Russia is already planning the second Russian-Ukrainian war. It’s scheduled for around 2027. The plan is to learn from the mistakes that caused Russia to lose the current war, regroup, and try again.

When will they stop trying?

Never.

If Putin dies and there’s a regime change to some pro-democracy leadership, the next war might be postponed to 2037. But it will still happen.

We need to be realistic about the future.

Ah, these people are clueless. The quoted script wasn’t written or disseminated by Trump. Trump is accidental to it, and can be easily swapped out at any time.

It’s shocking how incurious many people are. You see these narratives people of different social classes and geographic areas are repeating verbatim. Don’t you wonder where they came from? Who wrote the script? What institution that person represents?

Nah, who cares about all that when you can bray “Truuuuuuump!” like an aroused donkey.

When the Soviet bloc collapsed, men massively became depressed, planted themselves on their couches, and pouted about the injustice done to them. Women, on the other hand, got over it fast, picked up extra jobs, put food on the table, and ploughed on.

My family was exceptional in that my father started a business three seconds after it became allowed and my mother quit her job. Every friend I had in high school would ask, “wait, you said your Dad works? And your Mom doesn’t? How weird.”

I’m talking about normal people, not bandits, of course. Those had very traditional gender roles always.

The families that emigrated went through the same process. An unemployed, resentful Dad on the couch in an eternal tracksuit that was never used for working out and a Mom working three jobs. Many are still at it 30 years later, even when they are retired.

I have no explanation for this. This was a generation of men who never experienced any purges, genocide, wars, or any repression different from that of the women. So you can’t say that they were traumatized by that and gave up when the upheaval of capitalism came.

I thought it was a post-Soviet phenomenon but I’m seeing the same dynamic described in Lea Ypi’s memoir about life in post-1991 Albania. Her parents both suffered during socialism because of having a bad family history. But once capitalism came, Lea’s Dad became an unemployed pouter in a tracksuit moaning about his nostalgia for socialism and her Mom became a pro-capitalist politician.

The next level is when people figure out that their problems come from the inside.

Instead of “I don’t want to go back to work because I’m scared of COVID”, they have the intellectual sophistication to say, “Hah, it looks like I’m sick of my job and need a break from going in every day.”

Or instead of saying, “I don’t want to have children because of global warming” they say “I don’t want to have children because I had early bonding problems / I’m immature / I lack energy, etc.”

At this level, people start beating themselves up for the problem they identified within themselves. “I’m lazy, I’m no good, etc.”

At the next level, they start keeping the problem in check by self-control, discipline, stoicism, etc. It’s a more advanced level of development but the problem is that this self-control slips during moments of hardship. For instance, a person quits drinking and stays sober. Then, a bad moment comes. A tragedy, a personal loss. So he says, “I’ll just have one shot of tequila to relax ” and then he sucks down a whole bottle and passes out. The next day, he has to start erecting the whole edifice of self-control all over again.

At the level after this one, the person discovers a powerful source of energy precisely in those difficult moments. He plugs into them like a charger into an electrical outlet.

And then on the level beyond that, he learns how to stay connected to the charger permanently. He lights up from the inside and glows even when he sleeps. And the people around him get some of that energy for themselves.

There are more levels but very few people reach that far, so it’s unnecessary to discuss them.

Contrary to the opinion widely held by professors of film studies, moviegoers aren’t sexist and seem to detest the idea of looking at young, pretty women (or men):

I wouldn’t go to see any of these people because they are all shit actors. OK, except Morgan Freeman. But the rest, I have no idea why anybody wants to stare at their frozen, Botoxed faces.

There are several levels of human development. On the first and most primitive level, people are besieged with anxiety. The world is complicated and scary. They don’t know what to make of it and lack intellectual capacity to come up with an explanation. All they can do is feel anxious and periodically lash out in anger. They move from anxiety to rage to despair and then do the same all over again.

On the second level, we have people who intuit that this is no way to live. They find an idea, a system of belief that exists in the world and get completely invested into it. This idea becomes their bulwark against anxiety. An example is those health-obsessed folks who are constantly at the gym, posting endless videos of their workouts, their bicep measurements, and the recipes for their protein smoothies. They are happier than the first-level folks because they don’t feel as much anxiety and rage (unless somebody criticizes their hobby horse). Of course, they pay a price for the relief they achieve. Their whole life becomes dedicated to this single obsession. Like those Bitcoin fanatics who bark “buy Bitcoin!” whenever anything anxiety-producing is discussed. Still, it’s better to be into workouts or Bitcoin than simply sit there, feeling scared and angry all the time.

On the third level, we have people who have some capacity for abstract thought, which is even rarer. They try to come up with an explanation for why they feel scared. It’s going to be a more complicated system of belief that is based on the idea that something is wrong with how the world works. If that defect were removed, so would their anxiety. These are the people who attribute their anxiety to climate change, structural racism, the gender binary, etc. The problems they choose as an explanation for the terror they feel are unsolvable on purpose. If these problems were solved, the people in question would find that the anxiety is still there. And then what would they do?

The good news is that there are more levels and I’ll describe them soon.

My 7-year-old chose this book at the Scholastic book fair held at her private Christian school:

What do you think the book is about? A girl and her pet kitty?

Nah, that would not be sufficiently ideological. The book is about a “non-binary” child who is trying to come out about her “pronouns” to her mom who is distracted by her new lesbian girlfriend.

I mean, you could argue that the cover does send a message about pussies.

Back in the USSR, we had this joke about a man turning on the TV and seeing Brezhnev. So he switches over to another channel and again sees Brezhnev. He switches over to the third and last channel (there were only three channels at best), and he again sees Brezhnev, who tells him menacingly, “Stop switching over, or else!” This is exactly like that. You can never relax and enjoy a cute story about pet kitties. Not even when you are 7 do you get a break from being indoctrinated, hectored and brainwashed every second of every day.

I swear to God, there was never an ounce of negative feeling in me towards the word “lesbian.” But right now there is because anything that is rammed down your throat with a hammer is bound to become unpleasant to you.

Inspiration and motivation are neurotic states sought by masochists to force themselves into unwanted activities.

More from Lea Ypi:

I received presents from my parents and we went to eat ice cream by the beach and to visit the funfair. On that occasion, they also gave me a yearly subscription to several children’s magazines. It was through these magazines that I learned about the fate of other children around the world. The magazine Little Stars was for children from six to eight years old, and on Children’s Day it ran a cartoon called “Our 1 June and Theirs.” On one side there was a fat capitalist wearing a fat top hat buying ice cream for his fat son, and on the floor next to the shop’s entrance two ragged children and a caption: “1 June never comes for us.” On the other side, there were Socialist flags, happy children carrying flowers and presents, holding their parents’ hands, waiting to buy ice cream in front of a shop. “We love 1 June,” their caption read.

Lea Ypi, Free

I was also subscribed to a bunch of magazines as a kid. People were forced to get magazine subscriptions at work. There were literary ones, women’s magazines, and children’s magazines. I loved them all. Yes, they were ideological and preachy, but have you seen Teen Vogue?

In her memoir about life in Albania on the eve of the collapse of the USSR, Lea Ypi gives this description of a family suddenly discovering the concept of commercials:

Whenever my father caught an advert on TV Skopje, especially if it was an advert for personal hygiene, he would immediately shout, “Reklama! Reklama!” My mother and grandmother would drop whatever they were doing in the kitchen and sprint to the living room to catch the last sight of a beautiful woman with a delightful smile on her face who showed you how to wash your hands. If they were held up for a while and arrived when the adverts were over, my father would declare apologetically, “It’s not my fault—I called you, you came late!” and this usually marked the beginning of an argument about how they were late because he never helped with anything around the house.

Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

This sounded very familiar. I remember the time when we first started seeing commercials on TV at the end of the Soviet regime. We loved them more than the regular TV offerings. Often we watched a program solely for the commercials. We didn’t really understand their purpose (and frequently the companies paying for them didn’t either) but they were mesmerizing. The life depicted in them was incomprehensible but very attractive.