If you could see the glorification of Victor Bout (Merchant of Death) in Russia and watch even only just 3 minutes of the interviews he smugly gives, your blood would boil and you’d also question the wisdom of swapping him for the Hugely Important Celebrity Druggie whom everybody already forgot.

By the way, Ukraine conducts prisoner of war exchanges with Russia often. And every time manages to negotiate really impressive terms. So please don’t tell me that Biden just couldn’t have traded Griner on better terms. Russians are poor negotiators and its easy to play them. They are emotional and ripe for manipulation. There are, for instance, dozens of daughters of Putin’s oligarchs who can be easily arrested for prostitution. Or drug possession, or money laundering. Go grab a few, and Putin will bring the junkie over in his teeth.

But no, that would require effort. It’s so much easier to let a murderer go than actually think, plan and investigate.

At the bottom of identity politics is the fear of human complexity. People are reduced to a single, immutable characteristic to soothe the anxieties of those who can’t deal with anything more complicated.

This is why it’s impossible (and useless) to argue with the people who believe in the importance of identity labels. They are confused and terrified, and trying to introduce any variable into their closed system of thinking throws them off even more.

No comprehensive Medicare for All proposal even exists. Many policy promises that unite the progressive movement—including the Green New Deal, drastic defense cuts, and “tax the rich” plans large enough to finance their spending ambitions—do not actually exist beyond generic talking points.

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/progressives-empty-policy-agenda

It’s exactly like our new ultra-woke administrators. All they really stand for are budget cuts. Everything else is an empty slogan they don’t even bother to make half-convincing.

“We are going to increase graduation rates of African-American students by 40%!”

“And how are we going to increase those graduation rates?”

“Work harder!”

That was the actual response we got. “Work harder.” If your students fail, it means that, at best, you are a slacker, and at worst, you are a racist. It’s all vapor aimed at distracting us from austerity measures.

What is everybody watching? We finished Dexter: New Blood, which was great and snowy, what else is good?

Neighbors who have lived two doors down from us since 2014 still think I’m married to a woman. They sent me a Christmas card addressed to “Ms [my name] and Ms [N’s name]”. Because they have convinced themselves that a male name just can’t end with an A (although, what about Ezra, Joshua, or Dana?), and no evidence of their lying eyes will convince them of the opposite.

They could have asked themselves, where is this woman I’m married to? Why does nobody ever see her? And who’s the guy who’s always around and keeps doing half-naked pushups in the backyard? But no, the intellectual process never switches on.

Curiously, N is mildly entertained by being “misgendered.” I heard people are supposed to get massively wounded when it happens but he seems immune.

Stupid Argentina. I rooted for the Netherlands. It was my father’s favorite team after Ukraine.

I watched with colleagues and they were shocked that in spite of my heavily Argentinean accent I don’t support Argentina. But I don’t control the accent. It just happened. I feel no particular connection with Argentina. The only Argentinean writer I love is Claudia Pineiro, which is slim pickings for a whole country.

Cluster munitions are called cassette bombs in Ukrainian. But my subconscious only knows cassettes in the meaning of those cassette tapes we used back in the 1980s. For younger readers, this is what they looked like:

So now when I have one of my regular dreams of being under a missile strike in Kharkiv, I see these gigantic cassette tapes floating in the sky and raining bombs on me.

It’s very disturbing.

Only an extraordinarily rich and powerful country can afford to play these games.

Is everybody reading the Twitter files?

I’m most fascinated by the hubris of the former Twitter operatives who thought it was up to them to be the arbiters of Good and Bad.

I’m even more interested in their extraordinary pettiness and parochialism. The people they thought merited censorship weren’t warlords, dictators or terrorists. They were Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Chaya Raichik, Dan Bongino, and Charlie Kirk.

You’ve got this enormous power, and you use it to. . . hassle the Libs of Tik Tok account? Shadowban Charlie Kirk? I thought the only person who took Charlie Kirk very seriously was Charlie Kirk.

And Jay Bhattacharya? The nerdy Stanford prof? You are really scraping the barrel if you think he’s a baddie in need of suppression.

I won’t even talk about Dan Bongino because, honestly.

This is all so incredibly… small. These people were censored over very insignificant transgressions. You’ve got all this power and you unleash it against Charlie Kirk? How do you not feel completely pathetic after that? These Twitter operatives sound like they had the mental age of 11.