Tsar Alexander II specified in his manifesto that former serf owners were obligated to provide the voting units of the freed serfs with land that they could till. The state paid the owners for that land, creating a whole class of suddenly wealthy people who no longer depended for their livelihood on flogging serfs to make them work.

Alexander was an interesting fellow. He was trying to move the empire to a real nation-state. He instituted the draft, started dismantling censorship, and was slowly moving the country towards elements of self-governance and voting. What you know as the great Russian literature came out of Alexander’s reign. He reformed the judiciary to make it more civilized.

Do you know what happened to Alexander II and why his reforms remained incomplete and were later reversed?

He was assassinated by the wokesters of his era. A group of revolutionary terrorists murdered the Tsar because they didn’t want things to get better. If everything is good, how do you convince anybody to start a revolution?

The next Russian leader who also tried to introduce reforms and make Russia more civilized was the Prime Minister of Tsar Nikolai II, Pyotr Stolypin. One of his biggest reforms was to benefit the former serfs by ensuring that they had private ownership over their means of production.

“You want great upheavals, and we want a great Russia,” Stolypin told revolutionaries. They attempted to assassinate him 11 times and finally succeeded in 1911. There were no more attempts to introduced reforms, and in 1917 the Bolshevik revolution took place. The group that was one of the biggest losers in the revolution were the former serfs. They were starved, murdered, collectivized, and – funny how that works – deprived of freedom of movement and effectively enslaved all over again in the USSR.

About 40% of the entire population, or 23 million people, were serfs in the Russian Empire on the eve of the abolition that took place in 1861. Compare that to the 4 million US slaves, and you’ll see the magnitude of the issue.

We use a different word to refer to the slaves in the Russian Empire. We call them serfs. But they were property. They were bought and sold. Owners could do whatever they wanted with them.

There were no serfs in Siberia or the Far East, obviously. It was the European population of the empire that was enslaved. In a multiethnic empire, all slaves were white people enslaved by other white people. There’s no likelihood that my Ukrainian ancestors weren’t serfs. Of which I’m very proud and not remotely traumatized, but that’s a different story.

In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, one of the only two worthwhile leaders Russia ever had, signed the Liberation Manifesto freeing the slaves. Every church in the empire had the text of the manifesto read aloud after Sunday service because how else do you inform the illiterate slaves that they are now free?

Not only were the serfs freed, their houses and belongings were declared their own private property. They were given self-governance and voting rights within their self-governance units.

But signing the manifesto is not enough. How do the freed serfs feed themselves? And how do you make their owners agree to relinquishing their property, livelihood, and class position? I’ll talk about that in the next post.

Doing film versions of well-known fairy-tales that explore the point of view of the traditional villain is a great idea. Wicked shows the Wizard of Oz story from the perspective of the two evil witches. Netflix is planning to release a new version of Cinderella that tells the story of the stepsisters.

This is great because it teaches children that in every conflict the other side has its own version of the story. It’s a crucial life lesson. We are all villains in somebody’s story. And sometimes, it’s deserved. Remembering this helps us to be a villain less.

It’s the end of the semester, everybody is tired. It takes an effort not to be a jerk to a colleague who asks the same question for the fifth time, not to go off at a student who barges in while I’m recording a class video and spoils the whole thing, and not to snipe at a lab worker who showed up to work even though we issued 5 reminders that the lab closed for the holidays. Remembering that for all these people I’m a character in their story like they are characters in mine helps to avoid rolling my eyes, huffing, and being annoyed. The realization that they find me as annoying as I find them is a necessary humbling experience. We all need more of those.

The people who are ranting the most about the movies which question whether those everybody considers villains are really villains are conservatives. This is strange because, who do they think the Evil Witch of the West and the Evil Stepsister are in the story taught at every school and college and transmitted from every MSM outlet? In our society, who is it that needs people to wonder whether the official narrative of who’s the evildoer might be wrong? Who is the other side that gets labeled evil by definition? Who is it that doesn’t get to tell their story?

If anybody needs people to have a well-developed capacity to doubt official stories and give a chance to official villains, it’s conservatives.

Thank you, President Trump.

Obviously, I’m saying this sarcastically. This is a clarification for people who might have arrived since yesterday and don’t know that I despise BlackRock. That Trump is extorting Ukraine to accept BlackRock shenanigans is very depressing.

If anybody thinks that this is good and can explain how, please pipe up now. I need good news.

These children are being raised for success in 1825. In 2025, this slavish mentality of an identical cog in a vast machine doesn’t pay. The flat subjectivity this upbringing creates puts you at a big disadvantage.

The existing economy needs individuals, deep layered personalities, a quirky, complex character, and a very deep subjectivity.

I have no knowledge of South Korea to explain what drives this incapacity to understand that the world has changed but these poor people are doing their own children a great damage.

The latest strike in the Trump administration's war on "woke": @SecRubio orders the State Dept. to abandon using the Calibri typeface and to go back to Times New Roman. Blinken had State adopt Calibri since a sans serif typeface is easier for people who have a hard time reading. pic.twitter.com/V2cZNIEKvZ

— Edward Wong (@ewong) December 10, 2025

I support this measure. Not for any ideological reason but because Calibri is ugly and hard to read. I prefer Bookman Old Style or Book Antiqua but Times New Roman, which is the standard in academia, will do in a pinch.

I write all of my own research in Book Antiqua and then convert to TNR before sending in for publication. This is a trick I learned years ago from this blog’s long-time friend Jonathan, and it made me more productive because I love how my text looks on a page.

An absolutely horrible story about teenagers driven to suicide by online sex scammers:

In 2022, Mississippi high school football star Walker Montgomery, 16, committed suicide in a story nearly identical to Bryce’s, after he was contacted on Instagram by a “girl” who turned out to be a Nigerian scam artist.

That same year, 16-year-old Waylon Scheffer of Montana, 17-year-old Ryan Last of California, and 17-year-old Jordan DeMay of Michigan all took their lives after being contacted by East Africa-based scammers who had proxies operating in the US.

https://nypost.com/2025/12/09/us-news/west-virginia-teen-commits-suicide-over-online-sextortion-plot/

Somebody needs to be talking to these young men and explaining that there are no normal teenage girls in existence who want to see a picture of their penis. Girls do not solicit pictures of penises. Girls do everything to avoid seeing any more pictures of penises than the ones that are constantly thrust into their faces whenever they go online. Somebody needs to explain that girls aren’t boys. That there’s absolutely zero value to a 17-year-old girl in getting a guy send her genital photos. Because it’s not difficult at all.

These boys lost their lives because nobody bothered to explain that girls aren’t boys.

Or they could have sex. That would make the bowls feel a lot less dramatic.

It goes on and like this about the bowls on an infinite loop. Nobody will ever convince me that a man can care that much about the bowls. Given the shape of bowls, it’s hard not to read this as a cry for… not bowls.

You think it’s a parody but no, it’s real.

The sense of humor is dead and buried.

It’s Spain and Argentina, which makes the whole thing all the more grim.

There’s an ongoing battle for the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. It has been going on for 1,5 years. Ukrainians call the city Pokrovsk, which means “Virgin Mary’s Protective Veil.”

Do you know what Russians call it?

Krasnoarmeysk. Meaning, the city of the Red Army.

These are people who are fighting for very different things.