We had some unusually cold days this January. A local church decided to open up a space in the basement to make a warming station for the homeless. There are no homeless in our town but the neighboring town does have several, so church members would drive them over to the church, feed them, and give them a warm place to sleep. Every church has a specific branch of charity that it favors, and this one concentrates on the homeless. It’s been doing this for years, if not decades, and nobody ever had a problem.

However, our very red town now has a woke mayor and a woke group of new aldermen. They completely spoiled our traditional summer park festival by filling it with booths of such inappropriateness that I had to shepherd Klara out before she saw things I wouldn’t be able to explain. The festival is now called “Unity Fest” but it’s more about advertising every variety of sexual deviancy than promoting unity. The church I’m telling you about sent some people with goats and Jesus flyers to the newly woke festival, and I guess this upset the organizers.

As a result, this year the municipal authorities forbade the church from offering a warming station. They came up with a series of bureaucratic objections. “You didn’t file for permit. Yes, you did but you filed too late. You didn’t file too late but it’s the wrong form. It’s not the wrong form but the signature is in the wrong place. It’s not in the wrong place but…” And so on.

In the meantime, it’s getting extremely cold, and nobody is doing anything. The church, of course, said screw it (or whatever the religious euphemism is), and opened the warming station. The city authorities fined them heavily for every day they were helping the homeless.

We are a small town, and all of this is widely known and passionately discussed. Everybody except a couple of known curmudgeons is siding with the church. But what gets to me is the extreme pettiness of the woke leadership. They don’t like the church and decided to let a dozen homeless freeze just to annoy the pastor and the parishioners.

People will want to know how we ended up with this woke mayor. We had a really wonderful right-wing mayor who saved us from COVID lockdowns and did a lot to make us the best town in the region. But he retired and the only people who ran for mayor were a fun guitar-playing dude who masked his wokeness behind a clown persona and a trad right-winger lady who thought we should go back to being a hamlet where she grew up 50 years ago and where you had to drive 40 miles to buy groceries. There is a constituency of people in town who do have that sort of nostalgia but they are a tiny minority. Everybody else loves stores and restaurants and understands that the people who moved into town since year 1970 aren’t about to move out, so fantasizing about empty fields springing up where there’s now housing.

This is such a typical right-wing fail. Antagonizing the masses and losing elections to a fun wokester who skillfully concealed his extremism.

Since I’m on the subject, the entire portrayal of gay men in American entertainment is screwy. Gay men don’t get together to be “like” heteros. They get together specifically to be not hetero. That’s kind of the whole purpose. But the only type of gay couple you see portrayed any more is a dude who acts like a very stereotypical wife and another dude who is a very stereotypical hetero husband. They usually have a gigantic number of kids and it’s constantly underscored that they are so busy with the kids that they never have sex anymore.

I look at this, and I wonder, have the scriptwriters ever met any gay men? It’s the entertainment industry, so it shouldn’t be that hard.

The diversity we are being constantly lectured about isn’t really all that diverse at all. It always tends towards the hoariest, most boring stereotypes. Even hetero couples don’t live according to these stereotypes.

This is a charming children’s movie, my friends, that scrubbed out every trace of Roald Dahl and put the American sensibility of 2023 in his place. Some parts of that sensibility are good. For example, the frontier mentality of a persevering individual is at the core of the movie. It’s like a Wild West flick but cute and for kids.

On the negative side, there are the now obligatory racial hangups as the movie populates the Europe of 120 years ago with crowds of African-Americans. No explanation is offered for how they got there in such numbers. As with the Claudine Gay story, the blacks chosen for the parts in the movie are extraordinarily talentless. The lead part is played by an unattractive, overweight girl with a speech impediment and the affect of a dead fish who should have never gone into acting. (No, I’m not being mean to a child. I’m expressing my opinion about a product I paid for). I’m sure a crowd of mega-talented black tweens was available but DEI doesn’t like brilliant non-white people. They spoil the savior fun.

Timothée Chalamet is delightful, as always. He’s the perfect example of why it’s dumb to equate very feminine masculinity with gayness. Not the bougiest of gays can affect Chalamet’s easy and natural femininity. And it’s only because he’s so girly that his on-screen friendship with a child doesn’t seem creepy. Just a touch of masculinity would have made the movie weird and uncomfortable.

We have such a terror of discussing things relating to “diversity” that many people believe that gay men are wannabe women. This is utterly stupid, as gay men don’t want to be women at all and are not particularly feminine. Some affect femininity but it’s a parody, and not usually a very kind one. The proportion of feminine men among gays is the same as among straights because you’ve got to have the physique for it.

Going back to Chalamet, the phenomenon of women being attracted to very feminine men has always existed and is historically well-documented. I’ve seen no equivalent of men being attracted to masculine women. Maybe Xena, the Warrior Princess had some male fans but this was not a character aimed at a female audience. I find the outrage of men against the fact that Chalamet is a sex symbol to be very funny. They’ve been reacting this way back in the 1550s, as well, and it just goes to show that for all our sexual liberation we have not advanced much in our understanding of sexuality. We swapped one bunch of prejudices for another and arrived in the same place.

I didn’t go to the movie for myself, obviously, but if I have to sit through a children’s film, I want to get something out of it. So I got these musings about sexuality.

My sister says, “You and I always thought that we were much more North American than Ukrainian. We’d severed ties with Ukraine completely. But today we both feel that we are only truly ourselves when we talk with Ukrainians in Ukraine.”

It’s true. Ukraine changed enormously since 1998. But so did America. We left to be free. To speak and think freely and without constraints. And we were free. It was really great for a while. The fresh air of American freedom was incredible.

But then it started to change.

My nephew is 8, and he’s growing up to be such a typical North American guy, it’s funny.

He told his mother that there’s a girl he likes.

“What is it about her that you like?” she asked.

And he gave this very American reply that sounds deeply strange to those of us who are not from here: “She laughs at my jokes.”

The typical American girl reply of “I like him because he makes me laugh” is just as weird to us.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of this, of course. It’s just such a cultural difference because we’d never say something like this.

I’m doing a blind review of an academic article, and it’s very good. But the author accuses me of being “heavily influenced by Judith Butler”. I find that very hurtful. He also calls me a “classical Marxist.”

I’m either a Trumpist TERF, as some reviewers have suggested, or a Butlerian Marxist. Take your pick, people, and stick with it!

We are asked to nominate for a teaching award “faculty members who identify as wom*n”. I have no idea why anybody would want to identify as a weird word without meaning but I don’t identify as anything, so what do I know.

I hope nobody nominates me because I don’t want to be grouped with the people who “identify as”.

The first election stickers started to appear on cars in the campus parking lot.

In 2016, the first stickers to pop up were for Bernie Sanders.

In 2020, they were Warren stickers.

This time, Nikki Haley. This is a college campus we are talking about. Republican stickers are usually as rare as an intelligent DEI worker.

This Netflix documentary tells of an Israeli conman who swindled several EU women out of large amounts of money. He’d meet them on Tinder, pretend to be a billionaire, promise marriage and babies, and then experience “temporary financial problems” that would necessitate the girlfriends’ assistance.

When the women figured out what was happening and went to the police, it became clear that nobody would ever prosecute the fraud. The crook was hopping all over the EU. Which jurisdiction should prosecute him? No borders means no policing for criminals who move fast enough. As a result, the Tinder Swindler is living it up in Israel and continuing his cons.

What really got to me, though, is the story of one of his victims, a Norwegian woman called Cecilie. She’s been on… guess how many Tinder dates.

Over 1,200.

Then, she met the Tinder Swindler. And now she’s back on Tinder.

The crook weaseled $250,000 out of her. She’ll be indigent her whole life. And she still says, “But why not? It’s not Tinder that caused the problem!”

1,200 men. There’s no likelihood that they were all bad. You hear about consumer mentality in dating but then you see a case like this, and it’s downright scary.

An excellent documentary that is disturbing and funny at the same time.

My friends. I’ve got to ask. Are we some kind of idjits?