I just honestly. These people and their word games. How does it help Navalny to rename something after him? Give Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine and name it whatever you wish. That would be real help. Forgetting Magnitsky in favor of a more recent victim changes nothing.

Why, why do I have to engage with this absolute child, Philippe Lemoine? But OK, I will if people want me to.

Lemoine’s claim #1.

Russia would never attack a NATO country because Russians don’t feel as strongly about, say, the Baltics as they do about Ukraine.

First of all, yes, they feel very strongly about the Baltics. There’s been a single-minded obsession in Russia with how the Baltics are persecuting “ethnic Russians” and oppressing the Russian language. Lemoine doesn’t know this because he’s not part of the cultural space.

But that’s not even the important part. All of the high-minded disquisitions about how it would be irrational for Russia to do this or that are disregarding how much this is not about what’s rational. It’s about love. An irrational, single-minded, painful love.

Russians are in love with America. They were going nuts during Tucker Carlson’s visit. “He went to a store and bought something! He’s walking around in the streets! A real American person! Walking amongst us!” My priest has this level of enthusiasm when he talks about Jesus.

It was the same thing when that Scott Adams fellow visited. Nobody in Russia (or anywhere else) knows who he is but that’s not the point. He’s an American! That’s all that matters. The object of painful, unrequited love finally noticed them.

And what did Putin do during the interview with Tucker? He negged the poor guy. That’s a favorite love trick of the manosphere.

Lemoine goes on and on about how important Ukraine is for Russians and how unimportant the Baltics are. But it’s all a nothing burger because the real love object here is America. All of the Russian invasions are a love letter to America. What is the first thing you do when you fall in love? You start saying, look at me, we have so much in common, I’m the only one who understands you. This is precisely the Russian message. “You invade, and so do I. You are a big, strong country that walks over everybody else, and so am I. We are meant for each other. Why aren’t you seeing this? Why don’t you understand?”

This love is doomed to be frustrated because what does a person in love want from his love object? To have and to hold, at his healthiest. To possess, subsume and own, at his most messed up.

Why is Lemoine not getting any of this and is trying to analyze the situation in terms of “if everybody were exactly like me, then they’d act exactly like I would”? He wasn’t with us when we lived behind the Iron Curtain and invented our own vision of America. He wasn’t with us when the Iron Curtain fell and we discovered a very different America, having to make our peace with that discovery. I often see my 8-year-old trying to reason her way out of concepts she is too young to understand. “The book says rich people live in mansions. We don’t live in a mansion. We must be poor.” It’s cute in an actual child but distressing in adult men like Lemoine.

In order to make pronouncements on what people in another culture would or wouldn’t do, you need to study that culture, immerse yourself in it, and let yourself become aware of the enormous distance between yourself and that culture. We briefly mentioned philosopher John Gray on this blog today. He explained how the Enlightenment-era belief in the hyper-rational core of every human being that supposedly makes us all want the same thing and try to achieve it in identical ways led to many of today’s problems. The French were the leaders of Enlightenment, and no amount of Bataclan fiascos is teaching them anything new.

If Ukraine never existed at all, Russia would be invading somebody. Tantruming, making itself noticed. Ukraine doesn’t solve its problem of wanting to be desired as passionately by America as Russia desires it. That’s a huge problem, and no amount of rationalizing will make it go away.

Hey, you asked for a long posts. Don’t complain now.

Here’s a question I received in the comments:

If Biden will massively increase US aid to Ukraine, couldn’t Russia massively increase its own spending on the war as well, possibly even up to the point of it spending 25+% of its total GDP on this war? That’s what Russia previously did during WWI before it descended into revolution.

There’s another question as to whether I think Russia might deliver a nuclear strike against Ukraine.

These are good questions, and I want to answer them seriously, as they deserve, because I don’t think people are thinking this through.

Yes, both these things are possible but please look at this from the other side. Imagine you are a 30-million nation that’s about to be genocided. Imagine that your infants are about to be gang-raped in front of you. This already happened in the occupied territories, so we know it’s coming. Imagine your entire cultural legacy, your cities, your people are about to be destroyed. And you are a high-IQ people with extraordinary courage and decisiveness.

What would you do?

Would you let yourself be genocided quietly? Or would you take the enemy and the indifferent bystanders who let you get slaughtered with you?

You think only Russia has nuclear? Are you aware that there are many nuclear power plants in Ukraine and Russia? What do you think will happen if they blow up? If you don’t mind a world without Ukraine, don’t you think Ukrainians, placed at the brink of extinction, would be fine with a world without Europe?

Let me tell you, this decision has already been made. Not by any government but by the people who refuse to go quietly into the sunset.

Why do you think Denmark is sending its entire artillery to Ukraine? Because they want to survive. It makes sense to be scared of nuclear. But all of it, not just a small part you’ve selectively chosen to fear.

I was asked to respond to a post by a pro-Russian fellow in France. I might do that later today but for now I want people to sit for a little bit with this thought. If Ukraine loses this war, Monsieur Lemoine is gone, too. Dude is not seriously considering how much he wants to survive and what needs to be done to guarantee that survival. He’s a spoiled Western brat with a completely neoliberalized brain. I’ve known him for a while, and there was never a chance he’d abandon fantasy and join us in reality. His entire way of thinking is based on the idea that people are interchangeable widgets. It’s all “I don’t believe this is rational, so everybody else must think the exact same way.” France, you know? You’d think they should know better by this time but nothing is managing to teach them that cultural differences exist.

Maksym Kryvtsov is a Ukrainian poet killed by the Russians in January. I am helping a Ukrainian publisher (not mine but also a very good one) to put out a translation of his poetry into English. Here is my favorite poem:

He’s in the Armed Forces

she’s in Territorial Defense

they were kissing in the subway

it’s been only a month since

crossing

squares and river Dnipro

Kyiv’s quiet and peaceful core.

She puts on

her army boots and the uniform

the vest is concealing

her slight form

heavy weaponry

tactical meaning

she’s waiting for a quiet evening.

He puts on

his army boots and armament

the sky’s so clear

it’s transparent

the wind is crazy

and the raven knows,

enemy’s hiding

somewhere close.

Guys in the village

holding the line

while he reloads

his gun,

leaving the field of losses

and heading to the cross hill

where for our boys is waiting

Peter the Apostle.

She’s in Territorial Defense he’s in the Armed Forces.

Under the break (or on page 2 in some browsers), I placed the original translation. It doesn’t preserve the rhyme, and I hate to lose the rhyme because it changes the poem completely.

Many regions have contributed to the creation of the most disgusting food ever, and mine leads the pack. St Louis area is famous for the infernal concoction called “toasted ravioli”:

This deep-fried atrocity acquires the consistency and the taste of red brick. Why it is necessary to make a pasta dish hard and dry is a mystery. Another mystery is how I managed to avoid chipping a tooth on these gravel-like ravioli.

There are whole eateries around here where people get together and consume this kind of rock-solid, desert-dry fare. I believe they do it to avoid having to speak to each other.

What are your region’s most disgusting culinary exertions?

Pictures are welcome.

Here is a good deep focus activity. In the morning, pour yourself whatever makes you happy at that time of day and step outside (or open the window and look outside). Start imagining the enjoyable points of the coming day. It can be a morning hug from your child, a candy you are going to eat at lunch, a walk you will take in the evening. Imagine these moments in great detail. Try to experience what you will feel, taste, smell.

If you manage to do it and go deep into the images, you have experienced the deep focus. Now the task is to repeat the activity often enough to make deep focus a habit.

A younger person told me today that she admires me. That was the first time ever that I felt old.

At least, nobody has told me yet that I don’t look my age. That would be a real old person thing to happen.

People were so shocked by the Making a Murderer hoax that there’s now a whole little sub-genre of novels about manipulative makers of true-crime TV series. Daniel Sweren-Becker’s Kill Show is one of such novels. It doesn’t mention Making a Murderer but it appeals to the outrage we all feel against the makers of that famous early BLM-fest.

The problem with the novel is that the hoax it comes up with is significantly less egregious than the one in Making. It is tame and boring in comparison.

Also, the author likes to preach. Dude, we got it, manipulative TV producers are scum. You don’t need to go on for 30 pages, lecturing us about it. I truly wish more authors had some restraint and let the readers figure out what they think by themselves. Emma Cline’s The Guest is perfect in that sense. Cline avoids the temptation to lecture the readers with beautiful ease.

Verdict: moderately entertaining but too preachy and simplistic. Read Cline instead.

You are very welcome, dear friend!

As for scholarly writing, I could wax poetic for days but I’ll try to be brief.

The two main kinds are an article and a book. Everything else is a derivative of the two.

To write a scholarly article, you need an idea and a calculator. The idea should never be “I want to write about …” because that’s not an idea but a topic. An idea is, for example, “In her novel Frankenstein’s Mother, Almudena Grandes projects her neoliberal subjectivity of a twenty-first-century leftist back onto the dictatorship of Franco.” I first came up with this idea right here on the blog but then the article suffered significant travails because the edited volume it was destined for became a victim of a romantic split between its editors. In any case, the article is coming out in print in a couple of months.

After you get your idea fleshed out, get out the calculator. Think about how many words you can realistically write in a day and subdivide the intended length by this number. Then look at your calendar and mark the date when you will be done. I do not recommend sitting down to write anything unless you have a clear date of completion. The worst thing is to turn into one of those people who spend years “working” on the same article that no longer motivates or remotely interests them. They have the eyes of exhausted old horses that should have been put out to pasture years ago.

We are in literature, folks. Nobody is solving Fermat’s theorem or curing cancer. Whatever it is can’t possibly take several years. If it does, you are probably writing the wrong article in a wrong way.

Another piece of advice: in the name of everything holy, please don’t tell yourself, “today I’ll be working on my article / book.” That’s a road to bad, bad places. Say, instead, “today I will write 3 sentences about the extent to which Grandes was influenced by Ramiro Pinilla.” After you finish your 3 sentences, decide what tomorrow’s 3 sentences will be about. “Tomorrow I will write 3 sentences on how Grandes is much more influenced by Pérez Galdós than Pinilla.”

The brain resists the grandiose. It likes tiny, bite-sized projects. I can’t tell you how easy it is to write when you start every day knowing exactly what today’s 3 sentences should look like.

As for a book, it’s one of those things where the changes accumulate incrementally but are realized in a burst. I came up with the idea and a detailed plan of Neoliberal Love in a single afternoon. But I had been thinking about neoliberal subjectivities for at least a decade. I have all my secondary sources annotated and pretty much learned by heart at this point.

The Ukrainian book was written in a 5-month ecstasy of writing but it contains things I’ve been reading and thinking about since 2006. So my advice: read, think, discuss, and one day it will burst out of you like a geyser.

An article is planned, scheduled and executed. A book erupts like a flamethrower. But there won’t be a book without many carefully planned and severely executed articles.

I’m not sure if I’m answering what you wanted to know but feel free to specify if you were looking for something else.

We had a lot of snow today, and as a result, the Darwin Day was cancelled.