Opinions, art, debate
It’s a pity nobody bothered to tell the world what its economic and cultural center was, so it went completely unnoticed.
It’s hard to say who is more stupid, Xi for saying such stupid things or Merkel for having a guy check if these childish mumblings were true.
Libertarianism is the philosophy that makes neoliberalism possible. They stand to each other in the relationship of a theory and the practice arising from the theory.
My own attitude to neoliberalism is that of an intelligent smoker to cigarettes. An intelligent smoker might love his cigarettes while also recognizing that they are very unhealthy. We’ve all known that one person who smoked two packs a day since 14 and is perfectly healthy at age 85. But we all know that this person is an outlier. She (it’s almost always a woman) probably has some genetic glitch that makes her immune to the harm of her habit. Much as she might love her ciggies, she won’t give a pack to a 5-year-old.
Libertarians, unfortunately, don’t understand the part about the glitch. They are almost invariably very brilliant, high-IQ, very organized people. Their fatal flaw is not realizing that almost nobody else is that way. Their ideas are deadly to those who don’t have their glitch. They want to distribute cigarettes, metaphorically speaking, to every 5-year-old. The neoliberal reality that libertarian philosophy engenders is fantastic for these glitchy (in a good way) people but deadly to everybody else. Libertarians are at war with human nature itself. Their theory appeals to the best qualities in human beings, and that makes it very attractive. But it makes no concessions for the irrational, emotional and dark side of humanity. And that’s why the results of their theory are so hellish when put into practice.
There might be an added complication of not being able to listen to anything if you don’t get born, but who cares about small details like that, right?
Before social media, one could go one’s whole life without knowing how incredibly stupid many people are.
And that’s when libertarianism finally died:
RIP, libertarianism, which is simply neoliberalism for nerds.
I’m very annoyed by the sudden flooding of public spaces with swear words.
This is now in every bookstore, and I have to do weird acrobatic things to get my body between this kind of stuff and my child:
At a local coffee shop, at the ice cream store, at a small clothing boutique, there are items branded with a wide collection of swear words. The arts and crafts fair is the worst. “Mommy, I wanted to look at a dolly,” my kid says, “but she has a bad word written on her tummy. Can we leave?”
Nobody but an extremely infantile person can enjoy this kind of branding. This is very belated teenage rebellion that is embarrassing in adults. Yet we are all hostages to these unhealthy people of whom there’s suddenly a legion.
Yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of my friend’s death. Her story is a study in ambiguity. She met her husband when she was 16 and spent the next 20 years being beaten and raped by him.
Finally, she left him. They both paired up with other people. At age 46 she got diagnosed with terminal cancer. My friend was not religious. There was no consolation. She spent the five years that it took the disease to kill her in a state of the darkest, most terrible depression.
And do you know who was the only person who was there for her every day of the illness? Her ex-husband. He called, came over, drove her to appointments, talked to her for hours. I felt suicidal on every occasion I spent time with her, she was in such a state. But he somehow managed to stick around. I’m not saying he’s a good person but these two people had something that was both extremely dysfunctional and bound them together like you can’t imagine.
Life is complicated. Nothing has an easy, clear answer.
This is the story that I mentioned several days ago. A career criminal with a lifetime of arrests and early releases stabbed a Ukrainian woman in the neck for no reason:
Of course, if she weren’t new to the country, she’d known not to turn her back like this. But that we should know and live with this knowledge is not great either.
Our town now has a boutique hotel. When I first came here, there was one bedraggled, old hotel that was almost always empty. Now there are three plus this new boutique hotel. It’s so great. We are a place where people want to come and visit.
This is a good question. We often forget that in abusive relationships between adults there’s never only a sadist. There’s always also a masochist. Some relationships bring out the best in people but others bring out the worst. Abuse is a result of the dynamic that exists between two people, and for both of them it fulfills a necessary function.
In long-term abusive relationships between adults, the masochist will go out of her way to provoke the sadist into beating her. She’ll press every button to collapse his efforts at self-control methodically and doggedly.
This does not excuse the abuser. Nothing excuses a person who beats another outside of the situations of physical self-defense. But these abusive situations can’t be resolved from one side. Two people engineer, maintain, and enjoy them. These are usually relationships where you can’t pry the participants apart under any circumstances. They fulfill each other’s neurotic need, and that binds them together like Krazy Glue.
The problem is that there’s a big taboo on what I’m saying right now. We have painted ourselves into a corner by imagining this S&M dynamic as an interaction between an angelic victim (who of course is always desperate to leave the abuser but doesn’t because she fears for her life) and a demonic abuser. People literally freak out if one tries to talk about this in a more nuanced way. It’s the same as “rape is not about sex but about power” which has now acquired the status of religious dogma in spite of being utterly dumb.
We won’t solve anything until we learn to live with the ambiguity. Unfortunately, this necessitates brains that are capable of more complex operations and are not dumbed down by staring at screens and catering to one’s worst instincts.
Love, as I keep saying, is only true if it tolerates ambiguity. If you only care about the victim if she’s a perfect angel but not if she’s a complicated, messed-up, often very annoying human, you don’t care at all.
Another great question. I’m loving these. Please keep bringing them to me.
Dude, the cockroaches. What a curse. In the USSR, we all lived in apartments, and if your neighbors had an infestation, what could you do? My mother is maniacally clean, like only a person who grew up in great poverty can be. But we had a terrible problem in one of the apartments where we lived. She cleaned like she was possessed by the demons of cleanliness but the roaches kept coming. And of course there were no exterminator services.
Finally, my mother found some dude who worked at a secret military plant. He brought over some radioactive shit. Told us that it would kill everything for miles around. We had to move out of the apartment for a month while the radioactive shit did its work. And hey, the roaches were gone after that.
Yes, it’s a weird idea to bring a radioactive substance into an apartment where you live with your small children but it was the USSR. Nothing was normal.
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