Since people want to talk about Navalny – which I didn’t expect – I’ll explain my position regarding his anti-corruption work in Russia.

People think that Navalny was some sort of a fighter against the Putin regime but he never was. His only charges against Putin were that Putin stole money. And Putin’s charges against Navalny were that Navalny stole, too.

Everything Navalny did strengthened the regime. He trivialized Putin’s crimes, turning them into something insignificant. Russian people don’t mind that Putin has 14 castles. As long as he gives them what they want, he can have all the castles he needs. And he does give them exactly what they want: war, genocide, looting, rape, torture, and the resulting great self-esteem.

Navalny’s investigations were enormously helpful to the regime because you see them and you think, well, if this is the worst thing that Putin’s biggest opponents have on him, then he’s not that bad.

Voters anywhere on the planet don’t care that their politicians are rich and how those riches were acquired. Cf. Trump, Biden and Hillary Clinton supporters. It’s a commonplace in politics that voters will disregard a candidate’s wealth as long as they perceive an improvement in their own standard of living. Putin brought a marked improvement in the Russians’ standard of living. Do you know what regular Russians discuss the most in connection with the war in Ukraine? Domestic appliances. They are getting to loot a lot of domestic appliances. So now they live better because they have all those looted Ukrainian domestic appliances. Thanks to Putin.

If you didn’t have a flat-screen TV, and now you all of a sudden do, wouldn’t you be thankful to the politician who provided it for free, no matter how many yachts that politician had?

Putin is a moron. He’s a very, very stupid, uneducated, primitive person. That’s why he killed Navalny instead of continuing to use him to whitewash the regime.

I have a new relaxation activity that’s very enjoyable. I listen to books on my Kindle in text-to-speech while playing Cooking Madness or Design Home on my phone.

Really clears my mind and de-stresses me.

Today what drives these struggles is not just rivalry for power but insecurity. Surplus elites are waging a war for economic survival in which hyper-liberal values are commodified in the labour market. Woke is a career as much as a cult.

The New Leviathans

I’ve been saying for years on this blog that wokeness is a tool in job wars. But job wars sound nasty, so people find a moral purpose in their wokeness.

In the past couple of months, I’ve been receiving almost daily phone calls and texts messages from Yale asking me for donations. Before, they’d contact maybe twice a year.

I think they must have been abandoned by some of their rich donor, and are scraping the barrel to meet their donation goals.

I wonder at people who donate to schools with massive endowments instead of bringing their money to struggling colleges that work with students who really need help.

Remember the novel The Psychoanalyst by John Katzenbach I recently posted about? The one that has two sequels only available in Spanish for a reason nobody knows?

I read the first sequel in Spanish, and it’s definitely a translation. There are some expressions that are calques from English and don’t exist in Spanish. The author is definitely American.

The sequel is good. These novels sold millions of copies in the Spanish-speaking world. But something mysterious is going on with these books. I bought this novel on Kindle but then the Kindle version disappeared from Amazon. Even the page no longer exists. It’s so weird.

The reason I like the novel is that the superhero protagonist is a bookish man in his fifties. He’s 53 in the first novel, 58 in the second, and 68 in the third. And the decisive, hardcore woman who saves everybody in the second book is 87.

I’m now reading the third book in the series that was published last year. Again, it’s only available in Spanish. This is a literary mystery, and I found no explanation for it anywhere.

Being groped and hair-sniffed while you are grieving a terrible loss is devastating enough but I thought the devastating consequences upon Navalny’s murder were promised to his killers, not his family members.

Another quote from John Gray:

Parallels between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia and the early twenty-first-century West may seem far-fetched. Their histories are very different. . . Liberalism did not die in Russia. It was never born. Yet the similarities are real. Late tsarism and the late liberal West produced an intelligentsia that attacked the society that nurtured them. Both were under attack from within.

Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (p. 57). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

There is a real difference, though. The intelligentsia of the Tsarist Russian Empire saw terrible things in the society it demolished. A police state. The absolutely horrid and subhuman existence of the peasantry. The Pale of Settlement and pogroms, which impacted the many Jewish intellectuals personally. The destruction of the non-Russian languages, which impacted the many Ukrainian intellectuals personally.

Life was. . . maybe not particularly short in comparison with other countries but definitely nasty and brutish. The Tsarist intelligentsia was rebelling against a state that was vastly inferior to the American, British, or French states of that time. Anybody who was not a complete animal or a congenital moron supported the revolution against the Tsarist regime.

The Western intelligentsia is in a very different situation. Their problems are pinpricks in comparison. They enjoy the best conditions for intellectual pursuits ever known to humanity by far. Their society truly nurtures them. The Tsarist intelligentsia ended up creating an absolute horror with their revolution but these intellectuals had never been nurtured like today’s Western ones are.

Now we know that Tsarism was definitely better than Stalinism or even Brezhnevism. But at least those intellectuals destroyed their society for a reason. It doesn’t make anything better or bring back any of the victims but at least you can kind of sympathize with it.

So I get Gray’s analogy but it’s not altogether correct.

And that’s why Lebanon is such a beacon of peace and prosperity as a result.

Oh, wait…

There’s a video of a woman who explains why relationships fail. You ask your boyfriend to exchange morning texts, he agrees, but soon forgets. You remind him but he forgets again. And then you stop liking him, and the relationship ends.

The video went viral because people intuit that something is wrong but can’t put it in words. It’s the marketization of love that bothers them. In the video’s definition of love, it’s no longer a feeling that you experience. It’s no longer the romantic love, the overpowering emotion that changes everything. It’s no longer the love as we have understood it in our civilization since the 12th century. It’s now a transaction. You give me XYZ and I give you “love” in return.

The interesting thing is that what’s being exchanged in this transaction isn’t real. It’s a simulacrum, an empty sign. The morning texts are supposed to mean that the boyfriend cares. But they don’t really mean it because they aren’t a spontaneous expression of his feelings. If he wakes up in the morning, and you are the first thing he thinks about, and he’s filled with joy and expresses it in a text message, that’s beautiful, and it does mean something. But if he only does it as a chore, then the texts are meaningless. The woman wants to purchase something completely worthless and give something equally worthless in return.

Transactional love is an exchange of simulacra. He offers a fake sign of caring, and she gives fake love in return. Actual love is scary. You can’t squeeze it into a formula of transaction, of supply and demand. It can’t be quantified or explained with graphs and arrows like the woman does in the video.

We are so afraid of life that we hide from it among empty signs, primitive formulas, and barren equations. Transactional love is no love at all.

What a terrible tragedy. You have the whole problem at the heart of today’s Europe right there.