This is from last night in Kyiv:
No, I’m not in favor of preventative bombings of sleeping people because you don’t like their regime. I’m not on the side of this no matter where it happens.
Preventative
It would be really bizarre if I, of all people, suddenly supported preventative invasions and regime-change-motivated bombings of peaceful cities. It would truly be the definition of hypocrisy.
Positive Message of the Day
Well, at least Canada is even more stupid:
That’s my positive message of the day, my friends. It’s downhill from here.
A Harsh Cope
The cope is so harsh, I actually feel bad for both these dudes:
The evidence that Trump knows what he’s doing and has been very proactive in this situation is overwhelming but yes, let’s totally hide from reality. It’s worked so well so far.
Influence
You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
Carl Jung.
The very special cookies who prattle incessantly about how they can never be influenced, persuaded or tricked are imaginatively excluding themselves from the normal fabric of human relationships. They are fragile. Everything around them crumbles on contact.
Sluggish Soldiers
Turns out, my colleague was right, there was a parade.
People routinely get upset when I say that the US army is pathetic but look at this. These soldiers are sluggish, slouched, low-energy. Many of them are overweight. They look like prisoners of war marching towards captivity.
If you watch this and feel that the soldiers project strength and confidence, then you probably need eyeglasses.
Emotional Pain
You cannot get rid of emotional pain if you understand it as originating outside or your self.
Q&A: The Forever People
I suggest going at it from a different direction. Decide which people will be in your life forever. And build relationships based on that. Is the husband in question a forever husband or a temporary companion? It’s your decision. The power lies with you. I promise that the moment you decide that you found your forever husband, you’ll have an entirely different relationship with him than with any temporary companion.
Once you got your forever husband (wife, relative, friend, etc), you will relate to them in a way that’s on a different planet from how you relate to the disposable and interchangeable people in your life.
The approach I propose is better because it’s not reactive. You don’t sit there, waiting for something to happen that will prompt you to end the relationship. There’s nothing that can end the relationship like there’s nothing that dan end your relationship with your forever head or your forever left shoulder. The forever head can have a massive headache and the forever shoulder can get annoyingly arthritic. But they are there for good. You can similarly have people in your life who are there for good. These will be very, very few. Isn’t it great, though, to have people like that?
As an exercise, I suggest sitting down right now and making a list of your forever people, the people who will witness your life from today and until one of you dies. The feeling of freedom and peace once you know for sure who’s there till the final point is like nothing else.
None of this, of course, works in the one exceptional case of parents. You will be in a relationship with your parents—whether they are living or dead—irrespective of whether you want it or not. You can decide never to see your mom again, yet you’ll continue suffering from the anxiety she seeded in you when you were an infant. So that’s one thing that was decided for us. All the rest of the forever people are up to us.
How Soviet Communism Died
There was no serious interest in communism in the USSR after 1943-4. In those years, all of the sincerity people had put into the communist cause evaporated. Cynicism set in. It never went away after that.
So how did the Soviet people become disillusioned with communism?
The war was brutal. Horrific losses. Stalin’s army had prepared for an offensive, and defensive warfare was something it couldn’t do on any level. The civilian population sustained terrible damage. Hunger, terror, bombings.
And at that exact time, a very visible and in-your-face class divide appeared. People would evacuate their young, send them to school in the safe depths of Siberia. And in the same school or the hallways of the same university, some kids would faint with hunger while others would throw uneaten salami sandwiches into the trash because they were too sated. If you want a literary depiction of this sudden class divide, I recommend Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle or his Cancer Ward.
In the 1920s, a party apparatchik would show off his worn coat and his shoes with holes in them. After 1943, he’d show off his expensive suits and his wife’s furs.
I keep saying 1943 because that when it became clear the war was won.
The war made it OK openly to want to be rich. It made it OK to despise people who didn’t have chic new things. It made the pursuit of material goods an obsessive and all-consuming game for the Soviet people.
By the time my generation came around, nothing but the most hardcore cynicism was possible for people who were neither very elderly nor mentally impaired. I can’t imagine anybody seriously bringing up Communist ideas after 1950 in my grandparents’ or my parents’ generation.
I still don’t use the words “sincere” and “earnest” as compliments. This is how many generations it took for people to recover from the early Soviet fervor.
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