Mikhail Krieger, a pro-Ukrainian activist in Russia is singing a patriotic Ukrainian song during a trial in Moscow where he faces 9 years in jail for an anti-Putin post on Facebook:

Based on his last name, I’m guessing he is probably Jewish, like 99,9% of anti-Putin activists in Russia.

Be that as it may, I find it significant that protesters in Russia are switching to the Ukrainian language and are adopting Ukrainian patriotic imagery. People need patriotism. They need to feel invested into a nation. Russian people never had that, so when they discover the possibility of feeling all this towards Ukraine, they are like Soviet people in an American supermarket in 1990.

I’m seeing this in N. If you think I’m invested in Ukraine, you should see him. The Ukrainian flags on our house and in my office – he bought them. He has 20 shirts with Ukraine symbols while I have two. He checks if I have a Ukrainian badge on whenever I go out to an event. He reads, listens and watches three times what I do about Ukraine.

Of course, people will assume he’s doing it to please me. But he never developed an interest in neoliberalism or the anti-COVID stuff. He doesn’t read Spanish literature to please me. He never watched Tucker Carlson or Matt Walsh. He has no idea who Brett Kavanaugh is, even though the Kavanaugh affair was the turning point in my political beliefs. This isn’t about me. It’s about discovering a powerful source of feeling he had no idea existed.

The war in Ukraine revealed something crucial to us all. We now know the great weakness of the post-national model. It doesn’t evoke good feelings in people. It can scare, it can create anxiety, it can pitch identity groups against each other. But it can’t inspire or bring joy. It can’t make you feel stronger or more resilient. It doesn’t know how to give hope. Hope and change don’t really go together. Fluidity crushes hope because it overwhelms our capacity to stay grounded in reality. In the midst of constant change, you simply don’t know what to hope for other than for the change to stop happening. Bordeless, amorphous neoliberalism is being crushed on the battlefield, in people’s minds, in art, everywhere. It’s failing, and that’s where real hope lies.

What the activist from Russia is singing in his cage is really, “we want country, we want nation, we want patriotism. We want what is normal for human beings to want.” And that’s good.

When people fret about the impending death of democracy because of coming fascism or authoritarianism, they are half right. Democracy is weakened but by the erosion of the nation-state.

I think a similar anxiety can be seen in the worries that AI will develop so much that it will have its own subjectivity and then you won’t be able to distinguish between humans and machines. People intuit a real problem but they mistakenly attribute it to AI. It isn’t the development of the AI that’s a problem. It’s the impoverishment of human subjectivity.

We develop a subjectivity by being alone with our thoughts. When a small child first starts engaging in imaginative play and you see her little lips moving silently as she goes deep inside her mind to find enjoyment within, you feel a sense of reverence because you are witnessing a little animal becoming human. It’s an amazing moment. A child’s deep, unbroken concentration is precious.

But we are losing this capacity. One needs to work hard every day to keep it. That’s the real threat to our subjectivity, and the AI is simply an object onto which we displace our fear of something real we perceive in ourselves.

A new brand of apocalyptic theories has dropped. The “AI will kill us all” narrative is curiously similar to the “global warming will kill everybody in 12 years.”

I remember back in the early 1990s there was a widespread obsession that machine translation would deprive translators of work. Last year, I ordered a textbook for my translation course with the publication date of 2021. Half of the textbook consisted of the same old horror stories about the imminent demise of translator work because of technology. And the funny thing is that the technology hasn’t changed much in these 30 years. What I was already doing in 1992 – because I had early access to technology – now everybody is doing. And making money.

But who cares about reality when it’s so much fun to titillate oneself with scary stories?

P.S. Now it looks like AI is going to kill democracy before proceeding to kill all of us:

https://twitter.com/mezaoptimizer/status/1657917561827098625?t=fn-NucoCzqpR507iRBH3pQ&s=19

God, what a yawn.

Judging by the extremely earnest and dramatically self-righteous reaction to this post both on the left and the right, half of the country has lost its sense of humor:

Because of you, humorless, preachy bores, he’ll win again. The hand-wringing you engage in because of a goofy joke is getting on people’s nerves. Lighten up, you absolute babies, and stop your outrage act.

Today I finished reading Ruth Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone for the sixth time. Or the seventh, I’ve lost track. People say “genre literature”, well, this is definitely genre, and it’s outstanding. It’s very masterfully done, not a word out of place. The characters are completely alive. Until they are dead, that is, because this is a murder thriller written in the style of true crime.

I keep re-reading A Judgment in Stone because the descriptions of the British country life in the 1970s are mesmerizing, and also because th greatest mystery in the novel is how it’s possible to create something so good without striking a single false note.

The novel is about an illiterate woman who is desperate to hide her incapacity to read. It was written in a less sensitive era, so Rendell felt no need to slobber about “social issues.” It’s a refreshingly unsentimental book that never tries to preach at the readers. Ans it’s so well-written. Please give yourself some joy and read it.

People keep asking what gifts I received for Mother’s Day, but what gift can possibly be greater than this little face?

Well, that changes everything! Finally, we know what word to use. What a relief!

See this tree on the left that forms a sort of canopy over the walkway? It grew completely naturally. N trimmed the top so that it wouldn’t obscure the flag but everything else happened by itself.

We used to have a small bush there that got eaten by bugs while we were on vacation. We removed the sad, blackened stump, and started debating what to plant in this spot. I proposed a big, wild specimen. N wanted a small, neat plant. While the discussion continued, this tree grew, and now I adore it. I particularly like that it’s a weed.

If anybody knows the name of this plant, please let me know.

But hey, it’s not only Russia that keeps going in the same direction:

Some people always end up in the same place, no matter where they try to go: