Bleeding-heart liberalism is very annoying. All of this crawling on the knees for BLM, all of the exaltation of the victimhood du jour. Annoying.

However, the bleeding-heart variety of liberalism exists for a reason. It’s the only alternative many people see to the neoliberal alienation. They need to care about something outside of themselves. And it’s completely unimportant whether the caring is genuine or performative. Any performance becomes at least somewhat genuinely felt after a while.

Remember Maslow? After you satisfy your basic needs, you conceive a desire to move to a higher plane of existence and do something more transcendent than worrying about your next meal. The capacity to care about something other than basic survival is what makes us human. When there are no healthy ways to seek transcendence, people use debased, ridiculous forms of doing it.

Based on the number of readings in the course I’m starting to take, I’m going to get at least 4-5 articles and book chapters out of the material I will learn there. And then people will be asking, “how do you manage to publish so much?” I made a decision to set aside two hours every Thursday morning for the next 3 months (plus whatever it takes to do the readings) to expand my working base. That’s how it’s always done. Make a decision and chip away at it little by little.

Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia who currently serves as deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, announced today that the true goal of Russia’s war against Ukraine is “an open-border Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” Ukraine and its attachment to the nation-state border is an obstacle.

For years, I’ve been trying to explain to people that Russia is at the forefront of globalism. Will Medvedev’s own words finally help demonstrate that this is true?

Truly, Russians will be standing over the smoldering ruins of Lisbon – which, please mark your calendars, they openly announced as their goal on April 4, 2022 – and here in the West (or what will be left if it) we’ll keep repeating how it’s all our own fault for war-mongering, being sinful and imperfect and provoking the little darlings with our imperfections.

A SWAT team from the Russian city of Krasnodar was sent to Ukraine to fight. Twelve of the officers refused to go. They were fired. Their lawyers are suing.

That’s all that happened to them. They weren’t tortured, cut into pieces, or even arrested. They refused to go and now their lawyers will haggle over a severance package for them. That’s all it took to avoid raping and murdering Ukrainian toddlers.

Everybody else agreed to go.

I'm close to insanity from the stink of newspapers, and almost cry when I accidentally hear the radio or stumble upon the ugly face of a TV reporter ... It's strange, but deep down I have always been sure that we would definitely return to this vomit. Even in the most encouraging times, I knew that it was a mirage, a deceit, a delusion, and we would fall down with a sob to worship this rotting corpse. What sadness, what boredom! And how eagerly everyone strives for stupefaction, baseness, dumbness. So few of us were spiritually prepared for a worthy life, a life of mind and heart; most didn't have the energy to do so. People were terrified of the smallest whiff of freedom, its faint shadow. Now they have embraced the usual  lies. The ban on meanness and betrayal has been lifted again; again - no moral prohibitions, no responsibility - childish cynicism, pagan innocence, Neanderthal morality.

Russian writer Yuri Nagibin wrote these words in his diary in 1968 when the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia. How scary is it that Nagibin could have been writing this verbatim today?