Twitter started showing me this:

Also, in my niece’s dance school, parents are in a tizzy because the costumes teachers selected for dancing hip hop are “too violent.” Of course, after you read “DEI-lensed indigenous little books”, your mind might get even more clouded than it was before.

This is one of my favorite Ukrainian writers. He survived months of terrible torture by Russians in Lugansk in 2014 (delivered courtesy of one Barack Obama), and now he’s on the front line.

Aseyev is one of the very few Ukrainian writers translated into English. He could be living it up in Boston but he freely chose the trenches.

I pray that he lives because too many of our artists have been killed already.

What do you say to an American employee who filled with “gender-neutral pronouns” a slide deck created to represent a client from Saudi Arabia?

This is pure comedy at this point, my friends. Pure, unadulterated comedy.

We have politicians who are so out of touch with the people they are supposed to represent that it’s funny. Until you remember that this has real-life repercussions.

On the subject of May-December (or February-August, in this particular case) romances that everybody likes to ponder, a terrible thing happened to one such couple.

Vicente (45) and Fernanda (28) have been driving around Asia, making videos to post online. They’ve been doing that for 5 years, so this bastard Vicente started dragging Fernanda around, milking her for content, while she was a 23-year-old child. He couldn’t post videos of himself because nobody would be interested, so he needed to use a young cute girl for this purpose.

Vicente and Fernanda were making their way through India on motorcycle. Vicente clearly had no interest in providing safety or comfort to poor dumb Fernanda. As a result, Fernanda was gang-raped by 7 criminals in India. The horrible Vicente saw a fresh opportunity to make money and immediately posted a video, sharing details of Fernanda’s rape. Thankfully, Indian police had him take down the video, but what a bastard.

Kindle’s text-to-speech is now so good that Audible will soon go out of existence. It’s interesting how developing tech is destroying a large revenue stream within the same company.

Has anyone watched True Detective: Night Country? I loved seasons 1 and 2, and didn’t like season 3 much.

Does anybody recommend?

Currently, we are watching Inventing Anna because Julia Garner is very talented and the outfits are pretty, which makes up for how horrid everything else about this show is. As an additional bonus, I erupt in long passionate screeds whenever the dude who poses as a woman appears on screen. Why it is always the manliest-looking dudes who try to pull this con is a mystery.

Aside from “rights”, the words that we have to start stepping away from are consent, choice, and freedom.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these words per se. But we have turned them into idols. No other consideration is allowed or even occurs when something is claimed to be a result of “a freely consented choice that is everybody’s right.” 

None of these things are absolutes because nobody can even define them. What’s a free choice? What is it free of? Self-awareness is extremely rare. Today I think I freely consented and tomorrow I feel differently. Who’s to say what’s more freely chosen, yesterday’s enthusiasm or today’s repentance?

We had the whole #MeToo quagmire because first they consented, and then they un-consented, or they consented to one part but not the other, and we are sitting there, parsing who chose what at which point. As Juan Manuel de Prada correctly said, we are so stuck on “free choice” that we aren’t even asking why people are leading these weird, miserable lifestyles at all. The whole set-up is wrong. Remember the Mattress Girl who consented to anal sex with a random dude because she thought this activity, which she clearly didn’t enjoy, was going to get her a boyfriend? She un-consented and destroyed his life when he refused to provide the payment she expected for this unpleasant act.  There’s so much wrong here, aside from how anybody expressed consent. Why can’t she openly say she wants a boyfriend? Why is he finagling an unwanted sex act out of a clearly desperate young woman? Why are they both using sex as a substitute for every other form of communication?

The deification of consent has already given us transed grade-schoolers and is leading us straight to the legalization of pedophilia. This is not to say we should abolish consent. It simply shouldn’t be the only category of analysis.

Social media are filled with stories of adult detransers who are sharing absolute horrors about the mutilation inflicted on them. And every time, there’s a chorus of, “but you wanted this. You chose this. You consented. So what’s the problem?” There’s a 30yo man who had his penis cut off. This is a terrible tragedy. He’s devastated. But people are chirping on and on about how he chose it himself as if they weren’t choosing the most bizarre things themselves during COVID out of artificially stoked anxiety and politically induced ignorance.

Humans are not hyper-rational creatures who are always calculating the most optimal choices. We aren’t robots. We are emotional, fallible, easily led astray, often confused. Life is a lot more complicated than a series of calculated free choices.