I’m reading the Mexican writer Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, who is a Mexican ultra-nationalist. Detests the US. Adores Mexico. Yet he dedicates several pages of his book The Tyranny of Ideas to describing how Mexicans are congenitally incapable to embark and disembark from a plane without trampling over the heads of everyone else.

Only in the US is it treated like a heresy to point out that patient, polite, orderly lines exist only in a small number of cultures. Everybody else stampedes over others like a herd of hungry buffalo.

It’s my 11th semester as department Chair. It is the eleventh time that one faculty member (who is 15 years younger than me and so not senile) asks me which grade to give if a student stopped attending in the middle of the semester and never showed up again.

Eleven semesters in a row I offer my unchanging reply. Which is identical to what the university website specifies.

Another person needs at least 3 reminders every semester to do the state-mandated training.

Another always forgets how to enter final grades.

There’s a total of one person who figures his own shit without acting like I’m his mommy.

There’s no limit on people’s desire to self-infantilize.

All it takes is one Candace Owens fan on the jury, and Tyler Robinson goes free.

Robinson knows it and looks cocky and smug in court.

Zelensky stood 500 meters away from the contact line today. Out in the open. That’s 1,600 feet away from the enemy troops in a place that Russians claim to have taken weeks ago.

President Trump is wasting everybody’s time with this useless blabber about the need for elections in Ukraine. Ukrainians are going to vote for Zelensky again because… read the post from the beginning. It’s a waste of time, it’s stupid. This will require amending the constitution to hold an election that brings us to the status quo.

Trump is either being misinformed or is trapped in fantasy. He’s mishandling this.

We are so fortunate that at least domestically nothing is mishandled, right? America First is getting very firsted.

This is how you really troll:

November 20
Russian top general to Putin: “Kupiansk has been taken under control”

December 2
Putin: “We invite foreign media to Kupiansk”

December 12
Zelenskyy: “Hello from Kupiansk” pic.twitter.com/WNlgIb2BSb

— Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) December 12, 2025

Everything else is child’s play.

Nick Fuentes says he's not pro-Ukrainian, but he is pro-European.

"I like the idea of the European Union as a distinct power in its own right standing alongside the United States." pic.twitter.com/QnlLAZmf1b

— Fuentes Updates (@FuentesUpdates) December 12, 2025

I have no idea how we ended up in a timeline where the only intelligent, non-cretinous understanding of Russia on the Right comes from Nick Fuentes. Everybody else is a bleating moron on this subject. But Fuentes actually gets it completely right. He says exactly what I’ve been saying forever. But ok, I have reasons to understand this stuff. He doesn’t, really. Which is why he should get credit for trying to figure it out and not repeat idiotic slogans that proliferate on the subject.

Everybody who keeps repeating that Russia defends traditional Christian values or defends the Western civilization is an idiot. I don’t say that because I’m mad at Russia. Which I am but that’s not why I say it. I say it because I’m right. I love the Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes but if you said that he defended traditional Christian values, I’d also say you are a moron.

We need to live in reality. That’s all we’ve got. At this point, I’m abjectly grateful to anybody who cares about reality. Which apparently nobody on the Right does on this subject except for Fuentes.

I got a great Christmas gift from my university today.

I’m saying it sarcastically, of course.

You know what happens if you mistreat workers, refuse to hire, scare away all knowledgeable employees, and make the remaining people who only stayed because nobody else wanted them do 4 times the work for the same pay?

Can you guess what the result will be?

Well, our administration can’t.

The HR people, of whom there are now very few because everybody who is competent left for better jobs, have been messing up my paycheck. They’ve been overpaying me. By small amounts that I didn’t notice because my paycheck is complicated and changes based on my teaching load every one of the 4 semesters I teach every year (Fall, Summer, Winter and Spring).

Then HR realized that they’ve been making a mistake and want the money back. The total has come up to $6,000. And they want it in one lump payment. Because that’s so fair.

Merry Christmas to me!

I pray to God they aren’t doing this to people who are paid a lot less and to whom this will be a devastating blow. To me it’s the money I’ve been counting on to take my husband on a trip to Europe for his fiftieth birthday.

But what is the likelihood that it’s just me? Of course, it’s many people. Again, who knows, it might all be a scam to plaster over our budget issues. How is one supposed to know? There’s nobody in the HR office who can explain what goes on a paycheck and why.

We are drowning in incompetence. It’s not just HR. It’s everything because work doesn’t get done if there are no people to do it. This simple principle of management is not taught at expensive management workshops that our administrators attend.

Tsar Alexander II specified in his manifesto that former serf owners were obligated to provide the voting units of the freed serfs with land that they could till. The state paid the owners for that land, creating a whole class of suddenly wealthy people who no longer depended for their livelihood on flogging serfs to make them work.

Alexander was an interesting fellow. He was trying to move the empire to a real nation-state. He instituted the draft, started dismantling censorship, and was slowly moving the country towards elements of self-governance and voting. What you know as the great Russian literature came out of Alexander’s reign. He reformed the judiciary to make it more civilized.

Do you know what happened to Alexander II and why his reforms remained incomplete and were later reversed?

He was assassinated by the wokesters of his era. A group of revolutionary terrorists murdered the Tsar because they didn’t want things to get better. If everything is good, how do you convince anybody to start a revolution?

The next Russian leader who also tried to introduce reforms and make Russia more civilized was the Prime Minister of Tsar Nikolai II, Pyotr Stolypin. One of his biggest reforms was to benefit the former serfs by ensuring that they had private ownership over their means of production.

“You want great upheavals, and we want a great Russia,” Stolypin told revolutionaries. They attempted to assassinate him 11 times and finally succeeded in 1911. There were no more attempts to introduced reforms, and in 1917 the Bolshevik revolution took place. The group that was one of the biggest losers in the revolution were the former serfs. They were starved, murdered, collectivized, and – funny how that works – deprived of freedom of movement and effectively enslaved all over again in the USSR.

About 40% of the entire population, or 23 million people, were serfs in the Russian Empire on the eve of the abolition that took place in 1861. Compare that to the 4 million US slaves, and you’ll see the magnitude of the issue.

We use a different word to refer to the slaves in the Russian Empire. We call them serfs. But they were property. They were bought and sold. Owners could do whatever they wanted with them.

There were no serfs in Siberia or the Far East, obviously. It was the European population of the empire that was enslaved. In a multiethnic empire, all slaves were white people enslaved by other white people. There’s no likelihood that my Ukrainian ancestors weren’t serfs. Of which I’m very proud and not remotely traumatized, but that’s a different story.

In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, one of the only two worthwhile leaders Russia ever had, signed the Liberation Manifesto freeing the slaves. Every church in the empire had the text of the manifesto read aloud after Sunday service because how else do you inform the illiterate slaves that they are now free?

Not only were the serfs freed, their houses and belongings were declared their own private property. They were given self-governance and voting rights within their self-governance units.

But signing the manifesto is not enough. How do the freed serfs feed themselves? And how do you make their owners agree to relinquishing their property, livelihood, and class position? I’ll talk about that in the next post.

Doing film versions of well-known fairy-tales that explore the point of view of the traditional villain is a great idea. Wicked shows the Wizard of Oz story from the perspective of the two evil witches. Netflix is planning to release a new version of Cinderella that tells the story of the stepsisters.

This is great because it teaches children that in every conflict the other side has its own version of the story. It’s a crucial life lesson. We are all villains in somebody’s story. And sometimes, it’s deserved. Remembering this helps us to be a villain less.

It’s the end of the semester, everybody is tired. It takes an effort not to be a jerk to a colleague who asks the same question for the fifth time, not to go off at a student who barges in while I’m recording a class video and spoils the whole thing, and not to snipe at a lab worker who showed up to work even though we issued 5 reminders that the lab closed for the holidays. Remembering that for all these people I’m a character in their story like they are characters in mine helps to avoid rolling my eyes, huffing, and being annoyed. The realization that they find me as annoying as I find them is a necessary humbling experience. We all need more of those.

The people who are ranting the most about the movies which question whether those everybody considers villains are really villains are conservatives. This is strange because, who do they think the Evil Witch of the West and the Evil Stepsister are in the story taught at every school and college and transmitted from every MSM outlet? In our society, who is it that needs people to wonder whether the official narrative of who’s the evildoer might be wrong? Who is the other side that gets labeled evil by definition? Who is it that doesn’t get to tell their story?

If anybody needs people to have a well-developed capacity to doubt official stories and give a chance to official villains, it’s conservatives.