The reason why the presidential election looks geriatric and disappointing is that we are trying to convince ourselves to let go of the nation-state. We are all collectively putting on this embarrassing spectacle to make the loss not only palatable but desired.

This is why there are no younger, fresher candidates. This is why voting feels useless. Together, as a group of 320 million, we want national politics to be farcical. We really, really want it because we need an excuse to throw away the nation-state. The very first, the most successful, the most impressive nation-state in history has chosen to be the first in pulling itself apart.

Never forget they told us he got 81 million votes. Most popular candidate in HISTORY, by a large margin.

2020 was a STOLEN, FRAUDULENT election.

And everyone knows it.

— Thomas Jefferson (@BasedDetails) June 28, 2024

Both comments are phenomenally dumb but the “81 million votes” is the absolute winner. I’ve heard actual, real people (with fancy PhDs, may I add) repeat it with happy, zombified faces for years.

Obviously, Biden’s high vote count is owed, in large part, to how many people detested Trump and voted not so much for Biden as against Trump. Many of these 81 million are not passionate Bidenites but passionate anti-Trumpists. Is it a huge surprise that passionate anti-Trumpists exist? Have we not gotten enough opportunities to hear from them that we need to be so virginally surprised at their capacity to win elections?

The exact same people who can’t go a day without mentioning Trump Derangement Syndrome can’t fathom the possibility that this condition drove voter enthusiasm for an otherwise uninteresting Biden.

This is a huge pet peeve because I have two very dear friends who keep advancing this poster’s exact talking point and I just can’t already.

A gentle reminder to Democrats: you believe that women have penises, so there’s no intellectual advantage you can claim here. Humility is always in order until you can say publicly “women never have penises and men cannot give birth.” Whatever lunacy the Trump crowd advances, it has not remotely reached yours.

I didn’t watch the debate live because of the time difference. How did it go? I don’t know when I’ll have time to watch but what are everybody’s initial impressions?

I’m kind of depressed after spending time at this conference and talking to colleagues from many different colleges in the US and Canada. Everybody has horror stories about language programs being shut down, tenure lines eliminated, colleagues pushed into early retirement or outright fired. People have to teach courses they aren’t remotely qualified to teach (like me and my Molière course that starts on Monday).

The colleagues are all wonderful people, and they are trying to put a brave face on it but it’s all so sad. We all came to thriving programs and are witnessing their agony and demise. We had a great thing going with truly the best higher education system on the planet, and we’ve pissed it all away. Yippee for bloody us.

This is the Plaza Mayor of San Sebastián:

If you look closely, you’ll see that there are numbers over each balcony door:

Here they are:

These are not apartment numbers. But what are they? How were these numbers used historically?

At the conference banquet, I was out of luck. The entree featured delicate white fish with a large pickled tomato as garnish. I’m a lifelong fan of pickled tomatoes but they should not share a plate with white fish. They are pungent, overpowering. The fish gets completely lost by their side. Plus, nobody can eat a pickled tomato correctly in polite company. People went at the tomatoes with fork and knife, which immediately got the juice to burst out and soak the fish.

People truly take culinary experimentation too far. If you have a good, fresh piece of fish, all you need to do is not mess with it too much, and everybody will be happy.

This lady just picked her husband up from the airport, kissed him and immediately went to the passenger seat lmao

— 808s & Backaches (@Craig__b) June 24, 2024

That’s exactly what I do. I don’t get why it’s funny.

It’s interesting that one can behave in a way that’s completely normal to one yet to other people it looks weird. Speaking of which, Klara and I came up with the following joke after observing a small crowd of completely naked elderly people on the beach in San Sebastián:

“Hey, body parts! Whatcha doing?”

“Oh, just hanging out.”

Since there are, fortunately, no screens and, unfortunately, no siblings, how can a kid occupy herself in down times on vacation?

In the past 10 days, our kid made copious amounts of bead jewelry, paper dollies with large paper wardrobes, and sea shell decorations.

Today, she made this installation as a surprise for me while I was at the conference:

These are all bookmarks. Except for the toilet paper rolls which are there to give a 3D aspect to the installation.

Without screens, children’s creativity is free to flourish. I highly recommend.

Your progressive beliefs are a religion of sorts. Only your God isn’t in the heavens. You moved God into people. Everything that was clear, intelligent and necessary in religion, in your teaching is foggy, invented, and utterly useless.

– Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Balance (1912)

Vynnychenko was a best-selling Ukrainian writer and the Prime Minister of the Ukrainian Republic in 1918. Balance was one of his early novels where he tells about the lives of revolutionaries exiled in Paris. This isn’t one of his most accomplished novels but the portrayal of last century wokesters stuns with its continued relevance.

Vynnychenko was such a sincere socialist that, as he shared many years later, he believed that when socialism arrived, there would never be bad weather again. When the long-awaited and passionately desired socialism finally came and culminated in the only form of government it can possibly culminate in, which is Stalinism, Vynnychenko was compensated for his life-long fight for socialism with exile and a complete erasure of his name and work in Ukraine. Even now, much of his work has not been published.

He was a writer first, though, and in his literary work did not show progressives as any better than they were. Even in 1912, when he wrote Balance, Vynnychenko offered a devastating portrayal of his fellow socialists. Spoiled children of rich parents, they engage in acts of adolescent rebellion that include sexual perversions, satanism, and all sorts of addictions. They are physically and morally degenerate yet believe themselves to be carriers of superior morality. The depths of their condescension towards “workers” whom they strive to “liberate” are unfathomable.

In 1912, the phenomenon of spoiled brats clamoring for a revolution was new. Nobody could say for certain how the story would end. Today, however, we do know. Maybe it’s time we started learning from the mistakes of the past.

Food continues to be a problem. Klara won’t eat anything on offer, and nobody opens for dinner before 8 pm, which is terribly late for our provincial souls. We were rescued today by an Indian restaurant which opened as early as 7 pm and offered such good food that Klara agreed to eat some plain rice and 1,5 cubes of chicken. This is her 6-month ration of chicken, so I’m happy.

Whoever starts opening for dinner at 4 pm for the tourist crowd and offers American-style kid menu in this city will make buckets of money.

On a positive side, N bought his first Spanish book that he plans to read in the original. It’s by the only Spanish-language author known in the post-Soviet space in the 1990s.

In the photo, you can see a very fancy hotel (on the right) where I stayed once but never again. The personnel was so obsequious that they talked to guests as if we were on the verge of expiring of some horrific disease. I’m not used to be treated like a precious porcelain of the Ming dynasty, and it all felt deeply uncomfortable.