What you feel when you hear “from the river to the sea” is exactly what the wokes feel when you say “all lives matter”, “abortion is murder” and “men can’t give birth”.

Do those feelings justify silencing and cancellation? If they do, that should work in all cases. If they don’t, that should also work in all cases.

It felt extremely unpleasant when on 9/11 my professor was celebrating and blaming the US in class. It feels even more unpleasant today when that same professor is plastering the social media with Russian propaganda. But I’m not naming this person. I’m not writing letters to the administration to get him fired. Because I won’t cede my principles to a short-lived pleasure of punishing him. All of our lives become worse when we do this.

If “feeling unsafe” justifies forcing people to do things, then COVID lockdowns and forced vaccinations were completely justified. Anything is justified because anybody can claim to feel threatened, wounded, unsafe and genocided at any time and for any reason.

What happened with feelings having an internal locus of control? What happened with being able to master your feelings? Are we all now completely at the mercy of our raging emotions? Are we going to reshape the world endlessly to avoid unpleasant feelings?

I’m shocked and horrified at the people who up until two seconds ago supported free speech and opposed cancellation and have now gone completely in the opposite direction, calling for the persecution, firings and cancellation of the people who made pro-Hamas statements.

People, what are you doing? In the name of everything reasonable, what the flying fuck are you doing? If your psychological discomfort and feelings of being “unsafe” justify the persecution of others, then why isn’t a persecution of you justified? Surely, it’s not hard to find somebody wounded and made unsafe by something you once said.

What are you doing, people? You want to hound somebody as part of a morally outraged mob? You want to support and grow cancel culture? As long as you get to do the cancellation, it’s all good?

For shame. For absolute crying shame.

And those who say “liberals should have a taste of their own medicine now that cancel culture has turned against them” need to remember this moment well. For an extraordinarily important chance to feel momentarily smug on social media, they have given away every argument in favor of free speech. An actual moral advantage has been pissed away to cosplay an angry, self-righteous wokester for three minutes. What an achievement.

Imagine a woman who spends many years fighting against abortion. Organizes political campaigns, goes to clinics. But then an inconvenient pregnancy sends her right to Planned Parenthood for an abortion. “Well,” she says. “I’m not the one who made abortion possible. This is on the libs. I’m just living in the world they made.”

Everybody should say whatever they want. Everybody. Even the people I don’t like. Even the Russian propagandists. Nobody should be coerced into being silent. Freedom of speech only exists if it extends to everybody, not only the people I agree with.

You either have foundational principles or you don’t. Otherwise, you are a wokester who’s been unsuccessful at imposing your wokeness until now.

These are the stages of the formation of a nation-state:

1. First, the intellectual elites work to create the feeling of nationhood, of a national community, of cultural togetherness and value.

2. Then, once this work is done, the people demonstrate that the message sank and come out – maybe peacefully, maybe not – to proclaim and defend their nationhood.

3. A national government is formed, and it starts imposing uniformity and cohesion.

These are always the steps. The intellectuals, the people, the government. It was like this in Spain where the intellectuals battled all through the 18th century to create the concept of “the Spanish national character” (today we’d say ‘identity’). And then in 1806, people came out to fight for the independence of Spain from the foreign invader when much of that same elite had run away to the country of the invader.

In Ukraine, intellectuals worked all through the Soviet tyranny to keep Ukrainianness alive. And as a result, in 1986 people started raising Ukrainian flags in public. In 1990, still in the USSR, Ukrainians stood, holding hands, across 700 kilometers of the country’s territory to show their support for the Ukrainian independence.

And only after all that the statehood came.

It works the same with the post-nation state. Intellectuals create the ideas, spread them around, people accept them as “common sense” or normal, and the state molds into the new form. Intellectuals, people, state.

Them are the steps.

OK, folks, I’ve had a really shitty month. I get rejected for publication, I get sued, my Arabic instructor quits. I need to brag a little to make myself feel better, so bear with me.

I gave a talk today at a local community together with two other speakers and I slaughtered. I was so good. People came up at the end to say they envy my students because I must be the most amazing professor they’ve ever met. I spoke about what it feels like to be a Ukrainian in the US, so it’s great that I represented in a very positive way.

This is big because I used to be a tragically shy person. I couldn’t buy clothes or a cup of coffee at a coffee shop because I was so shy. And now I entertain large groups like it’s completely normal. I refashioned myself completely to achieve this. It was an effort of willpower and doggedness. If I had always been this way, there wouldn’t be anything to brag about. Some people are naturally outgoing and entertaining. But I was a kid who stood alone in a corner during recess and went hungry because I couldn’t muster the strength to buy anything at the school cafeteria. I was a young woman who missed class because I was terrified of going outside, scared that people would think I was ugly, fat, and awkward.

This whole “be who you are” thing is rubbish. If I remained who I was, I’d still be cowering in fear of every human interaction. Don’t be who you are. Be who you need to be.

Everybody is missing the point on the failed Victoria’s Secret re-brand.

I used to be a very faithful customer. VS had my bra size all figured out, and you won’t know what that means if you aren’t a big-chested woman. That and the familiarity kept me on board in terms of brand loyalty.

But a bunch of years ago, I quit cold-turkey and have never even entered a VS store since. This wasn’t because I missed the soft-porn, tacky “angels”. The “angels” are only of interest to incel guys. This wasn’t because I minded the new “diverse” models. I’m a woman. I don’t care about models one way or another.

The reason why I stopped going was the decor. You walk around a mall and see a dingy, dark, dirty-pink, aging-prostitute aesthetic, and you don’t want to enter the store. The underwear kept going in the direction of “let me step out to the truck stop and make a few bucks servicing the drivers”.

The fixation of both the marketing team and the commentators on the models is a male thing. The angels are about pandering to a certain category of men. The diverse models are about re-educating men. None of this is about women.

Normal women don’t aspire to look either like the angels or like Megan Rapinoe. Normal women aspire to buy a bra that doesn’t pinch, dig or shift while having a pleasant shopping experience. The idea that women wear the kind of underwear that would motivate men to have sex is unrealistic. Most men under the age of 70 don’t need much external motivation to have sex. You don’t need to prance around in fluffy wings and a garter to arouse a normal, healthy man.

I’m finding these Bible quotes everywhere around the house:

The Christian school education is worth every penny. My kid goes to school, and I don’t need to worry about what she’s being taught and whether I’ll have to feel like my Dad must have felt when I came back from my Soviet school and recited the propaganda.

It’s looking very strongly that Biden forbade a serious response to Hamas. We are seeing the enormous pro-Palestinian rallies, reading the Harvard profs supporting Hamas, The WashPo, the NYTimes cheering against Israel. Those are all not simply Dem voters but the organizers, the get-out-the-vote and pick-up-the-ballot people. And the big, big donors. The Dem money, the grunts and the intellectual elite all cheer for Hamas. Why would Biden choose to antagonize them?

By “Biden” here and everywhere else I mean “the collective Biden”. The administration he represents.

I’m watching videos that Ukrainian and Israeli soldiers record to support each other, and it’s heart-breaking and beautiful.

You don’t need to speak the languages to understand the message.

Good people are instinctively drawn together.

Which European countries besides Ukraine didn’t have any anti-Israel, pro-Hamas manifestations?

This tells us all we need to know about whose moral clarity hasn’t been clowded by leftist prevarications.

Incredible but heartening.