesting in Inside Higher Ed that higher ed should be destroyed and substituted with job-training.

“The trouble is that the contemporary Western mind has a hard time grasping a basic truth about both Putin and ourselves; we are not the world, and Putin is not us.” Golden words, golden.

Should blogging substitute scholarly articles and books? My answer is, absolutely not, brr, yuk, what a horrible idea.

A pro-Ukrainian protest in Tel Aviv.

“I would like Putin strong enough to help destroy the Euro, and Europe strong enough to defeat his aggression in Ukraine. It will be interesting if one has to make a choice between the two goals.” God, why are people so irredeemably stupid?

Stalin’s grandson criticizes Putin. Yes, Putin is a lousy insect. But doesn’t Stalin’s grandson realize that the best thing he can do us crawl into a hole and pray nobody notices him?

“A recent survey revealed that companies expect a boost in pay, as well as a continued increase in hiring.” From experience, I know that this is going to make many people very depressed for some mysterious reason. Stay strong, folks! We can survive this good news! I believe in you!

And the post of the week is this brilliant post about small talk.

The Russian TV program I mentioned in the previous post is dedicated to the horrifying video of a woman being beaten into a coma and then slashed on her face with a knife by a man. 

A male witness is filmed walking calmly by as the criminal brutalizes the woman. 

People in the audience are horrified. “You men! You just walk by when women are being brutalized! And you brutalize women, too!” an angry woman says. “Why don’t you just say once and for all that you are not men! You are women! Women, that’s what you are!”

14,000 women are killed as a result of domestic violence every year in Russia. According to the most conservative reports, one out of every two Russian women has been a victim of rape. Yet the biggest insult a woman can come up for a woman-beating man is that he is. . . a woman.

Mind you, Russian men haven’t been working, providing or producing anything worth a crap for generations. When N told me his Dad had a job back in the 1990s, my reaction was, “Wow, seriously? How come? That’s just so bizarre.” [Mine had a job, too, but mine is a Jew.] Yet the Russian women who are, en masse, sole providers for their families keep fawning over these useless pieces of junk. It’s a mystery.

A newscaster on a Russian TV channel announces, “The victim of this crime was a young girl of 34 years of age.” In Russia, where any woman past the age of 24 is considered an ancient old reject (and this idea is being delivered day and night on every channel), “a young girl of 34” is an enormous progress.

This is so that people don’t tell me I only write bad things about Russia.

There is an old fable about 3 sisters of marriageable age. The eldest was lazy and never did any work, just stayed lazing around in bed. The middle sister was gloomy and moody. And the youngest sister was beautiful, hard-working, and always smiley and good-natured.

Once a fairy godmother came to see the sisters and told them she had the perfect husband for each of them. The sisters got on to a cart and it rolled into the neighboring village.

“Here is your husband,” said the fairy godmother to the lazy sister, pointing to the most hard-working fellow in the area. “You are each other’s perfect match.”

In the next village, she turned to the gloomy sister and pointed to the most good-natured, out-going, joyous guy there. “This is your husband,” she said. “You compliment each other perfectly.”

Finally, they got to the village where the youngest sister’s match lived.

“And here is your perfect match,” said the godmother, pointing to an ugly, miserable little drunk lying in a ditch.

Moral of the story: People who feel that they need to be perfect all the time end up with very flawed partners because they need the partners to compensate for their uprightness with some looseness. Your partner will always (although not consciously) try to become what you lack. So don’t try to be too perfect. It doesn’t pay off.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Thursday Russia would consider extending financial aid to debt-strapped Greece if Athens were to make a request.

This is really good. This is the only thing that can sour the Russians on Putin. They hate it when anybody gets handouts. Anybody but them,  that is. Let Putin keep handing out cash to every freeloader on the planet. And let’s see Russians finally awaken from their crush on Putin.

I’m hearing that the supporters of Spain ‘ s new party Podemos have been celebrating the election of Syriza. I’m really hoping Podemos doesn’t decide to become one of Putin ‘ s ass-lickers. Spain really deserves better than that even if Greece doesn’t. And Spain’s economy is improving.

Obama said in his recent interview that he doesn’t believe Putin ‘ s annexation of the Crimea was part of any grand strategy.

Of course, he doesn’t believe anything of the kind but is forced to say it to give Putin a chance to step back.

But Putin can’t step back because the overwhelming majority of people in Russia passionately wants the war to continue. The bodies of the Russian  soldiers killed in Ukraine are shipped back to Russia by the hundred and buried, nameless, under the plaques saying “Surgical Waste.” And not a single spouse, parent or sibling has asked for a chance at least to have a grave to visit. It’s OK with them that their loved ones should be discarded as “surgical waste” as long as Ukrainians get killed. There is nothing Obama or anybody else can oppose to this.

I live in a bubble, people. It’s only from the TVs at the gym that I discovered that there is a horrible snowstorm ravaging my state and that the whole country is about to watch some sports game where everybody will consume 2,400 calories while watching.

More calories is the last thing I need so I’m happy I’m not into that game. Instead, N and I will celebrate the very last round of New Year’s festivities  (yes, really, and who’s to tell us we can’t?).  I vowed not to take down the New Year’s decorations until I see snow but it seems like, at this rate, I’ll might have to prepare to spend the next 30 years with these decorations and that’s kind of extreme.