Churchill on the US’s attitude towards post-Soviet Russia:

There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Yes, I know he wasn’t around to see it. Doesn’t make it any less true.

More from Churchill on the current situation:

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians….Nothing can save England j if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.

Here we have seen a change. Thanks to social media, wage earners have allowed the self-hating, defeatist brainy people to occupy their brains and plant the seeds of self-abasement there. Both the left and the right are in the throes of this self-hatred. What was a pastime of bored intellectuals is now a national hobby.

Has anybody on here ever ironed handkerchiefs?

I have ironed inordinate quantities of handkerchiefs. On 4 sides.

We had no Kleenex in the USSR, obviously.

I also ironed mountains of bedding. When I got married at 19, I gave myself a solemn vow that I’d never touch another flat iron for the rest of my life. And I’m still firmly keeping that vow.

I’ve been reading up on Frank Russell, the brother of the great philosopher Bertrand Russell and one of the husbands of Elizabeth von Arnim.

Frank Russell was known for two things: his very progressive feminist beliefs and his outlandish mistreatment and harassment of his many wives. It’s almost comical how he managed to advance the cause of women’s rights in the short breaks he took from bullying and persecuting women.

I’m having an unexpectedly busy July with a million things happening at once, and then I had to go and discover that Elizabeth von Arnim wrote many books.

A battle between pleasure and duty is about to ensue, and we all know which side is likely to win.

I didn’t listen to it myself but people are saying that Biden droned on and on about the global warming during his closing speech at the NATO Summit in Vilnius.

And then people get upset when I say that the NATO doesn’t really exist.

I’m not disappointed that Ukraine wasn’t promised membership because it was a complete impossibility to begin with but I am upset that this inane lecturing about global warming was unleashed on people. Nothing shows the complete evisceration of the very concept of the NATO better than this slide into ridiculousness.

A few days before the first session, facilitators circulated a short handout, “Why a White Space,” to explain “why we are meeting as white folks for these six months.” The handout, produced by the nonprofit Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, argued that white people need spaces where they can “unlearn racism” without subjecting minorities to “undue trauma or pain.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/woke-or-kkk-nyu-hosts-whites-only-antiracism-workshop-for-public-school-parents/

I’m telling you, folks, this “anti-racist” stuff is simply a way to make it normal and acceptable to say things like “white spaces” and for certain white folks to avoid the company of non-whites because it makes them uncomfortable.

This article on civil forfeiture will wake you up in no time. What happens if police decides to seize your property? What kind of excuse – if any – is needed to do that?

Read and find out about a very bizarre legal practice in the US and how it may soon change. “Civil forfeiture” sounds soporific but the article isn’t in the least.

I’ve been thinking about the differences between Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera and Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women.

The most admirable, dignified and memorable character in Vera is a 50-year-old spinster Miss Entwhistle. She doesn’t see herself as useless or rejected like Pym’s heroine. She’s a person of great dignity and quiet but unbreakable inner strength. Miss Entwhistle chose not to get married because she decided she was better off single. It’s clear that for her it was the right choice. You can feel anything but pity for her because she’s not in the least pathetic. But her admirable character isn’t written in a deliberate, pointed way, either. Von Arnim doesn’t try to prove anything or make a point. She creates a character whose dignity is revealed as something normal and expected. Pym, on the other hand, tries to make a point out of everything and comes off as fake.

It’s interesting to me that von Arnim could write about an unmarried middle-aged woman as an admirable, interesting person in 1921 but 30 years later Pym couldn’t. This tracks with something I long observed in Spanish literature. As we get farther away from the oppressive, patriarchal 19th and early 20th century, the more weepy, whiny, self-infantilizing and pouty do female characters become.

Something killed off interesting female characters in mid-twentieth century. It’s like there was a virus that wiped them off.

I also wanted to mention that out of the 16 members of our writing group, five are African American. This doesn’t reflect the demographic situation at our university as we don’t have remotely anything like 30% black faculty. We don’t even have anything close to the population-wide 13%.

This is something I noticed a long time ago, and it’s true for students, too. African Americans will grab at any opportunity and extract value from it, which is wonderful. Hispanic students and colleagues have the opposite strategy. I love them to bits but they just don’t go for the opportunities that are strewn around.

We are even being fed quite nicely at this writing accelerator. Our university is paying for it. This is the first time since I started working here in 2009 that the university noticed that some of us are not only tuition extracting machines but people with intellectual interests. To be fair, very few of us are, so it’s fine, I guess.

I always have mean, unpleasant feelings towards the idiots who prattle on about “the publish or perish environment in academia.” Oh, how I would enjoy spending a week being pressured to publish! Forget pressure. I’d love not being treated like a person with severe brain damage for wanting to do it. When I was naive enough to tell the Dean’s Office in 2015 that I was invited to a conference at Oxford, they treated me for months afterwards like I’d said I was speaking at a conference of pedophiles. Speaking at conferences means you aren’t 100% dedicated to tuition extraction, and that’s unacceptable. People kept throwing that conference (for which I paid 100% out of pocket) in my face forever afterwards.