The public justification for destroying the Wagner graves and memorials in Russia is that they were Nazis. This is true, of course. Utkin, Prigozhin’s second-in-command who died in that plane crash was covered with swastika tattoos. But the funny part is that Wagnerites were officially anti-Nazi heroes until the day before yesterday when they immediately turned into evil Nazis.

Just as easily and happily Russians will crap on Putin the second he croaks. But so what? It changes nothing. Their idols come and go but their behavior is always the same.

In Russia, the graves of the Wagnerites are being dug up. Wreaths, crosses piled up in a garbage heap. A surviving member of the mercenary force is crying, “People, what are you doing? My friends died for you! Please, people, don’t do it!” But nobody cares.

It’s really funny. Wagnerites thought they were dying for their country but you can’t do that if there is no country. Honoring the fallen soldiers is a nation-state tradition. If there is no nation, and instead you get rapidly changing, endlessly mutable arrangements and re-arrangements, you will be written out of the fluid story very fast. Your cross will be broken, your death will be mocked, your military awards revoked, and your memory spat at.

Until yesterday, Wagnerites were celebrated, idolized and worshipped in Russia. And then everybody moved on, including their families.

Ok, I finally get it. Trump is their sex fetish:

I’m so innocent that I didn’t clock on to the existence of this paraphilia until now.

I understand that sexuality is immune to reason but why, people, why? Why are they so into him in such weird ways?

https://twitter.com/BRyvkin/status/1694880086812487733?t=6UxVq5ziPDa_Hym9udavTw&s=19

I’m not sure what he’s talking about but I’m more certain than ever that going cold turkey on the MSM news coverage was a brilliant decision on my part. I used to love the news, people. I watched those 100% news channels all the time. But then I stopped and never looked back.

I even know the exact date I quit. March 14, 2020.

If people want to know more about the ideas motivating the movement of “next-level humans”, I highly recommend the book Neo-entes by the Peruvian philosopher Miklos Lukacs de Pereny.

Yes, the book is in Spanish, I’m sorry. It will be translated soon without doubt. But here’s an English-language interview with Lukacs de Pereny who is the world’s leading critic of transhumanism. He studied these “next-level” bastards for decades, and has a lot to say about them.

People perceive any criticism of their life choices as extremely threatening.

Gosh, forget that. They perceive any pause in the constant praise of their life choices as deadly.

“Me, me, me! What about me? I made a different choice and you forgot to mention that it’s a great one. MEEEEEEEEE!”

I have made a lot of choices in life. Some of them very bizarre. I’m fine with them. I have accepted that I have done what I have done because that’s what I needed to do at that time. For example, I don’t feel personally alluded to or criticized when people say (very correctly, by the way) that it’s suboptimal to try to give birth at the age of 40. People should be able to make that very reasonable and uncontroversial statement without having the pander to outliers like me who decided to do things differently at a terrible personal cost.

It’s much easier to find a way to be at peace with your own decisions, unconventional as they might be, than spend your life feeling constantly wounded by others not reassuring you that these choices are fine.

It’s up to you to make your choices fine in your own eyes, is what I’m saying. As to whether they are fine in somebody else’s eyes, if you are past the age of 20, that should not even remotely matter to you.

People have been asking why men don’t read fiction. It was invented for women, it was always targeted mostly at women, and it’s consumed mostly by women for the past 200 years. (Before that, very few people read at all). Why is it so?

Because of their different physiology, men and women have a different relationship with time. A woman’s greatest work happens when she isn’t doing anything. Pregnancy is mostly waiting around. We don’t actively build a child. Our bodies do that by themselves. Of course, labor itself is hard labor but everything before it kind of just involves existing.

This is why women are physiologically more adapted to non-utilitarian pursuits. We know at a very deep level that it’s not necessary to do anything useful or productive to render our crowning achievement. Not only pregnancy but also taking care of a child involves a lot of just waiting around.

Men, on the other hand, never gained any evolutionary advantage from doing useless things. Just lying there for hours as a happy recipient of art with no goal as to how to use it in practice doesn’t feel right. As a boy, yes, because you are waiting to grow up. As a man, though, it just feels weird.

Men will read if they find a practical, utilitarian explanation for why they are doing it. When N started reading Demon Copperhead, he wondered what the purpose of doing it was. Then he decided to put the activity into his productivity time tracker under the category “Personal Betterment”, and he’s now fine with it. Men are much likelier to read non-fiction because they can see it as something useful. “I’m reading this to understand how things work” makes more sense to them than “I invested 23 hours of my life into finding out how these non-existent people met, courted and married”.

Of course, men who read fiction after adolescence and before retirement exist. But go to the nearest bookstore, observe the entire carrels of Colleen Hoover’s books at the entrance followed by several tables of mommy-lit, pink beach reads, and the extraordinary number of novels with the words “wife” and “mother” in the title, and tell me if you honestly believe these men aren’t a small minority. A great minority. A minority I love. But a minority, nonetheless.

Men are made to feel bad about not being “more like women” in this respect but this is unfair. People simply follow their body rhythms. Physiology is not a moral category. Nobody is better or worse for relating to time as their physiology prompts them to do.

The assassination of Prigozhin yesterday pushed out of the news cycle a stunningly successful operation of the Ukrainian intelligence services.

Six months ago Ukrainian intelligence made contact with a Russian military helicopter fighter and started persuading him to defect. The pilot was understandably worried about his family. Ukrainians helped him quietly and unobtrusively to move the family out of Russia.

Finally, yesterday the pilot got into his helicopter and flew to Ukraine. His crew members weren’t happy when they heard that plan, so he had to eliminate them.

This is not the first time that Ukrainian intelligence brings over a valuable target who’s in possession of desirable equipment this way. These are all long-term operations that require a lot of patience, a great psychological insight and an ability to focus on the goal. We don’t find out about most of these operations but yesterday, our chief spy guy Kyrylo Budanov shared the details of this one as a present for today’s Independence Day.

Just to think, at this very moment Prigozhin could easily be the president of Russia and the leading candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He gave all that up in return for promises from a weaselly, nervous Putin and ended up dead.

Some people are extremely stupid.