The whole promise of neoliberalism is that finally everybody will be treated as an individual. It won’t be about groups, ethnicity, race, sex, or any other unchosen characteristic. Neoliberalism was supposed to free an individual from any unchosen group identity. We were going to give it a pass on every problem it creates in exchange for the wonderful boon of liberating the individual.

The pass was extended but in return all we got was group identities becoming more important than ever.

What is the point then? Why should we subscribe to this setup? What’s in it for us?

I don’t understand the American belief that sexual intercourse makes people absorb the professional skills of their partners. I’ve spent twenty years being weirded out by “spousal hires” in every area of life. Everybody is discussing how jobs were granted based on DEI characteristics but it never gets mentioned how many of these jobs went to wives, then to mistresses, and then increasingly to throuple partners.

There’s a lot of this in academia but it also exists in politics where every Hillary and Michelle get inflicted on the public in perpetuity for no reason I can comprehend. Now there’s Erika Kirk who is destroying TPUSA not for any conspiratorial reason but simply because she has no idea how to run a large organization. The spectacle of her flailing is sad and utterly unnecessary.

It’s paradoxical that TPUSA, of all organizations, should prove so incapable of hiring based on merit.

The man suspected of both the Brown shooting and the MIT murder was supposedly “found dead from a self-inflicted wound.”

This is the worst development. It will give Candace Owens years of material about maroon beekeepers. Conspiracies will never end. And it’s all because the FBI and the RI law enforcement are terrible.

COVID broke people’s brains. Especially in Montreal. I took my mother to her oncologist today, and when we exited the hospital, we got into a cab.

“Flu? You got the flu? I saw you come out of the hospital. Do you have flu? It’s got to be the flu. Ay yay yay!” ranted the can driver, a tall, wide-shouldered young man.

Tired of his lamentations, I screeched, “Cancer! It’s cancer she’s got, not flu!”

“Oh,” said the driver.

Isn’t wallpaper great?

I wish more people did wallpaper.

These are from my mother’s apartment in Canada.

This is me in my sister’s traditional Ukrainian headdress.

The whole thing isn’t fitting into the frame but you get the idea. It’s the coolest thing.

There’s a land acknowledgement on Air Canada flights. “We will be flying over the lands that belong…”

Is there a living person with above room-temperature IQ who thinks it’s not embarrassing and stupid?

Don’t do it in front of foreigners, at least. Make it an in-house secret of local dysfunction.

There’s a land acknowledgement on Air Canada flights. “We will be flying over the lands that belong…”

Is there a living person with above room-temperature IQ who thinks it’s not embarrassing and stupid?

Don’t do it in front of foreigners, at least. Make it an in-house secret of local dysfunction.

“The pilot of this airplane looks extremely young,” I told Klara. “This is disturbing.”

“He probably has really good moisturizer, that’s all,” Klara reassured me.

Isn’t it funny how people on the British right love talking about patriotism but hate like most of the institutions that distinguish Britain? They hate the BBC, The NHS, the ECHR (which we were key in creating) like if you want us to be America so bad maybe live there.

— Tharries (@TharriesYT) December 17, 2025

This isn’t as stupid as it sounds. Anything can become an element of national identity. It can be ancient or invented 5 minutes ago. It doesn’t even have to be connected to people who were aware of your nation-state because it was created long after they died.

The problem isn’t that the BBC and the NHS are recent or that they are institutions instead of, say, natural phenomena. The American nation-state by necessity relies on achievements that are enormously more recent than those of European countries, yet it’s the first, and still the strongest, nation-state in existence. Newness is not in conflict with national identity.

The problem is that the narrative of the British national identity that ties it to the NHS and the BBC was embraced along class lines by people who despise their class inferiors. You can’t have a separate national identity for the fancy people. Trying to position your class identity (which is what “Britain is the NHS is”) as national identity only annoys the people to whom you are signaling that you are their class superior.