Ihsan Ali and his wife Zahraa tried to murder their 17-year-old daughter for refusing an arranged marriage to an older man. The videos of the attempted honor killing are too disturbing to post here.

One of the most shocking things about the story is that it didn’t take place in Afghanistan but in Lacey, Washington. Why it was extremely important to inflict Ihsan and Zahraa on Lacey, Washington remains unclear.

Putin perceived Scholz’s call more as a sign of weakness than strength, — Le Monde.

A shocking development. Putin perceived Scholz crawling on his knees and wagging his tail pitifully more as a sign of weakness than of strentgh. Who could have possibly predicted this?

Truly, surprises never cease.

And completely OT because I don’t want to start a new post for this, the airport worker in Chicago refers to St Louis as “St Looee”, which I find very endearing.

German Bundeskanzler Scholz called Putin and begged him to stop the war. Immediately after that, Russia delivered one of the largest missile attacks of the whole war.

Begging, asking and wagging one’s tail ingratiatingly doesn’t work.

Remember when you were a kid and getting bullied at school, and you told your Dad who said, “have you tried asking the bully nicely not to beat you? Have you said “please”? Try that and see what happens.”

I hope this didn’t occur and instead your Dad told you to stand up for yourself because that’s the only way.

Well, Kanzler Scholz clearly had one messed-up Dad because he called Putin and begged to have his balls back. Putin refused to release the testicles in question. Today, there’s a huge, spontaneous celebration in Russia of last-night’s missile attack. Moms are dragging their kids outside to laugh and celebrate. Teenagers are off-the-rocker happy. Old grandmas are weeping with joy.

All this could have been stopped at a very low cost 20 years ago. But the cost grows higher every day. Every day of Western subservience and of eager Western prostitutes like Olaf Scholz and Tulsi Gabbard bending over and spreading their butt cheeks to expiate for some imagined Western guilt is going to cost us more and more and more.

P.S. “We provoked Russia into starting a war by bringing the NATO too close to Russia’s borders” is Western guilt. It’s the equivalent of “let’s allow weirdos to pollute our Parliament with their unhinged screeching” and “let’s pay reparations to whoever demands them.”

Our British friends have become so censored and policed that it’s impossible to find out what is actually being discovered regarding the Southport massacre that occurred last July. From what I understand, Britain’s current PM is responsible for the terrorist’s family being in the UK. Keir Starmer apparently defended Rudakubana’s father in his (Starmer’s) capacity as a Human Rights lawyer. The father seems to have been complicit in the Rwandan genocide, which is why it was so crucial to Labour to keep him in the UK.

This is why I consider anybody who unironically uses the expression “human rights” to suffer from cognitive retardation.

In any case, there’s no discussion in the UK. People only mumble that there are things they could tell but they won’t because you know. The incredible degree of censorship and fear is such that I say “God Bless America” whenever I read anything about Great Britain.

Poor Spain looks like it’s gangrened. Strangely, there’s complete silence in Spain on this crime against reproductive rights. No manifestations, no protests. Only a quiet dying off on the altar of freedom and choice.

These are simply numbers and colors but think about the human tragedies behind them.

I watched some Rachel Maddow in the hotel room for the first time in years. It’s sad. Authoritarianism, J6, more authoritarianism. “This is what you wanted, American people, so now you have it,” Maddow said with a bitter look. She seems not to consider herself an American based on this statement.

You’d think that if years of Trump, authoritarianism and J6 brought a complete electoral wipeout, people would manage to pivot. Isn’t this what the Rachel Maddow crowd always recommends to us? “Learn to code”, embrace change, “just move”. But when it comes to setting an example and showing some intellectual agility instead of lecturing everybody on how stuck in their ways they are, there’s bupkes.

The preachers of how great change is seem to not be very good at changing.

The New York Post editorial board on their meeting with RFK Jr:

“When it came to that topic his views were a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines…In fact, we came out thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.”

I don’t know much about this dude RFK and what I know I don’t like. But the sane people in charge of health brought us the opioid epidemic, the obesity epidemic, the autism epidemic, COVID lies and lockdowns, a mental health collapse, and the normalization of puberty blockers and mastectomies for children.

Health has been more full of nuts than a squirrel hideout. One finds it hard to be particularly outraged about RFK after all this.

Yesterday I finished reading Anthony Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her? and I want to use it to give some examples of how our subjectivity transformed in the historically short period of time since Trollope wrote.

In the novel, a young wife tells her husband that she never loved him. She loves somebody else, she says, and wants to run away with him. The reaction of the husband – a Duke and a Lord of Parliament – is unlike anything we can comprehend. Without a word of reproach, he abandons a political appointment that was the dream of his life and with infinite patience and gentleness starts nursing the marriage back into good health. The leader of his party is angry that the young lord can’t fulfill his political duty but when he understands what happened, he removes all objections.

The way this young man takes on his shoulders the responsibility for the emotional state of the family is not something we see today. The Duke’s complete lack of woundedness when his wife tells him she’s passionately in love with another man is incomprehensible to us. If our wife or husband publicly becomes silly with somebody else and declares their love for another person, we can claw our way to forgiveness and peace with the help of a priest or a therapist maybe by the end of next year. Unlike the Duke in Trollope’s novel, we have very large egos. They are so large, they are poking out of us and anything can would them.

Another big difference is that in today’s world, if anybody is going to make these enormous efforts to save a marriage and moderate everybody’s emotional responses, it will be a woman. In Trollope’s world, that role fell to men. Only yesterday, I saw a story that went viral on Twitter. A young woman got hysterical and screamed at her husband of 4 years that she despises his hobbies and she thinks they are stupid. Now, she says, the husband withdrew, won’t accept her apologies, and is talking about divorce. She’s trying to remedy the situation but he’s completely checked out. We hear such a story and we think, “yeah, obvs. She insulted him and of course he wants nothing to do with her.” Our subjectivity is that of neoliberal consumers. The wife turned out to be a faulty product, so the husband is justified in returning her to the store and getting himself a new one. He is a man in a completely different way that Trollope’s Duke was a man. We believe deep inside that it’s the wife’s role to emotionally regulate the relationship. It doesn’t occur to us that, like happens in Trollope’s novel, a husband can help his wife manage her emotions, that he can see himself as responsible for her emotional states.

What women do has expanded enormously since Trollope’s times and what men do has shrunk. And I don’t mean professions or making money or anything like that. Men have ceded a lot of ground to women on emotions. It’s not good or bad, it’s simply a different subjectivity.

Now, Trollope lived at a tail end of another massive change of human subjectivity that occurred in the West in the latter half of the 18th century. A human being that was possessed of a range of emotions that had to be minutely traced and moderated came into existence then. The genre of the novel became massively popular because that was the arena where people could immerse themselves into thinking about emotions and try out different scenarios of dealing with them. Religion – which was everything to humans before then – was replaced with our feelings. The external authority was substituted with the internal one. We don’t worship God. We worship minute shades of our emotional life.

I don’t like historical fiction precisely because of this. Its authors populate the past with versions of their 21st-century selves and we end up with medieval girl-bosses and such instead of people who actually existed back then.

I gave a single small example here but subjectivity is much bigger than what I described. The concept of children meant something completely different. Parents, family, love, duty – everything meant not what it does today. God meant something completely different. Even the most religious people today can’t begin to perceive God like those who lived 500 years ago. Look at Michaelangelo’s frescoes or the Canterbury Cathedral. If you stay with it for a while, you can maybe glimpse a tiny shade of the feeling that animated their creators.

I’m sorry this is long but this is a big issue that can’t be explained in a couple of sentences.

P.S. There’s also a novel about the Duke’s later life and it shows what he is like as a father to his adult children. The novel is a paean to fatherhood and I wrote about it here. We see a man who, by measure of his times, is almost elderly but he still grows as a person and tries to figure things out. Trollope has an amazing cast of male characters and I recommend him most sincerely.

A heads up: academia now really loves the words “ecosystem” and “spaces of care.” Both terms mean budget cuts because everything always means budget cuts.

Previously, “interdisciplinary” was a favorite term. It meant you could get rid of half of the workers and have the remaining half do the work of both. So, budget cuts.

They will blame Trump for the budget cuts so we need to record and remember that budget cuts were happening for years before this election.

This will be a long quote and I apologize in advance but I’m promoting this guy because he’s, in my opinion, a great American writer in the making. Thanks to social media, we can now witness the creation of an artist in real time and contribute with money and comments as the process develops. I’m posting this quote not because this is his best writing (and it really, really isn’t) but because he describes his process and I think it’s priceless information:

I’m a firm believer in the “daily bench.”

You’ve got to find a public bench with a faraway view within walking distance of your house. And you’ve gotta walk there every day, rain, shine, or snow, and sit for an hour.

And I mean sit. Don’t do anything. Don’t bring a book or your phone. At most, bring a cigar, or a Rosary, or talk to yourself, or sing, or whistle. But you’ve got to sit there and really just relax. Come alone most days if you can.

Everywhere I’ve ever lived where I’ve done this, I flourished. And people around me noticed — “there’s that guy again!” — and I wound up chatting with people and making friends. But more than anything, my mind was my own; the ‘blank space’ in my schedule unlocked ideas and energy I otherwise might’ve lost.

Find your bench.

https://x.com/shagbark_hick/status/1857100946628661407?t=T8of7Rjr-Q_eH4WVqE3xow&s=19

Once again, his actual literary writing is not this. I’m posting his off-hand social media comment but I’ll start sharing excerpts from his actual art and you’ll see, this dude is really talented.