Kamil Galeev is right, as usual. Prigozhin is a complete idiot. We have all heard him speak many times, and he was a pouty, dumb old man. But now everyone goes, “How could he not know Putin would have him killed? He should have known!”

Earlier this summer, Prigozhin filmed this mega cringe video of himself trying to mail a complaint to Putin. He actually thought it a good idea to post a video of himself being humiliated casually by some kid secretary refusing to accept the complaint and treating him like a nobody. Prigozhin thought it was a good look for him.

“He should have known!” The words “Prigozhin” and “know” shouldn’t be in the same sentence.

The whole idea that people we see on screens are Machiavellian evildoers with complex strategies and detailed plans is childish. That’s how we saw our parents in infancy. In reality, these people have no idea what they are doing. Their actions seem so contradictory not because it’s part of some secret plan but because they sincerely have no idea what they want or think.

COVID lockdowns messed people up in unexpected ways. I have colleagues who decided they would be able to “teach” by posting stuff online from anywhere in the world, never show up on campus, and still draw $100,000 salaries for that kind of “work”.

Obviously, this is a small minority of people. Everybody else is extremely happy to be back in the classroom. But the “lockdown happy” are currently in a mega pout. Somehow, they convinced themselves that this is a sustainable model and somebody is going to pay large salaries for this.

The public justification for destroying the Wagner graves and memorials in Russia is that they were Nazis. This is true, of course. Utkin, Prigozhin’s second-in-command who died in that plane crash was covered with swastika tattoos. But the funny part is that Wagnerites were officially anti-Nazi heroes until the day before yesterday when they immediately turned into evil Nazis.

Just as easily and happily Russians will crap on Putin the second he croaks. But so what? It changes nothing. Their idols come and go but their behavior is always the same.

In Russia, the graves of the Wagnerites are being dug up. Wreaths, crosses piled up in a garbage heap. A surviving member of the mercenary force is crying, “People, what are you doing? My friends died for you! Please, people, don’t do it!” But nobody cares.

It’s really funny. Wagnerites thought they were dying for their country but you can’t do that if there is no country. Honoring the fallen soldiers is a nation-state tradition. If there is no nation, and instead you get rapidly changing, endlessly mutable arrangements and re-arrangements, you will be written out of the fluid story very fast. Your cross will be broken, your death will be mocked, your military awards revoked, and your memory spat at.

Until yesterday, Wagnerites were celebrated, idolized and worshipped in Russia. And then everybody moved on, including their families.

Ok, I finally get it. Trump is their sex fetish:

I’m so innocent that I didn’t clock on to the existence of this paraphilia until now.

I understand that sexuality is immune to reason but why, people, why? Why are they so into him in such weird ways?

https://twitter.com/BRyvkin/status/1694880086812487733?t=6UxVq5ziPDa_Hym9udavTw&s=19

I’m not sure what he’s talking about but I’m more certain than ever that going cold turkey on the MSM news coverage was a brilliant decision on my part. I used to love the news, people. I watched those 100% news channels all the time. But then I stopped and never looked back.

I even know the exact date I quit. March 14, 2020.

If people want to know more about the ideas motivating the movement of “next-level humans”, I highly recommend the book Neo-entes by the Peruvian philosopher Miklos Lukacs de Pereny.

Yes, the book is in Spanish, I’m sorry. It will be translated soon without doubt. But here’s an English-language interview with Lukacs de Pereny who is the world’s leading critic of transhumanism. He studied these “next-level” bastards for decades, and has a lot to say about them.

People perceive any criticism of their life choices as extremely threatening.

Gosh, forget that. They perceive any pause in the constant praise of their life choices as deadly.

“Me, me, me! What about me? I made a different choice and you forgot to mention that it’s a great one. MEEEEEEEEE!”

I have made a lot of choices in life. Some of them very bizarre. I’m fine with them. I have accepted that I have done what I have done because that’s what I needed to do at that time. For example, I don’t feel personally alluded to or criticized when people say (very correctly, by the way) that it’s suboptimal to try to give birth at the age of 40. People should be able to make that very reasonable and uncontroversial statement without having the pander to outliers like me who decided to do things differently at a terrible personal cost.

It’s much easier to find a way to be at peace with your own decisions, unconventional as they might be, than spend your life feeling constantly wounded by others not reassuring you that these choices are fine.

It’s up to you to make your choices fine in your own eyes, is what I’m saying. As to whether they are fine in somebody else’s eyes, if you are past the age of 20, that should not even remotely matter to you.

People have been asking why men don’t read fiction. It was invented for women, it was always targeted mostly at women, and it’s consumed mostly by women for the past 200 years. (Before that, very few people read at all). Why is it so?

Because of their different physiology, men and women have a different relationship with time. A woman’s greatest work happens when she isn’t doing anything. Pregnancy is mostly waiting around. We don’t actively build a child. Our bodies do that by themselves. Of course, labor itself is hard labor but everything before it kind of just involves existing.

This is why women are physiologically more adapted to non-utilitarian pursuits. We know at a very deep level that it’s not necessary to do anything useful or productive to render our crowning achievement. Not only pregnancy but also taking care of a child involves a lot of just waiting around.

Men, on the other hand, never gained any evolutionary advantage from doing useless things. Just lying there for hours as a happy recipient of art with no goal as to how to use it in practice doesn’t feel right. As a boy, yes, because you are waiting to grow up. As a man, though, it just feels weird.

Men will read if they find a practical, utilitarian explanation for why they are doing it. When N started reading Demon Copperhead, he wondered what the purpose of doing it was. Then he decided to put the activity into his productivity time tracker under the category “Personal Betterment”, and he’s now fine with it. Men are much likelier to read non-fiction because they can see it as something useful. “I’m reading this to understand how things work” makes more sense to them than “I invested 23 hours of my life into finding out how these non-existent people met, courted and married”.

Of course, men who read fiction after adolescence and before retirement exist. But go to the nearest bookstore, observe the entire carrels of Colleen Hoover’s books at the entrance followed by several tables of mommy-lit, pink beach reads, and the extraordinary number of novels with the words “wife” and “mother” in the title, and tell me if you honestly believe these men aren’t a small minority. A great minority. A minority I love. But a minority, nonetheless.

Men are made to feel bad about not being “more like women” in this respect but this is unfair. People simply follow their body rhythms. Physiology is not a moral category. Nobody is better or worse for relating to time as their physiology prompts them to do.