The Irish fought for centuries for freedom from the English and then caved to the powerful invading force of the BLM. Invented by the English, obvs.

All those movies about Irish bravery and independent spirit – I feel kind of duped.

Yeah, I had no idea that Ireland did the George Floyd thing. I would have preferred to continue in ignorance.

I don’t think they should have done a minute of silence for the stabbed children, either. Staying silent in the face of street crime would signal complete impotence. These are the country’s leaders. They shouldn’t mourn crime. They should fight it.

Israel is grievously mishandling the fight for the public opinion in the aftermath of October 7th. All these photos of hostages, parades of women in bloody pants imitating rape victims, pouting about pro-Palestinian protests – it’s all a mistake. Israel chose to position itself as a victim, and that’s not going to work.

Here’s why.

First of all, Israel isn’t pathetic. This whole pretending to be Anne Frank schtick is unconvincing because today’s Jews aren’t Anne Frank. Israel isn’t pitiful. It has Mossad, world’s best medicine, nuclear weapons, and the garden it created in the desert. Chances that Israelis will out-victim Palestinians are non-existent. You can’t project an image of strength and excellence for 75 years and then expect everybody to see you as piteous and abject.

Another problem is that competing with Palestinians in what concerns the victim count is an exercise in futility. Life has different value in the two cultures. Palestinians can come up with a thousand dead to each Israeli victim of October 7 on the spot. They will roll out every dead, wounded, dispossessed and upset since 1948, and there’s nothing to respond to that.

So what would be a good alternative?

There’s an easy answer that was provided fairly recently by the United States.

Remember 9/11? A lot more victims than during October 7. But did Americans paper the capitals of major cities with photos of the dead? Stage shows with people throwing themselves out of windows? Ask the world to pity them? Collect footage from anti-American protests around the world and pout over it? Ask to be counted as an oppressed minority overseas?

No, of course not. Because nobody will ever pity the United States of America. It’s not going to happen. The price of being the superpower, the superstar, the leader, the achiever is that nobody will pity you even in your very pitiful moments. When you suffer, you can’t suffer like a victim. You have to do it like a superstar, a champion, a winner. You can’t beg for compassion.

Remember the position that the US took pretty much immediately after 9/11? The narrative was “we are fighting terrorism. We are saving the world from terrorism.” That’s what Israel should have done. “We love Palestinians, Palestinians are great, we are helping them to free themselves from terrorism.” This should be a conversation about terrorism. And the pro-Hamas bastards know that this is the killer narrative. They go nuts whenever you mention the word “terrorism.” Don’t compete with Palestinians in the victim status. Be their kind, compassionate protector.

I’m not saying don’t go into Gaza and blow the Hamas evildoers to smithereens no matter what the cost. I’m saying do all that but change the narrative. I can’t look at these “Jewish students hiding in a college library from a bunch of campus protesters” debacles anymore. They make me want to go re-watch movies about successful Mossad operations for images of Jews who are good at something.

God, these people are losers. We are stuck with geriatric presidential candidates because Gen-X politicians are mega cringe. They want to get together and debate regressive sales taxes.

I also heard that they dedicated a chunk of time to debating COVID death counts.

I wonder how many people watched this snoozefest.

OK. Here’s a question. Who shouldn’t be covered by DEI protections? Who’s the big bad wolf who’d exclude all these persecuted identities and has to be thwarted by DEI measures?

Ay yay yay, my Jewish brothers and sisters. You’ve learned nothing. You want to strengthen the DEI in hopes it will protect you. You still haven’t understood that you’ll never out-diverse the pro-Palestinian crowd. You are seeking allies among people who despise you and trying to sic them on those who support you.

Enjoy the learning curve.

Before the Russian invasion it was 72% opposed on the EU and 83% opposed on NATO.

Let’s not be like the characters of 1984 and get our memories erased overnight.

The neoliberal love for dragging around large groups of people never wanes. What’s the point of depopulating Eastern Ukraine and shifting a hundred thousand Asians there? Three hundred thousand Russians were killed in the process. All to relocate these Asian people to an area that’s completely new and deeply uninteresting to them.

This is not new, of course. Russia has been wiping out Russians and dragging over Central Asians and the Chinese to take their place for 20 years. As I wrote years ago, there’s no group Putin hates more than Russian men. They’ll go extinct before he’s done with them.

This is neoliberalism, people. It’s all about moving people around, and the resulting death, suffering and societal breakdown are not only acceptable but actively desired.

Reader Avi wondered why Carmen Laforet’s mediocre novel Nada is the second most widely read Spanish novel in the world. This is a great question that I want to answer.

Yes, the novel is not that great. Laforet wrote it when she was in her early twenties, and it’s good for somebody very young, inexperienced, and very self-involved. It’s deathly tedious to readers outside of that category. But the novel’s success is mostly due to two big misunderstandings.

When Nada first came out, it was the post-war time in Spain. People wanted to talk about the civil war. It was a terrible thing they had just experienced, and of course they wanted to discuss it. But there was censorship. Everybody was scared. Nobody knew how to broach the subject. When Laforet’s novel about a messed-up family came out, people chose to believe that Laforet was trying to say that the family was messed up because of the war. But what she actually wanted to talk about was family dysfunction that was entirely apolitical. People kept trying to squeeze some political statements out of Laforet but she didn’t give in. Her subsequent writing made it clear that she was interested in what makes a family collapse not as a result of any political upheavals but because of internal dynamics. There was an enormous pressure on Laforet to play the role of “the voice of the young generation that has something crucial to say about the current moment”, and she hated that.

Then something even more ridiculous happened. In 1951, a famous American Hispanist Gerald Brennan read Nada and Laforet’s second novel and attached a woke explanation to them. He published an article in the NYTimes where he said that Laforet’s novels had done “more for the liberation of Spanish women than the entire last 50 years of history.” Laforet at that time was a deeply religious Catholic pregnant with her fourth child but who cares about reality when the NYTimes says something different? Laforet’s Nada became assigned reading in every Spanish course on every US campus. It still is, and each new generation of Spanish professors struggles to massage the novel into some far-left mold that its very conservative author couldn’t have begun to imagine.

I don’t assign it to my students.

Turns out that my unusual headache wasn’t caused by sitting on a throne while listening to a land acknowledgement. I’d had my blood taken at the doctor’s office earlier today and the nurse put a very tight bandage over the vein. For some reason, it gave me a severe headache. I don’t know medicine, so I have no idea how this works but the moment I managed to pry off the bandage the headache immediately disappeared.

I wish we all knew more about the functioning of the human body. I suffered majorly for hours and had no idea this was because something was squeezing my vein.

Why it is necessary to wrap one in a huge, thick bandage for a tiny needle prick is a mystery.

Why, why did I agree to go to the small talk event? I now have a massive headache and I never get headaches.

At the beginning of the event, the invited guests had to sit on chairs with their names facing the audience. Everybody got a normal chair except for me. I got a throne. It was a huge, high affair that I had to climb on and then sit there, towering over everybody else like a sad old giraffe. The organizer really loves me, so I ended up with the throne. My feet were dangling in the air, it was so high.

Then the sociability began, and it was torture. Students who were being tested on their sociability skills clearly think that making small talk means you have to approach a person and stare at her with big, scared eyes. I ended up making 100% of the small talk, and we can all imagine the joy this caused me.

Finally, I disentangled myself from the throng of silent teenagers and went to get some food. And it was at that moment that one student decided to make small talk by saying, “I see that you really like sausage” and giving me an angry stare.

I have absolutely no idea whose brilliant decision it was to offer sociability as a college course but aside from the sausage that was quite good, this was not a raging success. Now these students are going to have a course on non-verbal communication, and I’m hoping that one will go better.

He is one of several dozen Russian businessmen who died in strange circumstances since 2022. There is a running list here.

These are very rich people. Some were billionaires. Many of them were young and vigorous. And they apparently managed to find no method to avoid being picked off one by one.

The extraordinary helplessness of these people is truly something to observe.