Welcome to Iowa.

But hey, it’s not completely stupid. Every day I increasingly think it is, in fact, a great privilege not to be referred to as, say, “a pink body” that needs to be saved. It’s good to be a complete human person and not some colored body that requires saving. Plus, nobody depicts me as a disintegrating blob of uniform color. That’s privilege right there.

Even the President’s Twitter account has memory issues:

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind Clinton and Obama being erased from history but this shouldn’t involve wiping our memories clean.

Either Putin is an insane maniac ready to start a nuclear war or he’s a reasonable person ready to negotiate a peace deal in good faith. You can’t have it both ways. Strangely, the exact same people who shriek “don’t move or Russia will escalate” keep repeating “a peace deal now”.

This is one of many examples of how reason has been swapped for raging emotionality. People don’t even try to be consistent. They are proud of being all over the place and not burdened by logic.

Some kids know they want to chain-smoke as young as 2-3 years old. Early signs include pretending to puff on a crayon, holding a pencil between their middle and index fingers, strong cravings for candy “cigarettes,” and rapidly making “huffing” sounds or deeply exhaling.

Be an inclusive adult. Tell them about people who smoke.

Educate them on the long and diverse history of tobacco use and smoking, from Native Americans’ sacred rituals to European sailors and beyond.

Show them pictures of iconic smokers from diverse backgrounds and the vintage ads that made smoking look cool. Ensure they recognize they’re part of a long and chic tradition.

https://twitter.com/xxclusionary/status/1699835848823308757?t=HDp62d1yop_8cky1Ndpw_A&s=19

There are similar ones for drunk driving and tattoos.

In spite of his recent comments, I don’t think Putin is anti-Semitic. I don’t think he particularly dislikes Jews. Compared to what he has done to Russians, Jews have had it very easy with Putin.

As I’ve been saying for over a decade, Putin seems to have a deep dislike of Russian people. He’s been dedicated to population replacement in Russia because he clearly prefers Central Asians to Russians.

As for Ukrainians, Putin doesn’t think they exist. He thinks they are Russian. Which proves my point that he really detests Russians.

This is what I’m trying to paint:

I’m currently in the upper right quadrant, so it’s not looking like much fun.

People are asking if I continue to paint, and yes, absolutely. From recent masterpieces, here’s a portrait of Klara with her favorite toy:

I’m now working on a nighttime view of my native city of Kharkiv in winter. It’s really incredible that you can find paint-by-number kits for every landmark view of Kharkiv. The one I chose isn’t glamorous or pretty but it’s a place that means a lot to me for personal reasons.

It’s a very intense feeling to be able to paint such a far away place, especially when you can’t draw a convincing stick figure by

Let’s take George Floyd as a case study in what I explained in the previous post. We’ve seen people – large crowds of people – become enraged by George Floyd’s death. I know such people in person, and they are very sincere. They very honestly perceive what happened to Floyd as the height of injustice and an absolute horror.

But why? you’ll ask. He was overdosing before he met with those police officers. He was a violent criminal on heavy drugs. He was committing a crime. He resisted arrest. Yes, it’s sad that he died, as it’s sad when anybody dies, but this is a person who did everything to put himself in a very high-risk situation. Why is it so much more upsetting than the shooting of a 6-year-old boy in Chicago this past Sunday who was sitting peacefully at home with his family? Or the murder of two 15-year-olds also in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend?

George Floyd’s death is so much more upsetting precisely because you are making this argument. You are looking at Floyd and the shot 6-year-old and seeing different things. You are bringing your knowledge and experience into the situation instead of perceiving these two victims as completely identical and as blank slates you aren’t allowed to write on. If you see any difference between what happened to Floyd and an imaginary situation where police grab a baby out of a stroller and murder her on the spot, you have revealed your unforgivable tendency to infringe on the capacity of others fully to control their interactions with the world.

Since it’s impossible to make people perceive others as blank slates, the proponents of the structural oppression theory try to mess with what’s written on the slate. They write insane things on it to confuse you. If you dare to try writing on the slate, the slate will retaliate by writing on you. Thus, George Floyd becomes a role model, punctuality becomes racist, and a blond Argentinean turns into a person of color.

The idea of structural oppressions is not insane. It comes out of a very specific worldview, and within that worldview both the idea and its consequences make every sense.

Here’s how it works.

The worldview that gives birth to the concept of structural oppressions is that of a complete, unlimited autonomy of godlike individuals. Within this worldview, a human person is exactly like what Christians understand as God’s creation. Within that creation there exists a spirit that occasioned it and can remake it at any time according to its inscrutable purposes.

Of course, anything that comes in from the outside and limits God’s power over his creation makes him not God. People with this vision of the self absolutely do perceive as an existential threat any limitation on what they can put in or extract from their bodies. They absolutely feel destroyed at their core by the idea of not being able to do exactly as they choose at every time. And they absolutely cannot tolerate other gods arising and turning them into objects instead of sources of creation.

The problem is that people don’t control how others perceive them. The human brain works in such a way that it categorizes an object of perception on sight and assigns qualities to it immediately upon encountering in. If this sounds confusing, think about what happens when you see a house. The second you see it, you know what it is and what to expect from it. You know what purpose it serves, what it looks like inside, what it will or won’t do. It won’t, for instance, growl, make jokes or run away. You have created that house in your mind before it did anything to reveal itself to you.

But that’s a house, so who cares. Problems arise because we do that with people, too. We do not discover each human being anew every time we encounter that human being. We create him in our minds on the spot and thus destroy his capacity to be his own and only creator.

No factor that isn’t chosen freely at every single moment should have an impact on God and his creation. But since we aren’t actually gods, there’s a million things we neither choose nor control. The very structure of the human life is that of having no power over crucially important aspects of our lives. This is why people feel structurally oppressed. Things are set up in a way that messes with their godly status. Those things must be wrong and need to be destroyed.

There’s no way out of this problem because we will continue bringing our knowledge and experience to every interaction. I mean, locking everybody up and not letting people socialize could mitigate the pain somewhat. Isolation is the best form of existence for people possessed by the need to be God.