What I love in this country is how well everything is organized for people with kids. I still can’t get over the shopping carts with the opening for kids to put their feet through and the little plastic seats. Or the parking spots for pregnant women right in front of the entrances with pictures of little storks. Or the changing stations in public restrooms. 

Also, there are so many completely free places to take out kids here in town. Parks, playgrounds, the splash pad. Everything is clean, very well-maintained, with padded flooring, shady picnic areas, and shockingly clean public toilets. 

Of course, we pay high property taxes but it’s great to see that the taxes go to something worthwhile.

Peter Tefft, my son, is not welcome at our family gatherings any longer. I pray my prodigal son will renounce his hateful beliefs and return home. Then and only then will I lay out the feast.

Hey, I’ve heard this before. Public renunciation of family members was very much in vogue back in the USSR.

It’s not surprising that the fellow became a neo-Nazi. With parents who can do something like this, it’s strange he hasn’t killed anybody yet.  Obviously, the parental assholishness doesn’t justify the son’s neo-Nazism. But his neo-Nazism neither justifies nor predates the parental assholishness.

Today I made my favorite vegan soup that has kale, collard greens, beet greens, white cabbage, red cabbage, carrots, lima beans, green peas, cilantro, baby potatoes, and fresh rosemary.

N doesn’t like it and calls it “the blockade soup” in reference to the blockade of Leningrad by the German troops in WWII when people had nothing to eat and had to make soup out of wilted leaves and tree bark. So I made baked turkey legs for N. 

From an article in the NYTimes:

I spoke to an Asian television-­news producer who had also made the trip from New York. ‘‘I’m just imagining what my parents would think about all this,’’ she said. We had one of those talks common among people of any marginalized group, in which it’s possible to unload your neuroses without having to explain everything.

Question: how do people know they belong to a “marginalized group”? I’m asking for purely practical reasons. Do I belong to a marginalized group? I’d love to feel all brave and resilient in the face of marginalization.

More importantly, who doesn’t belong to a marginalized group? The same old “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, yadda yadda yadda men”? But what if they feel marginalized? Isn’t the truth whatever you feel it is? Or is that only true for those who already claimed the stakes of being marginalized? 

The events in Charlottesville will have a very bad effect on the political Left in this country. I’m sure they will also have an effect on the Right but I don’t care because I don’t belong to it. 

On the Left, though, things are going to get bad. It’s already not amazing but it’s about to get worse because now one can mow down any dissent with “You disagree? What are you, a Nazi?”, “You want freedom of speech? What, like a Nazi?”, and “You don’t like what we are doing? The other side is worse. They are Nazis!”

And yes, it’s an unassailable argument because it’s true. Whatever you do, Nazis are worse. It’s the best carte blanche there is. 

And hey, it already started. See here:

I’m sure Heather Heyer’s family would be happy if she could trade places with James Damore.

It’s 100% true, of course. And it’s also true that this shouldn’t be the extent of our options. We shouldn’t have to choose only between traitorous neo-Nazis and self-righteous privilege-scratchers. Yes, the scratchers are better but only because they are competing against the most despicable people ever. 

Being better than torch-waving, Heil-Hitlering, goose-stepping, people-killing Nazis is a low bar to cross. But to a movement that is already addicted to self-righteousness, this feeling of being on high moral ground compared even to this kind of opponent will be irresistible. Like all addicts, it will desperately look for the next fix. And since there aren’t enough Nazi protests to feed the hunger, it will manufacture Nazis out of anybody who fails to be sufficiently loud and eager in their cheering and condemnation.

This is the trap that the Left has been incapable of avoiding since the 1930s. And it lost every single time because the potency of “But at least we are not Nazis” has an expiration date.

When I was little, I had a matchstick house that I really loved. And then a boy called Misha who was a little sociopath destroyed it. And I plastered the super sticky Soviet version of Play-Doh (called plastilin) on his hair, and he had to have his hair shaved off because it was famous for never coming out of one’s hair. It was Soviet, which means aimed at causing the most aggravation.

I’m not exaggerating Misha’s sociopathy. He was notorious for torturing kittens in high school, burning them alive for fun. And in adulthood he became a career criminal. His mom was seriously mentally unstable, so it’s not surprising.

I told N this story once, and he remembered and started searching until he found this matchstick house on eBay and bought it for me. It’s pretty sturdy, too, so no sociopathic boy can destroy it, even if I were in the mood to have one over. Which I’m obviously not. It was years ago that I told N this story.

Yes, it’s yet another post about N’s and mine annoying cuteness. 

A really, really good interview on the opioid epidemic with Dr. Gabor Maté, a specialist from Vancouver who knows what he’s talking about. This is extremely refreshing because people tend to say a lot of silly stuff about substance abuse. 

Smoking, drug addiction, alcoholism – these are a result of early childhood trauma. You need to look at the parents and the early parenting environment of addicts to figure out what’s happening. When an addict picks up a pill, a bottle, a cigarette or a syringe, he’s not making a lifestyle choice. He’s putting a bandaid on a bleeding wound. It hurts more not to do it than to do it. Trying to convince people not to be in extreme pain by using logical arguments is insane behavior. 

After watching the news, I’m not liking the narrative that is formed around the events in Charlottesville. You don’t need decency, courage or compassion to denounce neo-Nazis and feel deeply disgusted by them. 

You know what you need?

Not to be a neo-Nazi. That’s all. 

People who avoid denouncing neo-Nazis are not doing it because they are lacking in courage or empathy. They are sympathizers. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s not a character flaw, it’s a system of beliefs. 

It’s wrong and dangerous to psychologize this and move it to the realm of character flaws from the realm of political sympathies. 

It’s not “a deadly car crash in Charlottesville”* it’s an act of terror in Charlottesville at the hands of a domestic terrorist organization.

The equivocation would be understandable if we’d never seen this before. But terrorists have been using vehicles to mow down people for a while. 

I hate hate hate it when people mince words and fear naming what they can very clearly see. It’s not “violence and hate” that caused the riots. Specific people, neo-Nazi terrorists, did it. How convenient to present it all as a result of impersonal and hence uncontrollable forces. Hate didn’t pick up a torch and didn’t yell Nazi slogans, you know. Cars don’t kill people. People kill people.

* Heard 2 minutes ago on MSNBC, repeated 3 times.

Yesterday we took Klara to a little girl’s birthday party. It was great, we all had a fantastic time. The hosts were so thoughtful that they even provided bug spray for the guests who have a tendency to attract mosquitoes. I’m the favorite person of mosquitoes everywhere, so I doused myself with the spray. 

As I enjoyed the party, I noticed that there was this intolerable, cloyingly sweet stench that followed me everywhere.

“These are great people,” I thought. “But God, what a stench! Why do they make it smell so bad?”

I tried discovering the source of the odor but the stench was everywhere I went and it was of equal intensity in every room and on all sides of the house. (I’m very sensitive to smell, so it was worth the effort to explore). It was only when I grabbed the bug spray bottle to put a second layer of protection on myself when I realized the painfully obvious: the source of the stench was me, the only person who’d used the stinky bug spray. 

A similar story happened to me in our campus parking lot that has very narrow rows and requires that you make sharp turns. Whenever I drove in or out of the lot, I’d hear somebody’s car emit a loud screech. 

“It’s so weird that the freak with the screechy car should come to campus and leave at the same time as I do,” I thought. “He must have the same teaching schedule.”

Then I came to campus on a Saturday and heard the familiar screech. 

“Wow,” I thought, “the screechy fellow is here again! At the same time as me! What a coincidence!” 

It literally took me a whole semester to begin to suspect that I might be the source of the screeching noise.