Aside from “rights”, the words that we have to start stepping away from are consent, choice, and freedom.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these words per se. But we have turned them into idols. No other consideration is allowed or even occurs when something is claimed to be a result of “a freely consented choice that is everybody’s right.” 

None of these things are absolutes because nobody can even define them. What’s a free choice? What is it free of? Self-awareness is extremely rare. Today I think I freely consented and tomorrow I feel differently. Who’s to say what’s more freely chosen, yesterday’s enthusiasm or today’s repentance?

We had the whole #MeToo quagmire because first they consented, and then they un-consented, or they consented to one part but not the other, and we are sitting there, parsing who chose what at which point. As Juan Manuel de Prada correctly said, we are so stuck on “free choice” that we aren’t even asking why people are leading these weird, miserable lifestyles at all. The whole set-up is wrong. Remember the Mattress Girl who consented to anal sex with a random dude because she thought this activity, which she clearly didn’t enjoy, was going to get her a boyfriend? She un-consented and destroyed his life when he refused to provide the payment she expected for this unpleasant act.  There’s so much wrong here, aside from how anybody expressed consent. Why can’t she openly say she wants a boyfriend? Why is he finagling an unwanted sex act out of a clearly desperate young woman? Why are they both using sex as a substitute for every other form of communication?

The deification of consent has already given us transed grade-schoolers and is leading us straight to the legalization of pedophilia. This is not to say we should abolish consent. It simply shouldn’t be the only category of analysis.

Social media are filled with stories of adult detransers who are sharing absolute horrors about the mutilation inflicted on them. And every time, there’s a chorus of, “but you wanted this. You chose this. You consented. So what’s the problem?” There’s a 30yo man who had his penis cut off. This is a terrible tragedy. He’s devastated. But people are chirping on and on about how he chose it himself as if they weren’t choosing the most bizarre things themselves during COVID out of artificially stoked anxiety and politically induced ignorance.

Humans are not hyper-rational creatures who are always calculating the most optimal choices. We aren’t robots. We are emotional, fallible, easily led astray, often confused. Life is a lot more complicated than a series of calculated free choices.

Immigration is now the biggest concern for American voters, standing at 28%. 

All of 3% say racism is a top concern, with 2% citing healthcare.

Of course, we could have 100% of voters say they want less immigration, yet nothing will come of it, and instead we’ll hear endless prattle about racism.

To the scrooge who downvoted the previous post: for once, I managed to brag in a somewhat elegant way, and you crapped all over it, you old curmudgeon.

In Ukraine, the National Taras Shevchenko Prize is a lot more prestigious than the International Taras Shevchenko Prize. Which is exactly as it should be in a functioning nation-state. I have been awarded the less prestigious one. For now.

I’ve been translating more poetry from Ukrainian, and I’m convinced that the publisher should let their translator go and pick me. For one, I’m free. And I’m great at rhyming.

But most importantly, their translator has no feel for the English language. “Mercurial” does not mean “poisonous” because this word points to a different aspect of mercury than its capacity to poison.

Obviously, I’m not saying it to the publisher because I don’t want to deprive anybody if paid work with my leisurely endeavors.

The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer of Columbia University’s medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/columbia-university-hospital-dei-chief-is-serial-plagiarist-complaint-alleges/

There are pages and pages of copy-pasted material at the link, plagiarized from over 30 sources in addition to Wikipedia.

I’m now wondering if there are any diversity people at all who actually wrote their own dissertations. Of course, they won’t have to plagiarize in the future because now they can simply use AI to generate woke word soup for them. This is our last chance to catch them in the act.

Obviously, in this age bracket, younger woman – older man is enormously more acceptable. A 45-year-old woman automatically deprives a younger man of children. A 45-year-old man deprives a younger woman of nothing.

If, on the other hand, he’s 50 and she’s 65, that’s perfectly fine, especially since women live longer anyway.

I looked at the comments to the tweet and the overpowering need of many people to say “it’s none of my business” is even more interesting a phenomenon than age difference. It reminds me of an old Soviet joke about two friends having an animated discussion in the street. A stranger stops next to them, listens for a few minutes, exclaims, “Fuck you both!” and leaves. I guess now such people migrated to social media.

We have a group of wealthy people in the community who want to support our program. Asbestos claims lawyers, good money. They decided to give out scholarships in the amount of $1,500 (one thousand five hundred American dollars, just to be completely clear), no strings attached, to students in our program. Very eager to just give away money. All that the students had to do was write a 1-page essay about why they decided to go into our program.

Now, as adults who all have an OK living, how do you feel about $1,500? I might be a total weirdo here but I think it’s good money. I wouldn’t scoff at it. Tell me where I can pick up $1,500 for a one-page piece of writing, and I’m first in line.

Not so our students. Most refused even to try. They are too busy, and writing is hard. Out of those who agreed, one used AI, another made an extraordinary number of spelling mistakes , including IN THE NAME OF OUR BLOODY PROGRAM, and yet another quit after one paragraph without even finishing it.  The last sentence kind of fizzled out before actually ending.

The lawyers are confused. They wanted to give away money. They deposited the money into our scholarship account and arrived today to discuss the applications. They, busy, successful people, could be bothered to come and give money. But nobody could be bothered to take it.

Our students aren’t remotely rich. This is really not a privileged crowd in any way, shape, or form. So what is it?

It’s not just the scholarship. I’m going to fire my lab GA who will lose not only the salary but her tuition waiver. This means she’s out $15,000 just like that, and even this can’t motivate her to send me the correct spreadsheet with exactly 5 lines in it 4 weeks in a row.

I’m not saying they are all like that. But very many are. Way too many. And as God is my witness, I can’t explain it.

Do you know how children sometimes do things veeery sloooowly precisely when you could do with putting a move on it?

Or how they endlessly lose the little gew-gaws that are very important to them at this moment? And life turns into one interminable search party for every tiny lost object?

It’s almost like they do it on purpose.

Because they do. Not consciously, of course, but there is a great and crucial purpose behind this behavior.

Let me explain.

One of the main tasks of parenting is to contain the children and gradually teach them to contain themselves. When they are very little, for example, there are rivers, oceans of saliva coming out of them, and parents have to stem the flow with bibs and whatnot. And then the saliva stops coming out. It’s done, the child has learned to self-contain. Emotional self-containment takes a lot longer, of course.

The child knows that it’s a slow process and wants to make sure the parents get it and will wait for their self-containment to mature. The little lost gew-gaws and the slow-motion movement are their love letter to the parents where they ask, “Mommy, will you still love me while I’m learning this? Daddy, will you be patient for as long as I need to learn to self-contain?”

We can respond to this love letter with one of the biggest gifts a parent can give to a child. This gift is the sentence, “Take your time, I’m not rushing you.” This has to be said from the place of complete inner peace. If irritability overcomes, practice breathing, meditation, deep focus, whatever. How are you going to teach self-containment if you are not self-containing successfully?

The incomprehensible importance of the little lost gew-gaws is not in the gew-gaws themselves. The point is to see if the parent will eagerly and patiently engage in the search for the misplaced item and do it as many times as needed. By losing the gew-gaw, the child asks, “will you still love me even though I’m imperfect?” And with every search you respond, “yes, of course, I will.” It really helps to avoid feeling annoyed if you remember that it’s your way of responding to a child’s plea for love.

We use the word “rights” a lot but we no longer think about what it means. We treat rights like the sun that comes up every morning and is just there. But rights aren’t just there and, unlike the sun, they haven’t existed long before the human civilization. They are a concept invented historically very recently by a specific culture for this culture’s internal, situational uses.

For “rights” to exist, somebody has to a) grant them and b) guarantee them. In the deeply Christian worldview that gave us the idea of universal human rights, God is the entity that grants rights. Once we’ve accepted that God created us in his likeness and endowed us with rights simply because we are human, somebody will have to actually provide these rights and defend them. The US was created specifically for the purpose of guaranteeing these God-given rights.

What happens, though, when we take God out of the equation? What happens when we leave behind the idea that rights are given by God to whom we owe many onerous duties in return?

What happens is that we begin to invent rights. Interest groups battle each other to make the rights that each group invents at a rapid clip reign supreme.

Philosopher John Gray, the author of The New Leviathans, says that our reliance on a poorly understood concept of rights is creating unsolvable problems. Does the right of a man to be called Susan trump my right not to call him that? Does the right of a fetus to come into existence as a person trump the right of a woman to control her own body? Does the right of a female convict not to be raped by a male prisoner who claims he’s a woman trump the right of a female-looking convict not to be raped by male prisoners? Does the right to choose where you live trump the right of other people to a meaningful concept of citizenship? Does the right to education or healthcare automatically negate other people’s right not to pay for your education and healthcare?

Every individual has an answer to these questions based on their own understanding of what matters. But there’s no way to come up with an answer that will be acceptable to everybody. As a result, we have doomed ourselves to an endless struggle to cram our understanding of rights down other people’s gullets.

The whole idea of rights that can mushroom into infinity is flawed. Rights cannot be the most important thing that defines our life in society, says John Gray. In the West, we are so trapped by this concept of rights that we are dismantling everything that works in our civilization and dooming ourselves to impoverishment and insignificance.