Reader Demotrash, who by all appearances must be visiting us anonymously from Harvard, says this:

These are important observations that explain why I don’t like the growing popularity of the term oral culture to describe what we are experiencing.

Oral culture exists in a deeply religious society. There is a core of shared belief that brings people into the same symbolic universe. Without this shared worldview nourished by a lifelong participation in the common rituals and traditions, there is no culture. If you don’t have a shared symbolic language that everybody understands irrespective of their degree of literacy, there’s no culture.

There is another aspect to this issue. Culture is the capacity to understand that something can mean something else. It’s a non-literal understanding of the world of which only humans are capable. Portable screens are creating a cognitive gap of extraordinary dimensions. All of the natural cognitive distinctions remain in place. On top of it, we are adding a large number of people with a flat, one-dimensional inner world who can’t comprehend the reality around them and will exist in a state of a permanent freakout over it. They are imitating culture’s “something can mean something else” but in a flailing, dumb way. Like parrots who imitate the sound of a human voice, they chant “people in maroon shirts must mean something”.

Did you hear, folks? Rob Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death by their 32-year-old drug addict son. A terrible tragedy.

One thing that is invariable from one culture to another is that actors and actresses are exceptionally crappy parents. They raise more junkies and completely off-the-handle crazy types than truck stop prostitutes and their pimps.

What I find annoying is that people are already making this somehow about Trump even though the utter incapacity of actors to raise semi-normal children was proverbial before Trump was even born.

This is simply bizarre:

NEW: BROWN U. CANCELS REMAINING CLASSES, EXAMS, PAPERS.

"Given the deeply tragic events that took place on our campus yesterday, all remaining undergraduate, graduate and medical classes, exams, and papers or projects for the Fall 2025 semester will not take place as scheduled."…

— Kellie Meyer (@KellieMeyerNews) December 14, 2025

What is the theory of the mind here? That people who had a bad shock need to be excised from regular life and sit staring at a wall all day? This is stupid.

Even when somebody is experiencing a terrible personal loss, they don’t need complete passivity. To the contrary, they need a huge to-do list. When somebody dies, in the Orthodox tradition we have a funeral, then pominki, then a gathering at 9 days, and another gathering at 40 days. You cook, organize, talk to people, that helps.

Oh, students will want to go home. OK, and so what? You can’t accept their papers by email? Because normally they hand them in personally? Email has been abolished? You managed to teach remotely for two years and now all of a sudden you are “significantly hindered”?

What is the lesson here? That when you experience something unpleasant, life stops? This isn’t real. Nothing stops. You are preparing students for something that’s not a thing.

And by the way, why is the shooter still not apprehended? What is going on?

My 5-year-old used to fight me EVERY NIGHT about brushing teeth.

“No! I don’t want to!”
“You have to!”
Meltdown. Tears. Exhausting.

Then I changed one thing:

Instead of “Go brush your teeth,” I said:
“Do you want to brush teeth before or after pajamas?”

He thought about it. “After.”

Done. No fight. Teeth got brushed.

This is an excellent parenting hack. I’ve been using it since Klara was first learning to walk, and it works great. Kids want to make their own decisions. They want to show initiative and be responsible for themselves. This is a great thing and must be encouraged.

Klara has been choosing what to wear since she was in onesies. Of course, she was choosing between the two onesies that I curated based on weather conditions. These days she dresses herself, and we have zero struggles over “don’t forget the scarf and the gloves” because she’s long been responsible for her own attire.

Give them a choice and respect it, even if it’s weird. Klara brushes her teeth after breakfast. I don’t get it because I brush mine immediately after getting up and love it. But I’ve accepted that everybody is different and instilling initiative is much more important than insisting that my way of doing things is optimal.

Global warming hits hard as we experience the coldest winter I’ve ever had in this region. Canadian levels of cold. I almost closed the window all the way at night. Which means it’s Arctic weather for real. The window is still open a crack but if things continue this way, I might really close it.

Yes, I’m loving every second of it. That moment when you feel like your eyeballs have frozen solid and might actually crack? Paradise.

The most Herculean effort of parenting goes into exercising the self-control to avoid saying “I told you so.”

Edys Renan Membreño Díaz from Honduras crossed the border into the US illegally 7 times. After his most recent arrival, he grabbed a disabled woman with cerebral palsy and cognitive delays, dragged her into her apartment building’s laundry room, and proceeded to rape and sodomize her with horrific brutality.

He was convicted in 2022 and will be up for parole in July 2028. Not much of a sentence, given the severity of the offense. “In the age of #MeToo”, you know. “Believe women.” Unless they are raped by a convenient migrant, in which case screw them.

One possibility of keeping Edys Renan Membreño Díaz locked up for longer was to convict him for immigration crimes. The prosecutors tried to tack on 2 more years to his sentence because every day he’s locked up is one more day when he’s not raping women.

Not all women, however, care to help other women to avoid being raped by this dweeb. The District Judge Judith Levy decided that instead of being sentenced for violating immigration law, Membreño Díaz has to be praised as, and I quote, being a future “ambassador for living up to our immigration restrictions” who exhibited “family devotion and willingness to perform work that Americans find undesirable.”

The rapist received no additional sentence. We can expect him to be out of jail and ready to resume his ambassadorial duties in 2,5 years.

By year 2002, Russian nationalists started to get increasingly worried about the young, blond new president whom they’d invested with such great hopes. Only three years earlier, he’d promised to kill Chechens (who were ravaging Russia with horrific acts of terror) everywhere, including in the toilets. But in reality, Russia was paying enormous money to Chechnya as a form of perpetual tribute, Russian laws had no validity on the territory of Chechnya, and Chechen businessmen were opening gay clubs all over Moscow and St Petersburg that served as transit hubs for hard drugs.

The nationalists were also bothered by Putin’s refusal to close the border between Russia and the countries of Central Asia. Big cities were becoming increasingly dangerous for women because migrants would assault and rape them. The official narrative was that migrants were necessary because Russians “just wouldn’t do these jobs.” A lot of already scarce housing was converted into barracks where migrants slept, half a dozen to a tiny room.

The last straw was Putin’s declaration that the Russian Federation is a multiethnic state and using the word “Russian” (as opposed to “citizen of Russia”) was not allowed in any state documents. The nationalists were feeling like they were being squeezed out of their own country. The started to resist.

A wave of nationalist protests began. The brutality with which the unarmed protesters were put down was something they didn’t expect. The bodies of their dead leaders were being dragged away but there was no coverage anywhere in the news. Online accounts of those events have since been deleted.

Back then I thought that Putin preferred Central Asians because they were easier to control and didn’t expect much by way of a standard of living or civil liberties. Since then, I realized that this Marxist explanation was insufficient. When a large city with 99% Slavic population gets razed to the ground and 100,000 of its white inhabitants are killed with the goal of repopulating the area with Central Asians, there is a word for that. It’s Lebensraum.

The first time I read the words “Putin is waging a race war against whites” was in 2005. I thought it was dumb. The idea of population replacement sounded very nuts. Yes, it kind of did look that way but it’s not like anybody was doing it on purpose. And it was true that whites didn’t want to be janitors and didn’t want to have kids and were kind of bringing it on themselves, wasn’t it?

It was all a conspiracy theory. It had to be.

I’m reading the Mexican writer Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, who is a Mexican ultra-nationalist. Detests the US. Adores Mexico. Yet he dedicates several pages of his book The Tyranny of Ideas to describing how Mexicans are congenitally incapable to embark and disembark from a plane without trampling over the heads of everyone else.

Only in the US is it treated like a heresy to point out that patient, polite, orderly lines exist only in a small number of cultures. Everybody else stampedes over others like a herd of hungry buffalo.

It’s my 11th semester as department Chair. It is the eleventh time that one faculty member (who is 15 years younger than me and so not senile) asks me which grade to give if a student stopped attending in the middle of the semester and never showed up again.

Eleven semesters in a row I offer my unchanging reply. Which is identical to what the university website specifies.

Another person needs at least 3 reminders every semester to do the state-mandated training.

Another always forgets how to enter final grades.

There’s a total of one person who figures his own shit without acting like I’m his mommy.

There’s no limit on people’s desire to self-infantilize.