N and I started watching Netflix’s Making a Murderer. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend. If you have, please no spoilers. We only saw the first two episodes so far.

One observation I wanted to make is how extraordinarily manipulative the absent narrator is. This is a lesson we can all learn from 19th-century realist literature: if the author / narrator is going to great lengths to make themselves imperceptible in the story, some massive manipulation is about to be perpetrated against you. And you can make your experience as a reader or viewer more fun through catching the author in the act.

In Making a Murderer there is no narrator, and the viewers are invited to believe that nobody is telling them what to think, they can make their own minds. Of course, it’s all a lie. The footage is selected and arranged in a way that pushes a single version of events very hard. Every narrative and creative vehicle is used to slam the “correct” reading down your throat while allowing you to entertain the comforting illusion that you made your own mind.

It’s a great documentary, totally worth watching.

Great news from the UK:

The prime minister will call for a revolution in child rearing this weekend by suggesting that all parents should attend classes on how to discipline their children. As part of a speech on the family, Cameron will announce plans for a parenting classes voucher scheme, claiming that all parents need help and that there is too little state-sponsored guidance on offer.

Ideally, of course, people would come to these classes of their own free will, but if one has to pay them, then for this crucial purpose, no amount is too much to spend.

For all the useless chatter about family values, nobody is all that invested into actually doing anything to achieve familial happiness. People put in a lot of effort into planning and organizing their careers, yet their family lives are supposed somehow to work out on their own. As a result, they come home from work and slide into yelling, screaming, bitterness, sourness, misery and discomfort. And if they have to be prodded into dedicating a few hours to thinking about what it is thar poisons their family lives and turns their children into sad little neurotics, then so be it.

In the early years of my blog, I used to publish a weekly “Mock Ross Douthat” post (and if you still remember those times, thank you for being such a loyal reader, you rock!). Then I got bored with his repetitive superficiality and stopped reading him. Years have passed, and today I discovered that for Douthat they have passed in vain. He is still as clueless and woman-hating as ever. Here is Douthat on the issue of European immigration:

How transformative depends on whether these men eventually find a way to bring brides and families to Europe as well. In terms of immediate civil peace, family formation or unification offers promise, since men with wives and children are less likely to grope revelers or graffiti synagogues or seek the solidarity of radicalism.

This is not only egregiously stupid, it’s also offensive. Women are not food, we are not fungible. Providing each man with his own piece of meat might prevent him from grabbing other men’s pieces of meat. But women are not pieces of meat (surprise!) and the reason men grope, poke, assault and humiliate us is not that they don’t have a willing object at home to do this to.

My mother has a friend, a Ukrainian woman who married a man from Morocco. He raped her and beat her for 20 years, in spite of being an educated, well-established, financially successful professional man.

When they emigrated to Canada, Mohammed brought both his wife and child and his contempt for women with him. Whenever they would come over to my parents’ place on a family visit, Mohammed would ogle me and my minor child sister in such a disgusting, offensive way that we would feel precisely like pieces of meat that Douthat considers us to be. The presence of his wife and our parents not 10 feet from all this in no way prevented Mohammed from acting like a pig. I am convinced that the only reason why he didn’t jump on us was not that he was married but that he was fat, clumsy and alone and we would all collectively whoop his ass if he tried. Put him at the train station in Cologne, and he’ll gladly participate in assaulting women.

If I had any temptation to wonder whether Mohammed’s piggishness was linked to his religion, that temptation evaporated the moment I met a group of Christian men from Lebanon. Their piggishness was so identical to Mohammed’s that I was cured from “my religion is better than yours” kind of hubris immediately.

The reason why Douthat doesn’t grope women against their will is not that he is Christian. It is that women from the culture to which Douthat belongs worked long and hard to spread the shocking news that women are valid human beings. And they were joined by some men who said, “Hey, this kind of makes sense.” And then more women joined and more men.

Gradually, after a lot of work by a lot of people it became possible to construct a tentative and insufficient yet still earth-shattering social consensus that everybody will be happier if women are treated like humans that we are and not pieces of meat. 

If it were possible to skip that long and painful process of building this social consensus by adopting some religion and automatically achieving non-piggish treatment of women, I’d be all for it. But I studied a lot of history and I know for a fact that no religion or lack thereof leads to creating a space where women can go out to celebrate New Year’s and not be sexually assaulted. 

Our consumerist mentality makes us want to believe that happiness resides in a correct selection of identity labels. Put the correct label on it, and joy will follow. But good things in life don’t come as a result of label switching. They come only as a consequence of long and painful labor of changing oneself and the reality that surrounds one. 

P.S. I know the post is long and people hate that but ideas that are worth being expressed don’t exist in soundbites. If it’s simple, it’s probably stupid.

Such an important cultural event, and I totally misssed it:

And the exhibit ‘ s catalog:

The organizer is some life-battered Brit who picked up an inexpensive Russian broad and is trying to impress her with passionate Putinoid worship.

Syrian refugees were attacked in Vancouver. The attacker approached them at a bus stop and sprayed them with a pepper spray. There were several small children who lost consciousness.

The attack sounds like it had to have been planned because how would the attacker identify Syrians as opposed to anybody else in such a diverse city?

P.S. No link because I’m finding this out from Ukrainian news but I’m sure you can find it in English.

N’s parents traveled to the Soviet republic of Georgia back in the 1970s and saw a street vendor selling peaches. There were two lines, one very long and one short, to the same vendor of the same peaches. The short line was for men and the long line was for women. The two lines were needed so that men and women didn’t have any accidental physical contact with each other.

This was deeply bizarre even to Russians, let alone to Ukrainians or Baltic people. And there were even more hardcore places like Uzbekistan where some women still wore the veil until the 1970s, even though it was obviously illegal.

The USSR was so doomed because keeping such different people together can only be done by force. The Soviet authorities tried very hard to mix everybody up but it was still not working.

P.S. Nobody was religious in the USSR but Georgians are historically Christian.

Two women attempt to involve a 2-year-old child in pornography. Let’s remember that sexual abuse knows no gender boundaries.

The ideological biases of The Guardian become clear in a case of dishonest reporting.

Magic baloney!

I say “MAh-slim” and “Is-lAhm.” This means my political identity is all messed up. And what about yours?

This is how students bitched about grades 100 years ago. 

Social justice retreats at Oregon State make me want to vomit.

A good long article on the most important developments in Syria in 2015. 

[Ukrainian] Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. It’s truly admirable how dedicated Ukrainians are to figuring out their past.

Guns are now allowed in state run psychiatric facilities in Texas. Because mentally ill people totally need to be surrounded by guns.

The word “racist” and “racial” is used a lot to refer to the treatment of Syrian refugees, and I find that ridiculous and offensive.

Syrians are, of course, of the same race as Frau Merkel and as myself. The idea that semitic people are somehow not of the same race as non-semitic Germans was very beloved by Hitler who took it to very bad places, as we all know.

Today, people are parroting the idea that the semitic people are somehow not “really white”, believing that this makes them more enlightened and progressive. However, that’s precisely where their racism becomes obvious. If a Syrian is accepted as white, he won’t really deserve any compassion or assistance. He needs to be imagined as non-white for Europeans to pity and condescend to him. As white he’d be threatening because he’d be seen as an equal. As non-white, he won’t be seen as an equal, so it’s OK to patronize him.

An even more ridiculous instance of this is when people accuse Israeli Jews of being “racist” towards Palestinians. Constructing Jews as white ⇒ hence, just like “us” ⇒ hence, treated with familiarity and held to the same or higher standard as “us” and constructing Palestinians as non-white ⇒ hence, not like “us” ⇒ hence, implicitly held to the standard of “well, what do you expect from these poor, backwards creatures?” is an act of imagination that is deeply racist in nature.

It would not be any more stupid than declaring Russians and Ukrainians as belonging to different races and analyzing the war of Russia against Ukraine as a racist aggression. Neither would it be any more stupid than declaring the dislike of Ukrainian refugees in Europe an act of racial animosity.

Dreams, of course, are very individual but just a couple of general things:

1. Every person in your dreams is an aspect of yourself.

2. If in the dream you are dying, it means you are ready for some big change where you will be reborn in a new capacity or role.

Observe the overwhelming female need to service and please needy men in action:

Young German women thankfully enjoy historically unprecedented economic and sexual freedom, with their expensive smartphones and their right to celebrate New Year’s Eve however they want. The same isn’t always true of young male migrants exchanging life under repressive regimes, where they may at least have enjoyed superiority over women, for scraping by at the bottom of Europe’s social and economic food chain. It is not madness to ask if this has anything to do with attacks that render confident, seemingly lucky young women humiliated and powerless.

Yes, those poor babies! They didn’t have smartphones, so they tried to compensate themselves for this intolerable hardship by sexually assaulting women. Don’t they deserve understanding and help? Maybe they need to be provided women to rape if there are not enough smartphones for them to enjoy immediately.

God, this is pathetic.