English speakers, does the expression “five to seven” mean anything to you? If you read the phrase, “they really enjoyed their five to sevens”, do you know what that’s about? Or should it be translated differently?
I’m trying to figure out if a translation of the Quebecois “cinq à sept” is good. By the way, popular as they are, nobody ever invited me to a cinq à sept in Quebec. Not once. They have no sexual meaning in Francophone Canada, just in case people have dirty interpretations of what I said.
Solzhenitsyn was a good author. His novel In the First Circle is excellent. I highly recommend if people haven’t read it. In that novel, there’s a really funny character whom the author gently mocks for his extreme Russian nationalism. The dude is so Russian, he avoids using any foreign words, including “engineer” and “mathematics”, which is quite hard given that he’s a mathematician. He’s also immoral and shallow, in spite of prattling incessantly about morality.
I’m going into so much detail about this character because after mocking this type of mealy-mouthed, holier-than-though, abnormally nationalistic individual… Solzhenitsyn turned into exactly that kind of person. The large series of historical novels he wrote later in life is impossible to read because the author’s avoidance of foreign words makes the text sound ridiculous.
In what concerns his ideas, Solzhenitsyn hated Jews and Ukrainians, and his entire ideology revolved against the narcissistic wound inflicted on his Russian soul by their existence. But In the First Circle is still absolutely worth reading. And so is Cancer Ward which is weaker but still good.
US lefties detest Solzhenitsyn because he told the truth about the horrors of Stalinism. He’s not much liked in Russia today for the same reason.
There was a house here in town, plastered with BLM signs and rainbow flags. Today I was driving by and saw that they removed all the BLM and rainbow signage and put a Palestinian flag instead. The old gods have been discarded to make space for the new one.
The right of course wants to paternalistically focus on the contents of this haul, while the left will see it and still deny that we do anything to help poor people in this country. The correct moderate position is to acknowledge that some people for whatever reason have trouble… https://t.co/dkeBF7kYG4
I don’t know how many they are in that family but $1,000 per month for food doesn’t seem very low. I spend more but it’s my own money I spend, not somebody else’s. I don’t buy any of this crap, though. I don’t even recognize half of it. Of course, if there are many children, that’s not enough but who feeds children with this kind of crap?
Why are land acknowledgements stupid? Everybody lives on land where somebody else lived previously. Go far back enough in history, and you’ll find that it’s all about one group displacing another, then getting displaced in turn, and so on forever. Every group is a settler colonialist. And if everybody is something, then nobody is. We don’t call anybody “a person with one head” because there are no people with two or three. There’s absolutely nothing special or unique about the American native groups because they are only “native” in a very historically narrow sense. The only thing unique about America is that it built a wonderful society after displacing the previous groups. Look at Aztecs. They came from elsewhere and started eating everybody in sight. Yet we are supposed to apologize to them for the Spaniards who, with all their faults, didn’t practice cannibalism for gastronomical reasons. Instead, they founded universities where Aztec medicine was studied and taught with the same respect as the European.
Now let’s look at war. War is a natural state of human beings. It’s terrible. I hate it. But it’s always been there. Philip Bobbitt wrote a great book The Shield of Achilles, demonstrating that every new form of statehood was brought by the need to wage war in a new way. I wouldn’t take it as far as Bobbitt but it’s incontrovertible that the nation-state arose out of the need for a new type of warfare. The idea that the US is more war-mongering than any other country is as ludicrous as the idea that Americans are unique (or uniquely cruel) in displacing other groups. For its size and dominance, the US is extraordinarily peaceful. It’s a country that will try absolutely anything before engaging in warfare. When it does wage war, it does so with the greatest economy of means and human losses than anybody else. Mind you, I’m not comparing it to the imaginary world of sweet, kind peaceniks but to the real world where we actually live.
The habit of curling our noses at America and accusing it of being the worst of the worst is moronic and ungrateful whether you are on the Left or the Right.
This is Churchill on how Britain self-destructed after winning World War I:
Historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory — “gone with the wind.”
Now the victors are the vanquished, and those who threw down their arms in the field and sued for an armistice are striding on to world mastery. That is the position, that is the terrible transformation that has taken place bit by bit… We should lay aside every hindrance to endeavour by uniting the whole force and spirit of our people to raise again a great British nation standing up before all the world, for such a nation, rising in its ancient vigour, can even at this hour save civilisation.
This is exactly what happened to the US after 1991. A great victory was supposedly won but the US celebrated the victory by starting on a journey of self-hatred and constant apologies for imaginary crimes.
Churchill was right. It’s not too late. We can all turn this around by learning to feel joy and getting into the habit of laughing at land acknowledgements, Deep State stories, racismsexisms, “forever wars” cliches, etc.
Yes, whoever seriously says “forever wars” is just as unintelligent and un-American as his brother who says “and now let me read a land acknowledgement.”
I followed a reader’s advice and gave Klara a talk about the history of the Jewish people. She’s a happy child, so it had no effect on her but it did have an effect on me. Forty years passed since I received the same talk. There’s no USSR any more, I’m on a different continent, the world has changed. But kids with Jewish ancestry still have to be warned about anti-Semitism and encouraged to “pass”.
Klara asked why I was doing the opposite of passing having decked myself out in Jewish symbolics. And like my father four decades previously, I said that this is my burden to bear and she’ll decide if she wants to pick it up in adulthood.
I’m very envious of Klara’s dentist. He’s a young doctor who bought the practice a few years ago. Everybody is so kind, welcoming and exceptionally sweet to children at his practice that Klara keeps asking me to take her there when there’s no need. Every visit is like a theatrical performance aimed at a single, extremely important viewer.
Even the receptionists act with more tenderness than I’ve experienced from my own mother throughout my life.
What I envy is that this young guy managed to train his entire staff to behave like they are performing as Fairy Godmother in the most important spectacle of their lives. I have no idea how one gets workers to try so damn hard.
Why does our university need to be “an anti-racist campus? I kept wondering.
Why all the race-baiting book clubs, workshops, and seminars?
Why are we pretending there’s racism on campus?
Why are we rubbishing ourselves so actively?
I finally have the answer, and it made me feel better about all this.
This year we have broken every proposed donation goal by a large margin. Apparently, donating to “anti-racist” initiatives brings tax relief and other benefits. We are dying because the state is dramatically reducing our funding. So we have to pretend to be “anti-racist” to get money out of donors.
This is a great relief. We don’t really mean it! We aren’t crazy, we are simply whores.
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