Opinions, art, debate
The first country in the world to legalize abortion was USSR. It made abortion legal in 1920. Curiously, it only legalized birth control in 1923.
Until its very end, Soviet Union offered abortion as the easiest, most accessible form of birth control.
I think I figured out why scholarship in the Humanities in the EU is so low-quality.
Scholars in the EU get much lower salaries than we do. But they get tons of funding. They pretty much exist on the funding and not on the salaries. To get the funding, they need to write proposals and couch them in a language that EU bureaucrats will understand. My funding, which is my salary, is guaranteed to me. I don’t have to convince anybody that my research is good to get the funding. In the EU, the endless striving for funding has people starting inane research projects that sound very childish to actual scholars.
The North American model is better and produces better results. We don’t have any bureaucrats standing between us and our research.
On every one of my three flights, I sat next to people who either had severe COVID or were in the last stages of tuberculosis. They coughed their guts out at me for hours.
If I don’t succumb by Wednesday, it will be a miracle. I have three more trips coming up, and the last thing I need is to get sick.
The most important thing you can do for what they clumsily call mental health is to spend at least an hour a day alone with your thoughts without consuming any media, music, information, generated images, etc. And you need at least one hour a day in an unmediated, personal interaction with somebody who matters to you. Not on the phone, not on a screen but physically present.
The problem is that, for people who have already been severely damaged psychologically, remaining alone with their thoughts is deadly. Their thought stream was poisoned. They instinctively protect themselves from the danger of drinking from a poisoned stream by scrolling their feed and consuming content. The only narrative that is available to them is that they are lazy procrastinators. They feel guilt for what is actually a crucial survival strategy. That guilt poisons the thought stream even more, and the problem gets solved.
An off-ramp from this vicious cycle lies through small pockets of guilt-free enjoyment. Here’s an example. “I’ll browse X for just a couple of minutes and then will do something important” tends to lead to an hour on X and hours of guilt afterwards. Instead, say to yourself, “I’m going to browse for an hour because, as coping strategies go, this is one of the healthiest.” Position yourself comfortably, bring cushions, arrange a nice, enjoyable beverage and a tasty snack. Create an ambiance like you are doing exactly what you should be doing. Use whatever it is that gives you comfort. A soft throw, a music playing in the background, a cigarette, a vape tube or whatever you call it, a candle, a glass of wine, a shot of tequila, a box of chocolates. Use all of these at once if it will give you joy.
The same amount of time spent browsing, yet the results are very different because you aren’t punishing yourself with guilt. It sounds weird that the road towards being able to be alone with yourself without media can lie through consuming media. But it’s similar to quitting smoking (or any other bad habit). Often, what you are addicted to is the punishment, the feeling of guilt. Once you accept your bad habit as something good, a survival mechanism, your need of it might be dramatically reduced. Not 100% of people drink excessively or smoke because their addiction is to punishment. But everybody who is addicted to media pursues freedom from being alone with their poisoned thought stream.
Most people urgently need to forgive themselves for not being the perfect productivity machines because they are hurting themselves with endless and unnecessary guilt.
We used public transport in the USSR all the time. People hoping to get on a subway train or a bus would stand very close to the doors of the stopping vehicle in a thick crowd. The doors would open, and there would be no way for the exiting passengers to disembark. The entering crowd would press against the people trying to exit. As a result, few people managed to enter the vehicle, even though the middle of the carriage might be completely empty. Some of those who needed to exit had to miss their stop. This happened every time. Zero exceptions. That’s how it always worked.
It would be much more convenient for everybody if the people waiting for the train stood to the sides of the doors, letting passengers exit, and then entered the vehicle without having to shove and push. How many experiences of this kind do you think people need to figure out that it pays off to stand to the side? Years, decades, a lifetime of experiences? None of this was enough. Mockery in the media, endless discussions, daily discomfort of having to beat your way in and out of a subway car. You don’t have to be Freud to figure out that this behavior wasn’t about finding a comfortable way to use public transportation. “I will not step to the side for anybody because it’s dog-eat-dog out there, and the moment you blink, people will eat you alive” is the motivating idea behind the behavior of those Soviet and post-Soviet passengers. It was a point of pride not to give way.
I’m back in America, and the absolute wonder of a culture where people control their tempers, control their impulses, and proceed from kindness and rationality hits hard as I spend more time than usual in public spaces. What causes me the most pain is that the people whose ancestors traveled for many generations this uncommon path of reason over instinct and civilization over jungle beast have absolutely no idea that their enormous advancement is not humanity’s default. What’s worse, they feel apologetic for their advancement.
Standing to the side of the door which you want to enter is a non-trivial cultural achievement. It shows that you can delay gratification. You can tame down the brute animalistic competitiveness and privilege collective peace and cohesion over the natural impulse to trample on others. Cultures that have learned to stand to the side have a much higher standard of living than those who haven’t. Third-world countries are the way they are not because of colonialism or oppression but because their inhabitants’ way of being produces exactly that system of social relations.
I found the car of my dreams. It has a completely transparent roof. Not a puny window, but the whole roof is see-through. I don’t know from engines or fuel efficiency. This transparent ceiling is where it’s at for me.
And please don’t say convertibles have the same effect of an endless sky above you. Can you imagine what a convertible does to my Yeti hair?
The lights on the interior of the doors light up in purple. It’s a bloody paradise of a car.
Why aren’t people making more cars with transparent roofs is beyond me.
This explains so much:
They are simply scatterbrained. They can’t stay alone with their thoughts for 4 minutes, and have no idea that it’s not normal.
His father did a great job while his mother did a piss-poor one, that’s what went wrong.
Social and professional success = great father.
No anxiety, feeling comfortable in the world, feeling that the universe loves you = great mother.
Obviously, you need both to function well.
During this trip, I met a great number of people who vote for Vox, admire Santiago Abascal, and are fans of Trump and Nayib Bukele. Most are half my age. These were conversations that arose spontaneously with grocery clerks, store cashiers, cab drivers, Uber drivers, and an occasional young adult child of a colleague.
[Yes, I feel enormously more sociable in Spain than anywhere else. I initiate a lot of conversations, and it’s not even a language thing. Yesterday, for example, a had a 30-minute conversation in German with a guy from Stuttgart who’s lived on Spain for 31 years. And then people will say that Duolingo doesn’t work.]
Going back to my original subject, yes, I encountered raging right-wingerism in Spain. People slide into the political part of the conversation cautiously. Nobody walks around announcing, “I’m right-wing. Let’s be right-wingers together.” Everybody tests the ground before launching into their spiel.
“It always makes me glad to see people put up the rojigualda [the Spanish flag]. You are from America, I heard everybody really respects the American flag there. It’s important to be patriotic.”
“Did you see the October 12 ceremony? It was so beautiful until that piece of shit [the Socialist Prime Minister] spoiled everything.”
“Say what you will, but in many case Santi Abascal [the leader of the right-wing Vox] is right.”
“Sure, Trump is totally crazy. But is he all that wrong?”
“I really hope Pedrito [the Socialist Pedro Sánchez] crashes in his stupid car and dies. Did you see the princess? Even she’s mocking him.”
“I don’t think Bukele is all bad, do you?”
The moment you give the slightest indication that you are receptive, people launch on a right-winger tirade of the century.
This might be a class issue. I avoided all colleagues except the Ukrainian one and only talked to working-class people. On the way back to the airport, the Uber driver, a very young father of a baby boy, couldn’t get the toll pass to function. A toll worker in her sixties came up. We all immediately became friends, and the representatives of the different generations of Spaniards engaged in an excited tongue-lashing of “those Socialist shits.”
The young people in Europe are angry. Forget young. I haven’t met anybody under the age of fifty who’d be rah-rah for leftism and for the European status quo of infinity migration, speech codes, and the lack of economic protectionism.
I come to Spain all the time. This is a huge change. Fifteen years ago everybody was very lefty, especially the 20-year-olds. And everybody said contemptuously “el Estado español” [the Spanish state] instead of Spain. Now I feel one could get socked in the face for disrespecting the country publicly like this.
This is the kind of thing I meant the other day when I talked about people who make it very hard to support their cause:
“Read this to know how to speak of this” is insulting. Aimed at somebody who spread himself very thin to help your cause, it’s smug and stupid.
This annoys me to an extraordinary extent. Vance is nothing but sweet to Israel to the point of subservience in this tweet. And this is still not enough? He still gets lectured haughtily to educate himself?
My post is not about Vance or Israel. It’s about every cause whose supporters don’t know how to take a W and move on. There’s a lot of this going on. If you express support for people once, they begin to act like this grants them the right to throw tantrums at you for all eternity. I’m not Vance and don’t much like Vance but this exact thing happened to me. I was expressing support when I was rudely interrupted and told I was using a wrong term and needed to keep to the exact (and very fussy) terminology that they preferred. It was shocking that people would choose to antagonize a sincere supporter for absolutely no reason.
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