Transgenderism is a fad of opulent societies. Saying that Venezuela is good because it has no transgenderism is dumb. Venezuela is starving. Obviously, there’s no money for boutique identities of bored, overfed people. Because there are almost no well-fed, let alone overfed, people.

The real victory over the tyranny of boutique identities is not to starve everybody to distract them from weird behavior. The victory lies in convincing the people who have the leisure and the money to pursue this path that it’s not good and doesn’t lead to any real flourishing.

We don’t need to give up any of our civilizational advances. We don’t have to embrace third-worldist privations and chaos. Our civilization can lead to normalizing “yeet the teets”, and yes, it already did that. But it can also lead away from that. All we need is to start exercising some self-control. We need to not venerate self-indulgence quite so much.

If there’s a scratch on your knee, you don’t saw off the whole leg. We can absolutely continue enjoying our civilization and correct its mistakes. There’s no need to ditch the whole thing.

“There’s nothing special about the Holocaust and it’s a right-wing ploy to claim that there was” has been the far-left position for at least 30 years. I’ve heard it expressed endlessly, recently in the context of promoting the interests of Gaza, at many academic conferences.

When I say that rightists promote lefty ideas, people pout but it’s a fact. You’ve got to know it to recognize it.

A reader on this blog was shocked by the existence of hijabi campus leftists. This incomprehension, as well as the confusion caused by “queers for Palestine”, stem from the utter incomprehension of the liberal project. Its goal is to erode the Western civilization. Everything that is Western-coded is bad in liberal view. Everything that is not Western is good. That’s all you need to know to understand it.

But yes, you need to try hard to be completely out of everything to find yourself in a place where hijabi leftists strike you as something new and unexpected.

Suddenly, you're 27.

You make your coffee, rush to work, come home around 7, and you're too tired to do anything except eat, scroll on your phone, and pass out.

Then you wake up, and do it all again.

And when Friday comes, maybe you go out, or maybe you're just too tired.…

— tree (@treeonchain) November 1, 2025

The same psychological problems get harder to carry with age. He sees how much harder it is for him to carry the burdens of everyday life at 27 in comparison to 17. But he knows that nothing special happened between these ages, so he concludes that lower energy is the normal aging process. But it’s not. It’s carrying the same sack of shit for a decade that’s doing it. At 37, it’s going to be worse yet if he doesn’t drop the sack of problems he picked up long before age 17.

Tonight is the best night of the year. We get one additional hour to read in bed.

I feel that this extra hour deserves some really special, kickass reading. It needs to be honored and cherished. It’s a magical moment that must receive its due.

Here’s one example why I say Ioffe is not very bright. She bases her entire argument in Motherland on autobiographies and interviews of relatives of politicians. It seems never to occur to her that people can describe their own lives in self-serving ways. She mistakes a tendentious autobiographical account for documentary evidence.

For example, she dedicates a whole chapter to discussing how desperate post-Soviet women were for strong, decisive men who were nowhere to be found. Right from that chapter, Ioffe segues into retelling the account of Putin’s wife on how strong and decisive Putin was since his youth. It never crosses Ioffe’s mind that Putin’s wife wasn’t sharing her intimate memories but that she simply put her name under whatever spin it was considered politically expedient to make public at that time. Wives of politicians currently in office do not spontaneously share anything. Especially in authoritarian societies where censorship exists.

And it’s all like that. “‘Stay strong, Misha,’ said Raisa to Gorbachev when they were alone.” But how can you possibly know that she said it? Because it’s in her memoir? What people put in memoirs rarely bears much relationship to what actually happened.

For lack of knowledge and insight, Ioffe goes on and on, retelling these autobiographies like they mean something profound. Emotional goo is offered to readers in lieu of analysis.

I was really hoping that Hickman would become a writer. He has a gift. He should be writing. But he won’t. He’s showing us why many gifted people amount to absolutely nothing when others, with a much more modest gift, achieve a lot.

This is hitting me like a ton of bricks lately.

Parenting in an ultra-high-median-age area feels untenable. The contrast between our baby and the collapsing world around her is intense.

It's one thing to live in a place with no future as an adult, but with kids? It's dismal. https://t.co/UFSWEI8HJ8 pic.twitter.com/LtPnHgeLcj

— 𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 (@shagbark_hick) October 29, 2025

This isn’t about housing or region. He fantasizes about writing but he isn’t writing. Creative work is like any other work. You need to get up every day and grind. Go at it in tiny, frustrating, annoying bits. Learn to enjoy the process because the reward is far away and possibly nowhere.

Clearly, much of it is temperamental. Hickman needs to get the hyperactivity under control before he can create anything. But he’s making it about “society” and has zero insight into his own limitations.

Well, it's been interesting getting critiqued, psychoanalyzed, cheered on, complimented, threatened and generally scrutinized for good and ill by tens of thousands of people.

The fruit of it all? Last night I dreamt we took a sabbatical in the desert. Offline — no Twitter.

We… pic.twitter.com/nTShz3RZGh

— 𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 (@shagbark_hick) November 1, 2025

It’s a shame. We’ve lost a writer in him.

It is annoying, though, that the same people who tolerated Tucker and raised zero objections while he lauded Russia to the skies and calumnied the US in relation to Russia’s war-mongering are only now noticing that something is wrong. And they are only noticing now because he revealed himself as a Jew-hater.

Tucker’s 9/11 documentary is unpatriotic and anti-American. It’s definitely a lot more shocking than his interview of Nick Fuentes. But nobody gave a crap. For years, he’s been spreading lies about America and supporting every dictator who hates our country. And none of this raised the slightest outcry. Dude reflexively, deeply hates America, which is the definition of a leftist. Nobody cared.

Now they all decided to notice. Seriously, what a joke. “He platformed Nick Fuentes.” Long before that, Tucker platformed Putin who is guilty of the murder of millions. Let’s compare that to Fuentes who runs his mouth a bit too much. Yet what is provoking a bigger outrage, Tucker being turned into a quivering, slobbering mass of subservience by someone who hates America over anything else, or Tucker turning Fuentes into a quivering mass of subservience for two hours? Tucker and Fuentes are both Americans. Whatever they say to each other is nothing like slagging off your own country to please a hostile foreigner.

The problem, as I’ve been saying for a long time, is that Tucker is a leftist. Our biggest issue is that we can’t figure out who’s a leftist even after he praises every Commie dictator in existence. The Left, though, identifies us very easily. We have no cultural power to a large extent because we can’t define who WE are and aren’t. We are stuck in the utterly inane debate over whether it’s OK to criticize Israel instead of spending at least a fraction of the time on talking about whether it’s OK to blame our own country for everything bad that happens anywhere.

Now Tucker Carlson is praising Venezuela. I told you, people, that he’s a leftist. The moment somebody starts praising third-world hell holes as being superior to America, that’s how you know this is a leftist. To them, third-world hell holes are only that because American colonialism victimized them. This has been the leftist narrative for over a century. It never changes.

I don’t know from BPD but this is literally every female student in the past 20 years:

“How do you think it made me feel when I saw that you corrected 16 mistakes in my composition? It’s like you are saying I’m a horrible person.”

I don’t know what causes this extreme touchiness but I do believe that people put it on because they think it’s cute and then it becomes second nature.

Then we end up with the idea of hurty words being equal to violence, and the rest we all know.