This week, Russians have been discussing the story of a doctor from Belgorod who approached a patient in his hospital and murdered him by hitting him on the head, openly and coldly. The murder was recorded on video but all of the doctors at the killer’s hospital support him, and the maximum sentence he’ll get for the murder is 2 years.

Belgorod is the town on the border with Ukraine through which Russian tanks and troops moved in the direction of the neighboring country. It’s hilarious to see Russians cluck like scared hens, “How is this possible? Where is all this violence coming from?” now that the glorification of Russia’s unprovoked violence against Ukraine has born fruit within Russia itself. 

From a great article in The Atlantic on Obama’s last State of the Union address (that I didn’t watch):

The first thing that stands out is how the decline of economic terror has created space for other terrors.

This is so true. Rich societies that don’t remember what it means to have actual problems will always find a fresh tale of imaginary terror to titillate the sated consumers. 

The feminist movement imitated the trajectory of industrial capitalism. It was born in the XVIIIth century, consolidated in the XIXth when the capital needed more and more people to work in the factories irrespective of their physiology, won all of its major victories before the end of the 1970s, and fizzled out starting in ≈ 1980 when industrial capitalism began to disintegrate.

Since then, gender became a lot less relevant than mobility. Today, the issue of abortion access, for instance, is not an issue relevant to all women. It’s an issue relevant to women who can’t afford to  transport themselves easily and casually wherever the needed service is provided. Safe streets are crucial to women who can’t afford to move to a gated community, etc.

Capital never cared about gender. It’s entirely non-ideological, and that’s why the rise of capitalism coincided with the development of the civil rights movements. Today’s liquid capitalism cares about gender only inasmuch as it can be turned into an object of consumption. In the words of Ann Branaman, 

“‘Identity’ becomes a problem and a source of deep anxiety in liquid modernity; gender and sexual identity, like other bases of identity, become destabilized and deregulated, open to an unprecedented degree of individual experimentation and choice.”

Of course, this consumerist approach is only available to those who have the means to adopt it. However, those without the means eagerly celebrate this consumerist view of gender, hailing  a spoiled rich “being a woman means buying nail polish” celebrity “a hero” and “the woman of the year.”

If gender is placed on a Walmart shelf alongside bottles of cheap shampoo, its value as a mobilizing factor for political activism evaporates and feminism drowns in cheap, weepy sentimentality of Walmart commercials.

Of course, mass migration has many uses or nobody would promote it. For instance, it exorcises, somewhat, “the specter of uselessness”* that haunts so many people in the liquid world.

The arrival of migrants requires an army of bureaucrats, state officials, social workers, etc to process their paperwork, hand out new paperwork, file the paperwork, and come up with new kinds of crucial paperwork. In this way, you can occupy them for years, making it look like what they are doing is extremely necessary.

This is a way of pushing many locals out of the danger of slipping into the welfare class. For this purpose, a cushion needs to be created in the form of a much more dependent and helpless welfare class.

The longer the migrants stay unintegrated, the longer can this game be played. A self-reliant, independent migrant is useless in the game of providing the superfluous locals with the sense that they are not all that superfluous if there are people who are even more easily discardable than they are.

* The term was created by Richard Sennett.

I feel very young these days because I’m only vaguely aware of who this David Bowie fellow is.

This is very gratifying.

Not being attracted to people who look a certain way cannot be racist, transphobic, fat-shaming, sexist, hegemonic, or anything else that’s bad. Being attracted but not allowing oneself to be seen with them in public, for instance, that shit is definitely all the bad things. But genuine attraction knows no ideology. It’s entirely outside of our control and beyond the reach of any rationality. And that’s only scary to people who are terrified of sex and of themselves.

Trying to analyze attraction in terms of ideological concepts betrays a profound sexual dysfunction in those who do it. 

If a system or an institution doesn’t work for women, the immediate response is never to reform the system and make it work. It’s always to exclude women from public life.

Medical care doesn’t serve your needs? Give birth at home!

Police doesn’t assist you? Forget reporting any crime against you!

Streets are not safe? Stay home!

There are tons of cases where medical care, law and street safety fail men. But in those cases, the response is always about the need to reform medicine, criminal justice and policing. Some people agree, some disagree and say no reform is needed, but the discussions never turn towards the idea that men should not try to access these systems at all.

Bernie Sanders called for all rape accusations on college campuses to be handled through law enforcement, a controversial stance that puts him at odds with many advocates. Decrying rape and sexual assault on campuses as an “epidemic,” he said schools must not try to handle the issue internally.

Thank you, Bernie! Finally, a voice of reason among all the madness.

I’m so glad somebody has the brains and the guts to say the painfully obvious: rape is a serious crime and shouldn’t be made a mockery of through being prosecuted by well-meaning yet entirely incapable amateurs.

Bernie is very brave to say this because now he will be attacked by a bunch of clucking hens who believe that feminism is about excluding women from the institutions of society.

In the 1970s, capital sucked all the juice out of the existing Fordist model. The growth slowed, and that meant a new model of capital expansion had to be found.

Since then, capital liberated itself from being tied to specific territory. It no longer has much use for borders, so borders become less relevant. I always find it extraordinarily entertaining when fierce anti-capitalists proclaim, “I’m for open borders! Border guards, customs, passports – enough of that already!” Today, there is nothing more capitalist than contempt for borders and citizenships. And the only line of defense – feeble as that defense might be – against the ravages of capital is the nation-state with its borders, passports, and national myths.

Capital always gets what it wants. And what it wants is whatever will advance its principal goal: to keep growing, expanding, accumulating. What you want or I want or what is fair does not concern it. If we see any limits successfully placed on the free run of capital by human beings, we need to realize that the capital only allowed this to happen because that was useful for it at this particular point in time.

(Example: the “wild capitalism” of the Industrial Revolution era was substituted by the more “humane” capitalism of the welfare sate in the XXth century. Make no mistake, though: this was a development that was useful to capital, and that’s the only reason why it occurred. The ragged and starving factory workers of the XIXth century did not consume as actively as the orderly, well-fed, healthy and eager to purchase employees at Ford’s conveyor belts.)

I know that none of this flatters the sense of omnipotence that human beings so love but it’s simply what it is. It’s like climate change. If we shut out eyes really tight and pretend there is no climate change, will it go away? Obviously not. And neither will the power of capital.