In spite of being one of the most overpriced stores in existence, Sephora is at least 60% out of stock. It looks like people will be celebrating Christmas with 3 layers of makeup caked on.

And please don’t say gifts. Who gives makeup as a gift? How can you possibly know what shade or type a person wears? Or what she already has at the moment?

In other positive news, the university is closed until January. I’m still teaching my online winter course (15 weeks of material covered in 3 weeks of daily lectures without weekends) but it’s still very festive not to go to work.

It’s really funny that many people who made a brand for themselves out of defending masculinity have chosen to support not the strong, courageous Zelensky but the weak, scared Putin who was cucked by his wife and who, while Zelensky went to the frontlines, visited Lukashenko and gave him a bouquet of flowers. An old man whose wife left him for a younger fellow sticking a wilted bouquet into the hands of another old, lonely man – you’ve really messed it up if your brand is tied to that sad image.

Forget visiting the White House. The other day, Zelensky visited Bakhmut. It’s the most infernal place in the war. Russians have been storming it for weeks. Rubble, piles of corpses, and ongoing hostilities with Russian troops a couple of miles away – and still Zelensky went.

Russians had just declared the capture of Bakhmut, and then Zelensky showed up in the supposedly captured city. So they had to scramble to declare that they never intended to fight for Bakhmut anyway.

During the visit, Zelensky stood in the midst of dozens of heavily armed soldiers. Any one of them could have been upset, traumatized, shell-shocked, supportive of Zelensky’s electoral opponent* – and decided to take a shot. But they weren’t asked to disarm in view of the president’s visit. The right to bear arms is so sacred right now in Ukraine that it would not have been possible.

Imagine the balls one needs to do something like this. Also, imagine how far safe spaces, hurt feelings, and trigger warnings are from the reality I describe.

The crisis of masculinity is over, my friends. Manliness is back, safetyism is out.

* In case people are completely clueless, Zelensky’s electoral opponent is more anti-Russia than Zelensky. There are no pro-Russia political figures or voting blocs. Zelensky supporters bicker with Poroshenko supporters about who hates Russia more.

Slavoj Zizek said that (ex)-Communists like the Chinese or the Russians make such good neoliberals because they were brought up to hate the bourgeoisie (meaning, the middle-class), and neoliberalism allows them to wage war against this despised class.

Today, three minutes before having to rush out to Klara’s school, I discovered that the Christmas gift we are bringing to her school party should be wrapped and not placed in a gift bag. And I’m a really bad wrapper of gifts.

Fifteen years ago, I’d freak out. Ten years ago I’d get massively annoyed. But now I’m too old for all that. Being an old mother definitely has it’s positives. I’m so even-tempered and laid back, it’s amazing. There are simply no emotions left for small annoyances at this age.

While some people feel unsafe, engage in weaselly “quiet quitting” and suffer from anxiety, others figure things out.

Let’s draw inspiration from this teacher and get things done.

Since I’m doing quotes, here is one from the great Nancy Fraser:

In its U.S. form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. . . The former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment. . . gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser

If freedom becomes confused with the leftist utopia, then power necessarily devolves to an elite of ‘freedom fighters’ who can decide when to invoke the ‘exception’ to traditional mass notions of democracy, justice and morality.

Philip Mirowski.

OK, he said “neoliberal utopia” but there is no longer any difference.

In what concerns book reviews, I don’t get the sentence “a long-awaited debut by a new author.” How come people have been waiting for something that nobody knew was going to happen?

I started reading one such “long-awaited debut” yesterday, and it’s a fine novel. A cute, comforting mommy-lit book. But I almost didn’t pick it up at the store because of the gushy “long-awaited” statements on the cover. They always hint that the book is ideological. Thankfully, in this particular novel, the ideological component seems to reside in the author’s race and not the text of the novel.

The TV ratings of the chief Russian propagandists Olga Skabeeva and Vladimir Solovyov have collapsed. The reason is that they have no wins to report, not even imaginary ones. Now their shows are all about “why are we losing so badly?” And people don’t want to hear that they are losing, so they don’t tune in.

There is an important lesson here. Everybody is excellent at avoiding propaganda when it tells them what they don’t want to hear. No propaganda on the planet can convince people of something they don’t want to believe. Propaganda doesn’t cause desire. It’s desire that causes propaganda.

Consequently, nobody – absolutely nobody – is immune to propaganda. People who are convinced that they are immune are the most likely to fall under its influence.

Nobody is immune because we all have desires. I’m immune to the kind of propaganda peddled by Skabeeva and Solovyov because they have nothing that I desire. But I’m not immune to other kinds.

I spent 15 years in thrall to a particular brand of progressivist propaganda because it flattered my sense of superiority. Note that I say “flattered”, not “created.” The superiority was already there and it was my choice to seek out a system of thinking that would feed it.

Feelings of togetherness, belonging, self-righteousness, importance, clarity and many others are what people seek when they set out to look for comforting conspiracy theories and other propagandistic joys. The need can overcome anybody, and we should all be honest with ourselves about what kind of propaganda would be attractive to us.