I’m particular fascinated by which governmental agencies were sponsoring Politico with taxpayer money’s

Extraordinary stuff.

With the Soviet newspaper “Pravda” at least we knew it was government press and treated it accordingly.

People talk about neoliberalism like it’s still 1985 and neoliberalism is this sort of an unchangeable monolith. But it’s not. It changes, it moves. It is honest in the sense that it demands from us the same changeability that it manifests.

The first stage of neoliberalism was the reduction of the state institutions that guaranteed (or attempted to do so) the welfare of the citizens.

The second stage was putting in place of those institutions mechanisms of state control that ensured ideological compliance.

By the end of the second stage, the state transformed itself from an entity that sought legitimacy through the consent of the subjects into an entity that silenced the subjects and expressed consent on their behalf.

The institutions of the state are now stronger than ever but their function is no longer to help out citizens in difficult times. It is, instead, to shut up the citizens when they want to speak out about the difficult times.

I will leave everybody to figure out for themselves if removing these currently existing institutions of the state helps or thwarts neoliberalism. I’ll remind you, though, that neoliberalism is not about destroying the state. It’s about making it do something completely different than before.

Arestovych sums it up best of all:

That really does impress. We had no idea it was even possible actually to do something without all the prattle.

Byung-Chul Han defines rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world:

Rituals transform the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space; they render time habitable. They structure time.

We no longer value rituals, and don’t use them to make our lives more stable. To the contrary, we have come to see stability and predictability as something negative.

As a result, in our current existence

time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream.

We have stripped daily life of beauty when we expelled ritual from it.

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways.

In rituals, people come together to engage in a time-hallowed practice that takes them away from themselves. Rituals aren’t about anybody’s individual self and they remove us temporarily from the field of decision-making. Everything in a ritual was decided for us a long time ago, and that’s a great relief. In our self-obsessed culture, anything that distracts us from our fixation on the self is curative.

Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They depsychologize and de-internalize those enacting them.

I had an online meeting today with somebody from the US Department of State, and they are definitely still working from home, is all I can say.

This is from Matt Walsh’s thread, so I didn’t find it myself.

She doesn’t sound completely uneducated or dumb. Uses the Oxford comma, and all. Has money for a neuropsychologist. So not a confused illiterate lady who simply doesn’t know the answer.

What is it, then? Is she really this clueless? Or did Matt Walsh manufacture this comment for rhetorical purposes, which is what I prefer to believe and wouldn’t even blame him.

Honestly, at 33 it’s weirder to be really into going out for drinks with buddies than into productivity. Usually, people get their drinking and partying done in the previous decade of their lives, and then it gets boring and one can move on.

I say all this as somebody who did quite a lot of nighttime drinking with buddies in my time but you don’t spend your whole life doing it. You experience it and then move on and develop other interests.

When I was 20, it once took me 2,5 days to get dressed and go out to buy something to eat. I was paralyzed with anxiety, buttoning my blouse for hours, eyeing the distance from my foot to a shoe but unable to bridge it. Today I know this is called anxiety and what causes it but back then all I knew is that I wanted not to be that way.

Stuck at home and unable to leave, I’d turn on the TV, and there I saw people who had what I so wanted. These were characters in Latin American soaps, and they clearly relished human contact. They chattered up a storm, emoting like little factories that manufactured feelings, and displayed these wares openly. I realized that I needed to find these people and learn how they did it. Of course, to figure out such a complicated phenomenon you needed to study it scientifically. This is how the idea of getting a PhD in Hispanic Studies was born. It couldn’t have begun to occur to me that it would end up meaning I’d do literary criticism.

This was, of course, an utterly naive, childish plan. But it worked. In my studies, I discovered that one can’t redo one’s nervous system to become emotionally less heavy than one’s Slavic physiology allows. But you can imitate the behaviors that a more easily triggered nervous system produces. And the results of the imitation are almost as good as the real thing. Today, nobody who didn’t meet me back then believes my stories of clinical shyness. This was a crushing issue and I solved it. Not through medication or even therapy but by way of an inventive plan that enriched me intellectually and ultimately gave me a good income.

It’s also a very weird story that I rarely share because every aspect of it sounds very nuts.

I told about French here but as for Ukrainian, no, we didn’t speak it at home. I can’t even imagine doing something like that. You had to be a major dissident and a very brave person to maintain that level of subversive behavior.

I learned Ukrainian in second grade when I came home from school and started airing the opinions I had picked up there about Ukrainian being a language of peasants and completely unnecessary for cultured people. Nobody despised peasants and proletarians as the Soviet people, and this was the worst kind of insult. My father didn’t appreciate my embrace of Soviet propaganda and made me learn Ukrainian in a day by reading a thick book in the language and then writing a précis of it.

That was passive knowledge, of course. I didn’t have anybody to speak with. The first time a had a chance actually to speak Ukrainian for a sustained period of time and not just an odd phrase here and there was in 2023.

As a college student back in Ukraine, I majored in English and German. I was doing pretty well in German but the whole Germanic thing wasn’t doing anything for me on a personal level. I didn’t feel like the German-speaking version of me was that different from the regular version. I was painfully, tragically shy. Often, I was unable to leave the house because of the anxiety that people would look at me and judge me. I wanted to change that because it’s no life to live at 20 to be cooped up inside like mental invalid. German wasn’t helping with any of it. But I knew what would.

I needed to learn Spanish.

You won’t have a coherent message if you are constantly terrified of offending some invented micro-identity. Of course, the goal was to beat people into submission by threats of cancellation and insults. There was never any plan to persuade or convince. Now that it’s suddenly necessary to have a message instead of screaming at everybody to shut up, it turns out that Democrats have none and don’t know how to create it.