Ay, I can’t believe that the stupid affectation “be like” reached even the Ukrainian Twitter:

Of course, Ukrainians have no idea that this is African-American slang and white people who imitate it look very stupid.

So the Russian conscripts, right? They’ve been mobilized and sent to the frontlines. They can’t work, which means they aren’t paying their credit card bills, their car loans, and their mortgages. Debt collectors arrest their property and shut down their bank accounts.

Theoretically, recruitment centers are supposed to send the lists of recruits’ names to the banks to freeze their debts but nobody can be assed to take the trouble.

Everything, absolutely everything in the post-national model is a pretext for transferring capital from those who barely have enough to those who are drowning in opulence.

Let’s carefully observe what the post-nation is like and ask ourselves whether we find it attractive.

I divide all works of world literature into two categories, the permitted ones and those that were written without permission. The former are despicable, and the latter are a stolen breath of air. The writers who write what’s permitted – I want to spit them in the face and hit them over the head with a stick. . . They shouldn’t get married and have children because children have to continue our most important stories but how can they when their parents have sold their souls to the pockmarked devil for three generations ahead?

Osip Mandelshtam, The Fourth Prose

“The pockmarked devil” is Stalin. “Permitted literature” refers to Soviet censorship. In the USSR, censorship didn’t mean that there were things you couldn’t read, say or think. It was much worse. There were things you were required to read, say and think. Writers existed to arrange these permitted ideas on a page in slightly different ways.

To those who have lived in ‘historic times’, abstract concepts always stink of rotten fish.

Osip Mandelshtam, Egyptian Stamp