Opinions, art, debate
80% of Ukrainians support Israel.
2% support Palestinians.
The rest don’t have an opinion.
And the funniest thing is that the same leftist crowd that accused Ukrainians of being Nazis in the pages of the NYTimes and WashPo is now harassing Jews all over America.
I don’t understand why leftist protests are always about punishing regular people and creating discomfort for others.
In all of the pro-Ukrainian events, protests, manifestations and activities that I’ve participated, we never tried to be a nuisance. We always make sure we aren’t in anybody’s way. We always clean up after ourselves. The events are positive in spirit. We never try to guilt or scare anybody. We always discuss in advance that the goal is to make passers-by feel better at the end of the event than before they came across it.
And it works. People don’t run away from us in fear because that’s a normal reaction to unhinged behavior. We don’t act unhinged, so we always get a lot of positive engagement. At the most recent event, people were flocking to us because they felt that something good was happening.
If the goal is to make people hate your cause, then you’d behave like these leftist protesters. Stopping the traffic, vandalizing works of art, attacking Christmas trees, scaring kids at the mall – isn’t it obvious that people are going to dislike you and whatever you stand for?
Nobody owes you anything. Nobody owes you attention, support, interest, time, or anything else. If people do decide to give what they don’t have to, you should be grateful. You should never lose the feeling of wonderment at how big their hearts are if they want to give when they don’t have to.
People who think it’s OK to get in the face of complete strangers and wreck their day have a totalitarian mentality. They have lost the capacity to understand that their biggest thing doesn’t have to matter to others because others have their own biggest thing. They can’t accept that nobody has to feel their pain.
Truly, you couldn’t hurt your cause any more than by doing this kind of infantile tantruming.
Friends, I have the perfect Christmas Day book for you. It’s beautiful, touching, human, and it’s about things that really matter.
The novel has been translated into English, Spanish, Italian, and French. It received the Dublin Literary Award for 2023. And it shows that people are desperate for good books about normal lives of normal people.
The novel’s narrator is a failed writer who trains as a chiropodist at the age of 45 and starts working at a small salon in Marzahn, a Soviet-era residential area in the former GDR. Her clients are mostly elderly people, and she listens to their stories – funny, tragic, uplifting, or silly – realizing what a gift it is to come in touch with these amazing old people.
What starts as Katja’s midlife crisis, turns into a life rich with tenderness and humanity.
Can you remember your midlife crisis – the fuzzy years, when you were turning around, at a loss, flagging from the tedium of swimming? Can you remember the fear of sinking in the middle of the big lake without a sound and without a cause – when you could see no land anywhere, no coastline, no shore, when you dropped to the bottom?
Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp
The novel is autobiographical, and it’s written with such simplicity and unpretentiousness that it really gets to you. It transmits an incredible sense of peacefulness and comfort. I’ll never be able to achieve even a tenth of the inner peace that Katja feels normally but at least I can read about it.
I can’t imagine anything better to read on Christmas than this beautiful novel. Grab some hot chocolate, curl up under something exceptionally fuzzy, and lose yourself in Marzahn.
It’s got to be COVID, what I have. I’m not eating and the only moments in my life when I don’t want to eat is when I have COVID or after I give birth. And I definitely didn’t give birth recently.
The worst part is that final grades are due on Monday at noon, and I’m responsible for the grades of all our 9 languages. And I’m starting to teach my winter course on Monday. And my brain doesn’t work. I have to make a gigantic effort to complete the simplest operations. Plus, I’m sure that not eating isn’t helping with concentration.
As I’m sick, I sleep all the time. And for some reason, in my dreams I’m reading newspaper headlines in Polish. Many words are just like in Ukrainian but some are completely unidentifiable. For example, why is “kobieta” a woman? In my dream, I only figured out what it means from the context.
While I’m sick and unable to say anything remotely interesting, here’s some great Bill Maher for you on Israel and Palestine:
You can say the same about negotiating with Russia. You can’t negotiate with the side that wants you to not exist. And that is incapable of respecting any agreement.
It’s a great video. I highly recommend.
I’m sick with a brutal cold, my friends. Can’t get out of bed, cooked a great dish and ate none of it. Not a spoonful! I need to be really ill to stop eating.
I have to record an urgent video for students but the way I look and sound, it’s best not to show my face in public.
https://twitter.com/ErmakovFeda/status/1735037672832332201?t=ugaFVPj1diJHeuDEzLxN3Q&s=19
The girl in red ended up bringing a rifle to school, killing the girl who is pummeling her in the video, shooting 5 other 13-year-olds, and committing suicide.
I could post a video a day like this. Kids pummeling each other or their teachers. The teachers pummeling the kids. Men beating women. Women brutalizing toddlers. Toddlers slicing house pets with knives.
The tapping is fine but the costumes, the styling and the glorification of Russia are hideous and tone-deaf. If they wanted something Eastern European, they could have invited Ukrainian performers in beautiful costumes to do the song I posted yesterday. They could have US singers of different races do half of it in English. That would be beautiful and Christmassy.
Why does everything have to be so ugly? This is torture to people with a live aesthetic sensibility.
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