Opinions, art, debate
I very sincerely can’t think of anything more fun, attractive and enjoyable than helping raise one’s own grandchildren. I wonder what it is that this woman is planning to do instead.
By the way, my daughter is named after my grandmother because she couldn’t find anything more fun to do either.
What it is that people actually do that is more pleasant than being with their grandchildren?
Klara and I walked the hiking trail carrying a pink make-up refrigerator. Well, I was carrying it, obviously.
People we met along the trail kept trying to guess what we were carrying.
“Is it a bread-maker?” one man asked. “Are you baking bread?”
“Is it a mini safe?” asked another.
“Such strange people,” Klara said with the perfect superciliousness of a nine-year-old. “Why would we walk around the lake with a bread-maker or a safe?”
In case you are wondering why we were carrying a non-functioning makeup refrigerator, that’s because we needed it to carry our markers in it, of course. Why did we need markers on a hiking trail and why did they have to be in a pink make-up refrigerator? Have you ever been nine? Think back to that time, and you’ll have your answer.
Speaking of Russian, you know how I almost never read in Russian, right? But I discovered a Russian voice artist who is the most talented dude ever. I know I say this a lot but really, this voice artist is totally out there. His name is Ivan Litvinov, and he’s so popular, he’s done over 400 books.
I’m completely addicted to this guy’s voice to the point that N has started to get jealous. I have no idea what is it that has such a hypnotic effect on me in the actor’s reading. It’s not anything from my childhood because I never knew anybody with this kind of pronunciation. But I’m listening to one book after another.
If you are a Russian speaker, do check out his books. He’s done every genre, and I’m sure you can find something to your liking. I’ve listened to his recording of Mikhail Veller’s novel An Island for Whites. Now I’m ploughing through the Jo Nesbø series, and enjoying the books grandly because of the voice artist’s talent, even if the translation is sometimes clumsy. I’m quite confident that the translator was translating from English based on the mistakes I catch.
I casually stated on X that Elon Musk’s son is male and not female, and as a result all day weirdos have been bugging me about this.
In Russian.
This lunacy has been exported to all corners of the globe. There’s no linguistic environment where you can hide from busybodies coming to lecture you that a man is a woman because he put on make-up.
Somebody asked me to read their post on the Bluesky app. There were many comments, and reading them felt like being at work. People use “fascism” like it’s an article (both grammatically and of faith). Everybody is massively upset but won’t explain why. Everybody is living in “a genocidal regime.” Everybody has the sensitivity of a thumb that was run over by a dump truck and the rudeness of an unselfconscious three-year-old.
At least, at work I’m getting paid to exist next to all this. Why would I want to do this for free?
The app will die soon because nobody can live up to the leftist standard of purity.
This is a re-posting of an old piece from 2020 that I really like.
I know that I use the word “totalitarianism” in a way that confuses people because it’s not the usual one, and I apologize for it. Today in church it occurred to me that I need to explain it more clearly. To do so, I will use the metaphor of an hourglass created by the great Ukrainian writer Vladimir Dudintsev.
Dudintsev said that every human being is like an hourglass. We have two bulbs inside us that are connected by a very narrow neck. The upper bulb represents our life in the world. It contains everything that constitutes our interactions with other people and with things.
The lower bulb is our inner world. All that others can know of our inner world is the tiny portion that can be glimpsed through the narrow opening. Even the people who know us best can never get inside. They can peek in a little if they really want to, but the rest is concealed from view.
A totalitarian regime hates the lower bulb because, by its nature, it needs to control the totality, and how can you do that if you can’t access the lower bulb?
As a result, a totalitarian regime wants to make sure we live, as much as possible, in the upper bulb and don’t develop the lower one.
This explains, for example, the Left’s obsession with “unconscious bias” and its insane idea that you can be racist without realizing it or wanting to be racist. The goal is to make you suspicious and afraid of your inner world. “It’s deadly, it’s bad, it’s evil, don’t go in there, stay in the upper bulb with us and we will teach you how to prevent that hidden quagmire from ruining your life.”
In totalitarian societies, people learn very fast to live in the upper bulb and not develop the lower one. Back in the USSR, people with well-developed inner worlds knew they were defective and had to conceal it. Everything that helps people develop the lower bulb was interfered with, taken away, destroyed. Filling people’s lives with endless meetings, so that they are never left alone. Taking away religion and art. Poisoning their most intimate relationships with fear and suspicion. Making sure there’s never real silence. Making sure that no aspect of life is just left alone. Making sure that people are never allowed simply to be. Alone. With themselves.
The lower bulb is the place where we know the good and the bad. Why do you grab a bag of food and haul it to the food pantry? Because it makes you feel good in the lower bulb where you are alone with yourself. Why don’t you kick a cat in the stomach even when there’s nobody to see you? Because it will make you feel bad inside.
I once did something stupid that got a colleague into a sea of trouble. There was no way she was going to find out who did it. She was on my tenure committee, too, so in the upper bulb it made every sense for me not to tell her it was my fault. But I felt terrible inside. My lower bulb was poisoned by this knowledge, so of course, I confessed and tried to set things right.
But if people don’t have that lower bulb and live completely in the upper one, then the totalitarian regime gets to decide what’s good and what’s bad for them. Betray a friend, kick the weak, and we’ll reward you with stuff that has value in the upper bulb.
The USSR ended when I was 15. But the people without developed lower bulbs remained. Their life is impoverished in a way that they aren’t equipped to comprehend. All they understand is the material stuff.
My Dad has a friend in Russia who does art. She sent some for Klara, and we told the friend how much Klara loved it and how she kissed and hugged the pictures.
“Wow,” the friend said. “Here nobody reacts that way. If you can’t sell it for money or get some tangible benefit from it, they don’t understand why it exists.”
When I left Ukraine, this is what I was running away from. The first friend I ever made in Canada was a fellow student in my freshman class at the university. We were leaving the classroom after a lecture on the Franco dictatorship, and the student exclaimed, “I can’t believe this! This was so wrong! How could they do a terrible thing like that!” And I was absolutely stunned by the realization that I finally met a person who was capable to feel something when told about an injustice that had absolutely no bearing on her life. I had never met a person my age who was capable of that, who would be interested in something bigger than what’s for dinner.
That place inside us that feels something when we see art or notice a beautiful sunset, that hurts with the pain of others, and that makes it impossible for some of us to join the crowd that is stomping on somebody deemed an undesirable – that place can’t be taken for granted. It’s what makes us human. Growing it is a lifelong project. This is why I’m so happy when I read a children’s book to my kid and she sides with the character whom nobody likes. That’s why I sit quietly, trying not to move, when she plays by herself, whispering something to her dolls and enacting scenes with them that only she understands.
In her great book Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff says that the greatest danger of a life that’s constantly surveilled, observed, and modified externally isn’t that somebody will show us targeted ads. It’s that we won’t be left alone enough to develop the lower bulb. The inner world that’s only ours and that is the greatest treasure of human existence.
The people who are putting in place the surveillance understand this very well. They send their kids to Waldorf schools that prohibit technology and hold classes in the woods because the real eugenics isn’t some pathetic messing with genes. It’s this. Some people, a minority, will have lower bulbs and they will be truly human. They will be free. The rest will be like house pets or worse. Cute but without a capacity to engage with the world like a real human can.
There no longer needs to be an all-powerful government with a secret police that drags people into the dungeons to terrorize the rest into abandoning their lower bulbs. The same effect can be achieved more easily. And a lot more profitably.
But here’s the good news. We do have our lower bulbs. We can develop them every day. We can help our children develop theirs. We can resist the efforts to substitute our innate sense of morality with the one forced on us in the upper bulb.
Unfortunately, the upper bulb has been poisoned. We can all see it. But the more time we spend in the lower bulb, the less we inhale the noxious fumes. We can seek out other people with large lower bulbs and find comfort in each other.
There’s a lot of work to be done. Things are not hopeless.
Let’s get to it.
Today a group of very noisy military airplanes over my head caused me an embarrassing amount of distress. I know it’s not my trauma and it’s pathetic to suffer from something other people are experiencing but this is a visceral, physical reaction.
Without using a search engine or AI, can you guess what this headline refers to? I attempted to guess but was wrong.
Yes, this is a real headline.
Bringing food to a dinner party (unless discussed beforehands) is low-class coded. So is taking back the wine you brought. It’s especially low-class coded to bring food and put it on the laid table, rearranging things on it to make space. I’m talking about dinner parties outside the family circle, of course.
The poster mentioned in the comments that she sometimes brings a bag of popcorn from “a random corner store” to a SF dinner party. I feel vicarious pain for this sweet, simple-minded person who has no idea how very country bumpkin she looks to the hosts.
No, no, it’s the other way round. It’s absolutely very much the other way round. Feelings of guilt and anxiety are the biggest devourer of energy of all. You are low-energy because you “are already feeling guilty.”
The worst, most intolerable kind of guilt is parental guilt. And there is no parent in existence who couldn’t find five trillion reasons to feel guilty. You either give in to the guilt and it eats you alive or you don’t. If you are prone to feeling guilt, find out why and work on that. Then energy will start getting liberated and you’ll get to do a lot more than now.
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