I feel the deepest compassion for somebody so unable of learning. In the world we inhabit today, it must be very hard to be that way. My heart bleeds for you.

I’ll answer but it’s completely useless since you can’t allow any new information into your brain.

The only rights you have are the ones that your nation-state is willing to grant you. The nation-state of green card holders, or any other non-citizens, is that whose citizenship they hold. They can and should be deported whenever it pleases the host country. They are not citizens. They are here on sufferance. That sufferance can be withdrawn at will. To use a simple metaphor, you don’t have the right to remain in my house against my will. It doesn’t matter why I ask you to leave. It only matters that I do. I can be completely unreasonable and capricious in asking you to leave but that doesn’t matter. My house, my whims.

This being said, I am preoccupied by the aggressive removal of pro-Palestinian protesters. Not because they have “free speech rights” in a country that’s not their own. But because I don’t want the US to be subservient to Israel or any other foreign interest.

Having children is one way of feeling a connection with the human race, and all the other inhabitants of this planet, who—however else their lives may differ from your own—are doing precisely the same thing you are. . . We are adventurers in the same mysterious territory of parenthood.

Joyce Maynard, Domestic Affairs

Yes, I know, more Maynard. They keep putting her books on Kindle Unlimited, and it’s like placing drugs in front of a junkie. I keep grabbing one after another, my eyes glazed and my hands shaking.

Domestic Affairs is a collection of articles from long before Maynard met the woke second husband. And you can see it from this quote where Maynard talks about the beauty and importance of being a parent:

Sometimes at night the thought will strike me: There are three small people here, breathing sweetly in their beds, whose lives are for the moment in our hands. I might as well be at the controls of a moon shot, the mission is so grave and vast.

OK, just one more because I really love it:

It wasn’t until I had children myself that I understood the power of inheritance and the meaning of heritage. Of course I’ve rejected, railed against, and even cursed parts of my heritage, as most daughters have. But in the end, I guess I never for a moment questioned the essential belief my mother possessed (and possesses still): that there could be nothing more worthwhile and challenging than having and raising children. Fashions in raising of children dictate, now, that women leave their little girls more free to choose or reject childbearing. But my mother raised me to be a mother, and (though I’m always quick to say not “when you have children,” but only “if”) the truth is I am probably passing on a good deal of the same pattern to my children too.

I say “when” to my daughter because a mother’s doubt in a girl’s capacity to reproduce is very undermining but these quotes are only from the first 3 pages of the book and already so great. These are the most important questions we can discuss, and they are all here in this book.

I just started reading Domestic Affairs. I will totally understand if people want to leave until I’m done quoting this book but don’t worry, I’m on an 9-hour flight, and I’m sure I’ll finish reading it today.

And by the way, Maynard’s daughter Audrey has four children, two girls and two boys. She heard her mother correctly.

The UK is about to introduce a two-tier justice system where ethnic minorities will be given more lenient treatment than whites:

Ministers criticise ‘two-tier’ sentencing changes in England and Wales

Sentencing Council plans to make offenders’ ethnic backgrounds a greater factor in deciding whether to jail them.

Ministers have criticised plans to make the ethnic background of offenders a greater factor in determining whether to jail them, saying they amounted to a “two-tier system” of justice. . . Under the change, which would come into force on 1 April, magistrates and judges would be asked to consult a pre-sentence report before determining whether to imprison someone of an ethnic or religious minority.

At my German conference, people kept asking how Americans could have voted for Trump. All they needed to do was look at their own news, and they’d know the answer. The quote above is the answer. We don’t want institutional racism, is the answer. It’s either Trump or what’s in the quote above. Those are the options.

Does this child live at the White House now? pic.twitter.com/BJGCxEWEwK

— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) March 14, 2025

These are literally the most endearing images of any American president I have ever seen. The campaign to discredit eminently normal things as weird already failed. I’m perfectly fine with liberals continuing it because it helps us win but it’s bizarre that they are so dedicated to it in view of how disastrous it’s been for them.

The second most endearing image is that of Obama letting a little black boy touch his hair. I place it second because Obama didn’t spend much time with the boy. It was a photo-op, not a relationship. But still a mega touching photo-op.

If you see one of the images as endearing and iconic and another as weird, you are getting infected with partisanship and need to step away from the news cycle for a bit. If you are indifferent to both, that’s fine, not everybody is into visual culture. I’m not much into it myself.

John Marrs is the author of The One, a book we discussed recently on this blog. You Killed Me First is very different from The One. This is good because many authors are very repetitive and monochromatic.

There’s nothing science-related, futuristic or socially-minded in this novel. There’s something that can be perceived as vaguely paranormal, or not, if you don’t like that stuff. The novel depicts women being catty to each other. Hundreds of pages of women being catty. I enjoyed it massively. I’m not part of the Mom culture, so I don’t experience this in real life. It was fun to come back to my hotel room in Hamburg after a whole day of academic socializing and listen to a non-demanding story about women calling each other fat every 3 pages, trying to seduce each other’s husbands, and murdering people to keep the plot going. Any sociability, even with people I like as much as I did the colleagues at the conference, depletes my energy, and I need to recover. This book served that purpose beautifully.

John Marrs’ books are all on Kindle Unlimited with a free Audible version, and I’m planning to plough through all of them. I want to see if they are all as different as the first two I read by him.

I also can’t disagree with Yarvin’s description of the American Democrat-voting nobility:

Blue Americans are some of the best Americans. Everyone in the world should, and most people in the world do, want
to become blue Americans or live among them. And they can be completely trusted to govern themselves.

What they can’t be allowed to do, ever again, is govern anyone else. Blue Americans need to be separated from all authority over non-blue Americans including their old client classes—the way slots addicts need to stay out of Vegas.

This is true. In spite of an occasional they/them, these are people who live in clean, beautiful enclaves, form strong families, and donate generously to charity. They govern themselves effectively but are incapable of understanding other people. All their ideas for others are predicated on the belief that everybody on the planet is a highly organized, WASP puritan with a Nordic nervous system and gigantic amounts of interiorized guilt. Since that is not the case, the Dem nobility destroys every community it touches while having the best possible intentions.

Almost everybody I know is a blue American, and they are absolutely wonderful people who want what’s best. Yarvin is right yet again.

Since most voters participate in democratic politics only as an expression of their fear and loathing of their cultural enemies, and since the only way they know of winning is to dominate the other side, the only story of victory they know is sadistic domination.

This is from Curtis Yarvin’s Gray Mirror. If somebody disagrees with this, I’d love to hear their argument, but it sounds like a very exact description of what’s happening to us.

We are people who can’t limit our appetites and tame our emotions. We are a raging maw of desire but our libidinal object is not the other but the self. We need constantly to prop up our belief that we are prescient and in control because without this skill the instability we inhabit becomes too scary. It’s not each other that we hate but the unpredictability. But we can’t put that into words or come close to this realization intellectually because the whole point is to deny that there is any unpredictability.

The sadism in our political space is a ritual burning of the mirror image of the self that didn’t figure things out flawlessly. The enemy is what the self could have been if disinformation / propaganda had their way with one.

The civil war we hear so much about is waged inside the self that is terrified of being discarded and punishes itself for being discardable.

The only two conferences I’ve been to that were useful were in Germany. The ones I spoke at in the US, Canada, Spain, UK, and the Dominican Republic were a travesty compared to how conferences are done in Germany. There are two main features of German conferences that make them worthwhile: the focus of the talks and community.

German organizers turn each session into a community. The participants are not indifferent people who show up separately to read their talk and then scram as fast as possible. People show up together, hang out, then work together. Everybody stays the entire time the whole three days. Showing up just to read your talk and disappear is impossible. You won’t be invited again. As a result, people get to know each other as human beings and not machines that churn out words. The conference develops its own lore about funny things experienced together as a group. There are shared jokes and shared memories.

Obviously, I’m talking about conferences in my field and lay no claim to how things are organized in other areas. Neither do I suggest that all US conferences are built on the model of “show up for your session and disappear after it.” I’m only speaking about what I experienced several times a year every year since 2000, the year of my first conference.

Another great thing about German conferences is that people don’t talk about one tiny aspect of their research that nobody else in the room understands. And nobody reads pre-canned narratives. Instead, people speak like normal human beings about their entire project. And how they got interested in it. This way, it’s not boring for those who aren’t into this specific thing, which nobody ever is.

For instance, yesterday I listened to a talk about a Polish journalist who wrote a book about his experiences during the war of independence in Angola. It’s relevant to our field because a Spanish filmmaker made a movie based on the Pole’s book. I thought it would be the most tedious thing ever but actually I loved it. The talk wasn’t about some tiny aspect of the movie but about the whole project. And that made it human and interesting.

In short, in North America, we should throw away the entire way we do conferences. We should learn from Germans because currently our conferences are a complete waste of time and money. There’s zero reason to go to them at all because you can just as easily email your talk to the participants and they will ignore it just like they do at conferences.

Good job, Germans. Now that I’ve experienced this in Southern and Northern parts of the country, I understand that this is not a bug but a feature. You rock, my friends. We have a lot to learn from you.

Also, I just have to mention that the way coffee, tea, fresh fruit, mineral water, and excellent quality snacks were provided for free throughout the 3-day event was impressive.

Of course, this is a secondary connection area that was built for reasons nobody can identify and that is always empty. But who cares about little things like reality when you can burn with rightful anger over some dumb political point.

This carelessness proliferates on both sides and nobody has the moral advantage here. People believe all sorts of lies that flatter them. They act like the space of flows should be a high-trust society, refusing to realize that it’s not possible.

Never seen this before:

I’m ready to go home.