Timothy Snyder is starting to suspect something.

Give it a few years, and he’ll join us on the conservative side.

It’s true. Anybody who favorably compares the religiosity of a former Soviet bloc country with that of the US is sadly ignorant and confused. And also doesn’t understand how religion works.

Maybe in 200 years the former Warsaw Pact countries will develop real religious feeling again. But religion isn’t a toy that you can put down and then take back again.

Even Rod who has written powerfully about totalitarianism doesn’t understand what it is. He thinks you can push a button and erase it. But you can’t.

You know if a person is made for teaching if on the first day of class s/he stumbles out of the classroom with a look of somebody who reached an oasis after crawling through a desert for weeks.

The halls are filled with happy colleagues who look slightly drunk with enjoyment.

Here’s the way Russians see the unfairness of their position in the world.

Russia beat Germany in the war. Russia saved humanity from German Nazism. But today if you go anywhere in the world, people look at you completely differently if you say “I’m German” and “I’m Russian”. Way before the war, all you heard if you said “I’m Russian” was “Ah! Bandits and whores. Which one is you?” You save the world from Nazism but nobody cares because you are, for ever and ever, a bandit and a whore. When somebody says, “I have a Russian girlfriend”, everybody immediately thinks “Bought himself a mail order bride”. Nobody thinks that when somebody says, “I have a German (British, French, Canadian) girlfriend”.

I know how it feels because Ukrainians also have “whores and bandits” rolled out at us on a regular basis. Or had until February 2022. You probably have no idea with what childish joy people inform one that one must be a whore or a bandit in a wide variety of contexts. A couple of years ago, I was giving a talk at a local public library iny capacity as professor and department chair. A woman gets up during the Q&A session and announces brightly that she knows some women from my “part of the world”, and they are all prostitutes in mink coats. You think a professor from Germany gets such comments?

And, I mean, it’s not like people are wrong. We do have a massive problem with banditry and whoredom. Everybody assumes that a Russian (or Ukrainian) wife was bought from a catalogue because she probably was.

Of course, I’m Ukrainian, so I have an easy out from this. It’s not our fault, I say. We were conquered by Russia and they made us into this. Once we are free from them, we will be different, better, and the world will know us for other achievements than organized crime and lack of morals.

What do Russians say? Whom do they blame? Leaving aside the bandits and the whores, whom do they blame for the crimes of Stalinism, for the loss of the Cold War, and now for the current war? How do they explain this all to themselves in a way that they’ll be able to live with?

For now, all they came up with is “evil West is doing this to us on purpose”. We are seeing right now where that belief system leads. But what’s the alternative? It’s a serious question, and I have no answer to it.

Try getting 64,000 likes on anything and you’ll probably fail. But in Russia, all you need is to mock the death of a child and happy fans flock to you. This is a moral catastrophe of great proportions.

Every – and I mean every – bombing victim, especially young or otherwise helpless provokes a barrage of these posts on Russian social media with tens of thousands of likes each, excited, happy comments, smileys, hearts, etc. Of course, they’d be so much more excited if the dead little girl were from California.

The only scenarios where this whole thing gets solved are 1) somebody takes away Russia’s nukes, digs a ditch around the perimeter, fills it with crocodiles, and turns Russia into North Korea and 2) somebody comes up with a positive, non-paranoid explanation for why Russian history has always sucked and why nobody respects Russia.

Or maybe the indictments haven’t hurt because it’s hard to take the actual charges brought against him seriously.

I’m not planning to vote for Trump, I don’t follow him on any of his social media, I haven’t seen a single interview excerpt with him for years. But I read the indictments, and they sound deeply ridiculous.

This is the exact same mistake as in 2016 which is assuming that people who vote for Trump are gullible and stupid, instead of trying to see things from their perspective.

This is why I, for example, never say that Russians are brainwashed by propaganda and don’t know what’s really happening. Russians aren’t duped. They are mega pissed off about something that’s very real, and not propaganda or fantasy. It’s not “the NATO expansion” but something much deeper and long-running. The very nature of the problem we are all facing is that nobody has any ideas as to how to make them not pissed off.

I now like ice-cream. Maybe these are age-related changes because I didn’t even like it as a kid. Also, it might be the fault of the new ice-cream parlor we have in town because it’s only their ice-cream that I crave. I’ve already had it 3 times just this month when normally I’d have it one every two years.

Or maybe I have COVID. Somebody I know suggested this as a possibility and said I should get tested. For some people, COVID is now the global theory of everything.

It’s really good ice-cream at that parlor. They have adult, not too sweet flavors and very high-quality Italian cherries to put on top. Expensive as the dickens, of course.

My professional association of modern languages where I’m on the executive boats has proposed to dedicate the next year’s issue of our professional journal on modern languages to “a retrospective on George Floyd’s suffocation at the hands of etc., etc “.

Not only does exclude all languages but English, it also excludes every area of specialization except 21st-century America. At the same time, it excludes 100% of the subjects on which members of the association – who are all professors of languages and literature – are qualified to write professional research pieces.

To say that I’m annoyed and disturbed by this is to say nothing. I was invited to the executive board specifically with the goal of making the MLA less Anglocentric, and now I feel like a moron for agreeing.

Here we are complaining that Republicans are powerless but it turns out they invented Islam:

Our international students went to Walmart at 1 pm. They stayed there until 5 pm. After which they discovered that one of the group wasn’t there, started running around looking for her, couldn’t locate her, and then I got the message about it.

Can anybody explain what a group of young people could be doing at Walmart for 4 hours? There’s no mall there. It’s just Walmart. I can’t even think what middle-aged people can do there for such a length of time but young people? Our Walmart is grim. We have much MUCH nicer places.

You’d say it’s because they are international students and must have been curious about Walmart. But this particular group has already gone on their Walmart trip. It’s part of their orientation. (Don’t ask). They went on Thursday and also spent several hours there. 6 hours of Walmart in 3 days. I’ll be tortured in hell with this particular pastime.

These students were placed in a beautiful dorm in the woods next to a lake. There’s a large garden right there. A Starbucks is walking distance. A really cute ice-cream parlor. And they prefer to schlep all the way to the dank, somber Walmart?

I’d understand if they were straight from the 1980 USSR but otherwise, I’ll never get it.