The new president of Argentina Javier Milei is interesting because he’s trying to pry apart the economic neoliberalism from the political and ideological neoliberalism. I don’t know if he’ll be successful or if this can be achieved at all. But at least Milei is trying while others have stuck their heads into their anal cavities and are offering no solutions whatsoever.

Neoliberalism was originally economic in nature. It was created as an alternative to the economic measures put in place by most developed countries to appease the pro-socialist elements in society. The first neoliberals said, screw this, why are we putting the brakes on our productivity and entrepreneurship? Why do we constrain ourselves with all these government regulations? Why are we imitating the Soviet economy to appease a few cranks who are terrified of freedom and are eyeing socialism with curiosity?

OK, they didn’t really say that. There were many very complex intellectual debates but we’ll all die of extreme old age if we get into details.

I personally have never had a problem with economic neoliberalism. I experienced its most hardcore version in post-1991 Ukraine, and I did amazing. Loved it.

But then economic neoliberalism began to overstep. It turned out that it co-exists beautifully with authoritarian regimes. In fact, it thrives there. And for an authoritarian regime to exist, you need group think. So it happened that neoliberalism walked into a situation where it proclaims the primacy of individual freedom while abolishing not only freedom but the very possibility that there will be individuals in the future.

To give a recent example of how neoliberalism loves authoritarianism, remember during COVID when everything was closed except Walmart? And Walmart ended up eating the market share of many small stores in a situation that was engineered by the government and imposed with an iron fist.

Or the mass migration that neoliberalism so loves because “freedom” must mean everybody is free to go live wherever they want. This “freedom of movement” is being carefully engineered by government institutions and rammed down our throats with great force. Our mass media, in the meantime, are bamboozling us with lies about this whole situation. The migration problem is a perfect example of economic, political and ideological neoliberalism working together. Do you like it?

Neither do I.

Surely, we can be entrepreneurial and productive without going to this extreme.

Can we effectuate a divorce between neoliberal economy and neoliberal politics / ideology? Can we embrace the repeal of regulations on appliances that people on this blog rightfully love but reject the idea that men can be women? Can we find a reasonable place in our love of freedom and just stop there?

It’s been done in the past. Capitalism is wonderful, in part, because it self-corrects beautifully and effectively. Why shouldn’t it be able to self-correct now if we guide it there?

This is the question Javier Milei is asking. And it’s s very important one.

This is probably the best thing I’ve seen on Twitter in weeks:

Isn’t it absolutely precious? The guy passionately denies that there’s Marxism in schools and then… offers the most primitive Marxist explanation in existence. And there’s no pause between the two statements.

This is what happens when you use words without trying to find out their meaning.

We had some unusually cold days this January. A local church decided to open up a space in the basement to make a warming station for the homeless. There are no homeless in our town but the neighboring town does have several, so church members would drive them over to the church, feed them, and give them a warm place to sleep. Every church has a specific branch of charity that it favors, and this one concentrates on the homeless. It’s been doing this for years, if not decades, and nobody ever had a problem.

However, our very red town now has a woke mayor and a woke group of new aldermen. They completely spoiled our traditional summer park festival by filling it with booths of such inappropriateness that I had to shepherd Klara out before she saw things I wouldn’t be able to explain. The festival is now called “Unity Fest” but it’s more about advertising every variety of sexual deviancy than promoting unity. The church I’m telling you about sent some people with goats and Jesus flyers to the newly woke festival, and I guess this upset the organizers.

As a result, this year the municipal authorities forbade the church from offering a warming station. They came up with a series of bureaucratic objections. “You didn’t file for permit. Yes, you did but you filed too late. You didn’t file too late but it’s the wrong form. It’s not the wrong form but the signature is in the wrong place. It’s not in the wrong place but…” And so on.

In the meantime, it’s getting extremely cold, and nobody is doing anything. The church, of course, said screw it (or whatever the religious euphemism is), and opened the warming station. The city authorities fined them heavily for every day they were helping the homeless.

We are a small town, and all of this is widely known and passionately discussed. Everybody except a couple of known curmudgeons is siding with the church. But what gets to me is the extreme pettiness of the woke leadership. They don’t like the church and decided to let a dozen homeless freeze just to annoy the pastor and the parishioners.

People will want to know how we ended up with this woke mayor. We had a really wonderful right-wing mayor who saved us from COVID lockdowns and did a lot to make us the best town in the region. But he retired and the only people who ran for mayor were a fun guitar-playing dude who masked his wokeness behind a clown persona and a trad right-winger lady who thought we should go back to being a hamlet where she grew up 50 years ago and where you had to drive 40 miles to buy groceries. There is a constituency of people in town who do have that sort of nostalgia but they are a tiny minority. Everybody else loves stores and restaurants and understands that the people who moved into town since year 1970 aren’t about to move out, so fantasizing about empty fields springing up where there’s now housing.

This is such a typical right-wing fail. Antagonizing the masses and losing elections to a fun wokester who skillfully concealed his extremism.

Since I’m on the subject, the entire portrayal of gay men in American entertainment is screwy. Gay men don’t get together to be “like” heteros. They get together specifically to be not hetero. That’s kind of the whole purpose. But the only type of gay couple you see portrayed any more is a dude who acts like a very stereotypical wife and another dude who is a very stereotypical hetero husband. They usually have a gigantic number of kids and it’s constantly underscored that they are so busy with the kids that they never have sex anymore.

I look at this, and I wonder, have the scriptwriters ever met any gay men? It’s the entertainment industry, so it shouldn’t be that hard.

The diversity we are being constantly lectured about isn’t really all that diverse at all. It always tends towards the hoariest, most boring stereotypes. Even hetero couples don’t live according to these stereotypes.

This is a charming children’s movie, my friends, that scrubbed out every trace of Roald Dahl and put the American sensibility of 2023 in his place. Some parts of that sensibility are good. For example, the frontier mentality of a persevering individual is at the core of the movie. It’s like a Wild West flick but cute and for kids.

On the negative side, there are the now obligatory racial hangups as the movie populates the Europe of 120 years ago with crowds of African-Americans. No explanation is offered for how they got there in such numbers. As with the Claudine Gay story, the blacks chosen for the parts in the movie are extraordinarily talentless. The lead part is played by an unattractive, overweight girl with a speech impediment and the affect of a dead fish who should have never gone into acting. (No, I’m not being mean to a child. I’m expressing my opinion about a product I paid for). I’m sure a crowd of mega-talented black tweens was available but DEI doesn’t like brilliant non-white people. They spoil the savior fun.

Timothée Chalamet is delightful, as always. He’s the perfect example of why it’s dumb to equate very feminine masculinity with gayness. Not the bougiest of gays can affect Chalamet’s easy and natural femininity. And it’s only because he’s so girly that his on-screen friendship with a child doesn’t seem creepy. Just a touch of masculinity would have made the movie weird and uncomfortable.

We have such a terror of discussing things relating to “diversity” that many people believe that gay men are wannabe women. This is utterly stupid, as gay men don’t want to be women at all and are not particularly feminine. Some affect femininity but it’s a parody, and not usually a very kind one. The proportion of feminine men among gays is the same as among straights because you’ve got to have the physique for it.

Going back to Chalamet, the phenomenon of women being attracted to very feminine men has always existed and is historically well-documented. I’ve seen no equivalent of men being attracted to masculine women. Maybe Xena, the Warrior Princess had some male fans but this was not a character aimed at a female audience. I find the outrage of men against the fact that Chalamet is a sex symbol to be very funny. They’ve been reacting this way back in the 1550s, as well, and it just goes to show that for all our sexual liberation we have not advanced much in our understanding of sexuality. We swapped one bunch of prejudices for another and arrived in the same place.

I didn’t go to the movie for myself, obviously, but if I have to sit through a children’s film, I want to get something out of it. So I got these musings about sexuality.

My sister says, “You and I always thought that we were much more North American than Ukrainian. We’d severed ties with Ukraine completely. But today we both feel that we are only truly ourselves when we talk with Ukrainians in Ukraine.”

It’s true. Ukraine changed enormously since 1998. But so did America. We left to be free. To speak and think freely and without constraints. And we were free. It was really great for a while. The fresh air of American freedom was incredible.

But then it started to change.

My nephew is 8, and he’s growing up to be such a typical North American guy, it’s funny.

He told his mother that there’s a girl he likes.

“What is it about her that you like?” she asked.

And he gave this very American reply that sounds deeply strange to those of us who are not from here: “She laughs at my jokes.”

The typical American girl reply of “I like him because he makes me laugh” is just as weird to us.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of this, of course. It’s just such a cultural difference because we’d never say something like this.

I’m doing a blind review of an academic article, and it’s very good. But the author accuses me of being “heavily influenced by Judith Butler”. I find that very hurtful. He also calls me a “classical Marxist.”

I’m either a Trumpist TERF, as some reviewers have suggested, or a Butlerian Marxist. Take your pick, people, and stick with it!

We are asked to nominate for a teaching award “faculty members who identify as wom*n”. I have no idea why anybody would want to identify as a weird word without meaning but I don’t identify as anything, so what do I know.

I hope nobody nominates me because I don’t want to be grouped with the people who “identify as”.

The first election stickers started to appear on cars in the campus parking lot.

In 2016, the first stickers to pop up were for Bernie Sanders.

In 2020, they were Warren stickers.

This time, Nikki Haley. This is a college campus we are talking about. Republican stickers are usually as rare as an intelligent DEI worker.