I had an online meeting today with somebody from the US Department of State, and they are definitely still working from home, is all I can say.

This is from Matt Walsh’s thread, so I didn’t find it myself.

She doesn’t sound completely uneducated or dumb. Uses the Oxford comma, and all. Has money for a neuropsychologist. So not a confused illiterate lady who simply doesn’t know the answer.

What is it, then? Is she really this clueless? Or did Matt Walsh manufacture this comment for rhetorical purposes, which is what I prefer to believe and wouldn’t even blame him.

Honestly, at 33 it’s weirder to be really into going out for drinks with buddies than into productivity. Usually, people get their drinking and partying done in the previous decade of their lives, and then it gets boring and one can move on.

I say all this as somebody who did quite a lot of nighttime drinking with buddies in my time but you don’t spend your whole life doing it. You experience it and then move on and develop other interests.

When I was 20, it once took me 2,5 days to get dressed and go out to buy something to eat. I was paralyzed with anxiety, buttoning my blouse for hours, eyeing the distance from my foot to a shoe but unable to bridge it. Today I know this is called anxiety and what causes it but back then all I knew is that I wanted not to be that way.

Stuck at home and unable to leave, I’d turn on the TV, and there I saw people who had what I so wanted. These were characters in Latin American soaps, and they clearly relished human contact. They chattered up a storm, emoting like little factories that manufactured feelings, and displayed these wares openly. I realized that I needed to find these people and learn how they did it. Of course, to figure out such a complicated phenomenon you needed to study it scientifically. This is how the idea of getting a PhD in Hispanic Studies was born. It couldn’t have begun to occur to me that it would end up meaning I’d do literary criticism.

This was, of course, an utterly naive, childish plan. But it worked. In my studies, I discovered that one can’t redo one’s nervous system to become emotionally less heavy than one’s Slavic physiology allows. But you can imitate the behaviors that a more easily triggered nervous system produces. And the results of the imitation are almost as good as the real thing. Today, nobody who didn’t meet me back then believes my stories of clinical shyness. This was a crushing issue and I solved it. Not through medication or even therapy but by way of an inventive plan that enriched me intellectually and ultimately gave me a good income.

It’s also a very weird story that I rarely share because every aspect of it sounds very nuts.

I told about French here but as for Ukrainian, no, we didn’t speak it at home. I can’t even imagine doing something like that. You had to be a major dissident and a very brave person to maintain that level of subversive behavior.

I learned Ukrainian in second grade when I came home from school and started airing the opinions I had picked up there about Ukrainian being a language of peasants and completely unnecessary for cultured people. Nobody despised peasants and proletarians as the Soviet people, and this was the worst kind of insult. My father didn’t appreciate my embrace of Soviet propaganda and made me learn Ukrainian in a day by reading a thick book in the language and then writing a précis of it.

That was passive knowledge, of course. I didn’t have anybody to speak with. The first time a had a chance actually to speak Ukrainian for a sustained period of time and not just an odd phrase here and there was in 2023.

As a college student back in Ukraine, I majored in English and German. I was doing pretty well in German but the whole Germanic thing wasn’t doing anything for me on a personal level. I didn’t feel like the German-speaking version of me was that different from the regular version. I was painfully, tragically shy. Often, I was unable to leave the house because of the anxiety that people would look at me and judge me. I wanted to change that because it’s no life to live at 20 to be cooped up inside like mental invalid. German wasn’t helping with any of it. But I knew what would.

I needed to learn Spanish.

You won’t have a coherent message if you are constantly terrified of offending some invented micro-identity. Of course, the goal was to beat people into submission by threats of cancellation and insults. There was never any plan to persuade or convince. Now that it’s suddenly necessary to have a message instead of screaming at everybody to shut up, it turns out that Democrats have none and don’t know how to create it.

Is it part of the Irish accent to pronounce “t” as “ch”? It makes “wet” sound as “wech”, “that” as “thach” and “later” as “lacher.” Sounds like Chilean accent in English. And I hate Chilean accent.

I’m listening to a book about Irish characters, and this horrible lisping pronunciation is very distracting. “Thach wech cach in a hach.” Brrr. 

I’ll try to reconcile myself to it if people say this is reflective of the linguistic reality of the region and not an affectation of the actress.

People who are referring to Kanye West’s naked wife at the Grammys as a victim of abuse should remember that being unwilling to leave a mega rich man isn’t abuse. It’s greed.

It’s very tiresome that everything we don’t like is immediately tagged as abuse or “mental illness.” As a result, both expressions have come to be completely meaningless.

And we haven’t even had time to experience those highly anticipated expensive avocados:

I have read so many dire predictions about the imminent immiseration of everybody in America, and it’s extraordinary how people managed to squeeze all that hand wringing between the policy and the result.

We are now past the stage of “it’s a lie that USAID is used to promote far-left ideology overseas” to “yes, it’s true, but this is a small percentage of the US budget.”

As if doing this cheaply made it OK. USAID used people’s poverty and desperation to make them say, teach, publish and do things they didn’t believe. This is the equivalent of me telling a person living in a Guatemalan slum, “OK, I’ll feed you but you have to drop on your knees and proclaim that I’m your lord and master.” The fact that I can do this for the low price of 15 bucks does not make my actions moral and acceptable.

I vividly remember how this was done to us in the newly independent Ukraine back in 1991. People were lost and confused because everything had changed so fast on them. And these absolute bastards used us to throw us coins and have us dance in feather skirts for them. Obviously, I mean this metaphorically. No actual feather skirts were involved.

The absolute hubris of thinking that you are entitled to impose your ideology on people overseas because having money makes you superior. And the funniest thing is that it’s precisely the people who prattle endlessly how they are against imperialism who do this.