Anybody here a Blacklist fan? We are finishing up season 8, and I’m being visited by a terrible suspicion that the show is going in the direction of telling us that Raymond Reddington had a sex-change operation. This would be a huge letdown because I didn’t watch five million seasons of a show about the most masculine guy in the history of television to discover he’s supposed to be a chick. The entire show is nothing but a pretext for James Spader to demonstrate a glorious, unfettered masculinity. I very much hope nobody is planning to mess with that.

Talking about masculinity, isn’t it funny how when Spader was young, fit and acted in porn movies he didn’t come off as manly at all while in his sixties and overweight, he’s doing it effortlessly.

I should have known that there was no chance Netflix was going to put anything unwoke on its platform. But I bought into the social media hype and did go to check out the Dave Chappelle special. Of course, it turned out to be the standard woke swill. And I’m an idiot for believing Netflix’s marketing tactics.

Bleh. If I wanted that kind of thing, I would have gone to the faculty meeting.

At the University of Sussex, the administration is defending a feminist professor’s right to speak her mind while the union is trying to pressure the administration to fire her.

At my university, we are 75% back to teaching in person now and 90% back next semester because the administration waged a massive battle against the union that wanted us to become a 100% online school for the foreseeable future.

Labor unions are nothing more than a neoliberalizing disciplinary agent. It pains me to say this because we all know my history of union organizing. But now unions are completely anti-worker and pro-Big Business.

The reason why people insist on having their life choices constantly affirmed is that there’s no longer any stable moral framework within which they’d find the knowledge of whether they are acting correctly without having to pester everybody else constantly. People freak out so badly when the correctness of their lifestyles isn’t beamed at them from everything and everybody because they don’t have a set of foundational beliefs about the good and the bad. They are like little children who need mommy to approve of how many pieces of candy they can eat because they have no idea how to decide that for themselves.

Take, for instance, the demands that everybody list their “pronouns.” This is infantile behavior that needs mommy constantly to confirm her love because the infant doesn’t know how to maintain the feeling of being loved on his own. Ideally, the child grows up and finds a way to maintain the feeling of being safe and valuable on his own. But if he doesn’t know how to do that, he’ll become clingy, pouty and will demand declarations of love and acceptance from everybody around him.

Here is a link to a video by N’s favorite Russian-language podcaster (or YouTuber, I don’t know the difference). The linked video is about Charles Schwab’s The Great Reset, and I’m posting it because I wanted to say all of this myself but I don’t have the time. Again, this is all in Russian. If you want to hear these ideas in English, you are stuck with me.

P.S. I’m now listening to the Russian podcaster in my office, and wow, folks, he is like a mini-me. Some parts sound like they’ve been translated straight from my writing. I’m very glad nobody here speaks Russian and I can listen to dissident thought at work without anybody getting sore.

In 1996 I was a college student in Ukraine. One day, we were sitting in class, the professor was speaking, the students were taking notes. Suddenly, an irate secretary from the Dean’s Office burst in. Interrupting the professor in mid-sentence she screeched,

“Everybody, get up and go out. You will be sweeping the alley outside. Now! You, too!” pointing at the professor.

The professor, a youngish guy we thought was very cool because he had traveled the world and spoke an almost fluent English blushed and started stuffing papers into his bag. Everybody got up. Except me.

“What’s going to happen if we don’t?” I asked. “This isn’t the USSR any longer. You can’t make us.”

“Get up and go sweep now!” the secretary bellowed. “Do what you are told!”

“No,” I said. “I’m a student, not a street cleaner. I’m not going to sweep. What can you do to me?”

The secretary looked apoplectic. The other students started shooshing me down.

“It’s OK, we’ll go, we are going right now!” they piped up in mousy little voices.

“You will go because you want to volunteer,” the secretary said. “It’s the right thing to do. The alley needs sweeping. You will go now.”

Everybody went to sweep including the professor. I strolled around them in a fedora hat, delivering a lecture on freedom and human dignity. Then I got bored and went home while they stayed to get vaccinated keep sweeping.

I thought they were like that because they had been beaten down by a totalitarian regime. After several more events of this kind, I decided that I couldn’t wait for them to get over their totalitarian upbringing and that I needed to move to a place where people understood the importance of freedom and dignity. That’s how I ended up in North America.

Last year I shared this story with students.

“It looks like you can’t escape from totalitarianism, professor,” one student said. “It comes wherever you go.”

These bastards want to destroy the best things about this country:

Coincidentally, lockdowns in my suburban area were nothing like the ones in Chicago. This is the real reason why NYTimes hates us. We are harder to control.

Seriously, is there anything good that these petty dictators don’t want to eliminate?