Zygmunt Bauman was a Marxist. He had a lot of piss-poor ideas. He was against national borders and very supportive of mass migration. I have no idea how he managed to make that particular kind of raving lunacy coexist with the rest of his ideas but there you have it.

In reading Bauman, I discarded all of the stuff that doesn’t interest me and used what does to develop my own ideas. That’s the approach I recommend to everybody.

Rafael Chirbes, my favorite writer, was a Communist. Michel Foucault was a raging pedo. But Foucault came up with the expression “entrepreneurs of the self” which laid the foundations of the thinking on neoliberal subjectivity.

What I’m saying is that we can give ourselves over to the outrage that other people are not perfect and sometimes downright shitty, or we can resist this self-righteous impulse and find nuggets of value wherever they exist.

It is very appropriate that the thread on AI is sprouting great questions. We are humans, we think, we create. The discussions you can have with AI are not really discussions. They are exercises in narcissistic mirroring. When people say that they talked to AI for an hour, it’s as off-putting as if they said they stared in a mirror for that amount of time.

As for equality, this is an important point. People often confuse “equal to” and “equal as.” For example, is the person who asked this question equal to serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer? Morally, not a bit. Dahmer is absolutely 100% inferior to this reader in terms of morality. But in spite of this very obvious moral inequality, should they have equal rights under the law? Of course. We realize how immoral and inferior to us in every way Dahmer was but we still respect his human dignity. We don’t support him being tortured, starved, or violated in jail. We respect his right to legal representation and trial. Remember those students who hounded a professor because he acted as Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer? I’m sure we all agree that they were wrong. Every criminal, no matter how disgusting, deserves legal representation. That’s the beauty of a civilized society which punishes crime while respecting equal rights under the law for everybody.

Is everybody intellectually equal to everybody else? Obviously not. But should the law treat the dumb and the brilliant equally? Obviously yes. I’m clearly enormously intellectually superior to Candace Owens (or the persona she exhibits in her videos). But both she and I should have the exact same right to free expression. I’m horrified by the crap she spouts on YouTube. But I’m adamantly opposed to anybody censoring her or her show in any way. That is what true respect for equality looks like. If I were to pretend that Owens is not 3 standard deviations below me on the IQ scale,* that wouldn’t be respect for equality. That would be myth-making in service of ideology. It would make a mockery of the very idea of equality under the law because the most important thing about that concept is not that everybody is the same but that everybody is guaranteed the same rights in spite of being very much not the same. Equal rights for unequal people is one of the highest achievements of our civilization, steeped in the foundational ideas of Christianity.

I do not support trying to impose or export or promote this way of organizing society to anybody else. Different cultures do things differently. All I said here has to do with our nation-state. Great Britain, for example, has clearly chosen the path that leads away from these principles. I will continue mocking the Brits for this but I don’t support invading them to stop their slide towards authoritarianism.

*Once again, it’s possible that Owens is not actually a moron but plays one on YouTube as a moneymaking strategy. Let’s accept that when I refer to Owens, what I have in mind is her public persona and not anything else.

This is an important question because it rests on a fallacy which haunts us in many aspects of life.

Correctly describing something doesn’t mean you hate what you describe. Identifying flaws in something, or somebody, doesn’t mean you hate them. My husband states correctly that my singing is atrocious. It’s truly very bad. But does his clear-eyed evaluation of my ridiculously poor singing skills mean he doesn’t love me? Of course not. He loves me profoundly. But it’s not an imaginary, perfect me that he loves. It’s the real me whose terrible singing is the least important of my very many flaws.

Often we hear honest descriptions of things or people being labeled as hate. As if love consisted in shrouding the object of this emotion in utterly unrealistic perfection. But love is the exact opposite. You don’t love your friends, your country, or your relatives because they are perfect. Love is patient and love is kind because it understands, accepts and tolerates the flaws.

Your love of democracy is not really love if you idealize it and don’t see its enormous flaws. Ask yourself if you can still love it if you fully accept what these flaws are. Some of these flaws are what I outlined yesterday:

• An unavoidable orientation towards the short-term and an impossibility of long-term goal-setting;
• A tendency towards humoring the lowest common denominator of voters.

If you can’t get excited about a system of government that accommodates millions of excitable, undisciplined, and low-intelligence Candace Owenses, if you can’t see the rightness and the beauty in such a system, guess what?

You don’t love democracy.

This is another problem with democracy. It doesn’t pay to have a long-term vision. Doing things today that are oriented towards anything beyond the next election, which is always a few months away, makes no sense.

As a result, nothing stands between the love of “societal disruption” by people like Pichai and all the rest of us. Politicians are chasing the happy pill that will bring instant gratification, and future be damned. This is why no political force in the country has even attempted to take a position regarding AI. Politicians will do so when it’s too late. Then they’ll run around like headless chickens, promising harebrained schemes to solve everything in one fell swoop. And will end up solving nothing.

One of the reasons we can’t have nice things (guardrails on discourse) is because people like this will always abuse them as a weapon against every conservative thought that gives them the vapors. There is no comparison between Fuentes’ views and the considered thoughts of a guy… https://t.co/S1ShvmYVK5

— Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) December 3, 2025

Sure there’s no comparison. Fuentes is Socrates in comparison with these Heritage hacks. They can all stick their considered thoughts, with the piss-poor results those thoughts brought us, very deep into their anal cavities.

I despise this whole “guardrails on discourse” crowd. They’ve been pearl-clutching, denouncing, condemning, disavowing and repudiating for weeks while everything is falling apart around them.

The imagined community of a nation needs a story of itself that is positive and inspiring. Look at the American story. The Pilgrims, the frontiersmen, the Wild West. We achieved, we built, we overcame. That’s a great, positive story. And look at the results. Excellent results.

Unfortunately, Latin American countries locked into a miserable narrative of themselves. We were conquered, genocided, victimized. The results match the narrative. And it’s dumb because the Latin American “we” is not the indigenous “we.” It’s the mestizo “we”. Latin American “we” of necessity includes Spaniards because Latin America speaks Spanish. But that is not reflected in the national narratives where the “we” is always an utterly vanquished, robbed and immiserated victim suffering at the hands of Spaniards first and Americans forever after.

This is why it’s important to have good, high-quality elites. Who else is going to create the shared story of the nation, which is always a complicated process involving many people and occupying a long stretch of time? The Latin American elites have failed abysmally. They continue failing because they are still pursuing the victimhood angle.

Historically very recently in Great Britain people were arrested for being gay. Today, a woman is charged for using the word “faggot” in a private communication without any reference to anybody’s sexuality. This happened within a blink of an eye. From one extreme, it went to another.

I have a very sincere question to people who support censorship. How do you know that tomorrow your beliefs, which are completely normal and run of the mill today, won’t be declared chargeable offenses? How do you know that this morning you didn’t send a text message or write anything on social media that tomorrow will be used to deprive you of your livelihood and even freedom? What gives you this complete certainty that it won’t touch you?

This is not a rhetorical question. We’ve seen this happen to so many people so many times. Old statements that at the time they were made were considered normal and acceptable are used to destroy people today. Why wouldn’t it happen to you? What is the mechanism you use to reassure yourself that you will be immune?

Finally, finally, finally, I have found a great history book on the founding of Mexico. I can use it as a textbook. This is excellent.

What I want is a book that avoids the extremes of “Spaniards were evil genocidal maniacs who evilly genocided sweet little Indians” (because it’s moronic crap) and “sweet little Spaniards peacefully and sweetly brought the light of culture to evil savages who were evilly genociding other savages” (because it’s also moronic crap). But all that’s on offer is one of these two dumb narratives.

I kept looking for an author who likes being Mexican, you know? Somebody who writes from the perspective of not hating his country and endlessly bemoaning its existence. Somebody who could explain that Mexico is great, and the components that went into its creation are great. Somebody who would zing and zang with patriotic enthusiasm for Mexico. Which is a crucial characteristic in a national historian. How did it happen that historians tend to burn with love for every country except their own? It’s weird.

In any case, I finally found a patriotic author in Juan Miguel Zunzunegui. I listened to his book The Day After the Conquest on Audible, and he reads it himself. You can hear in his voice how much he loves Mexico and how cool he finds it. Zunzunegui explains that Mexico was born from the encounter of the majestic Spanish culture and the fascinating indigenous cultures. Mexicans were not conquered by Spaniards. Mexicans came into existence from the meeting between Spaniards and Indians. 99% of people who defeated the mexicas (later renamed into Aztecs) in Tenochtitlan were indigenous. They were led by Hernán Cortés in a revolutionary struggle to liberate themselves. They were not victims but victors.

The narrative that Spaniards showed up, raped everybody in sight, and Mexicans are very sad today and have a lot of crime because they are sad over all those rapes 500 years ago is stupid and needs to go. I shit you not, that’s the Nobel Prize winning theory that dominates the official Mexican story of Mexican identity. No wonder Mexico isn’t achieving much with such a story of its own origin. If you tell yourself every day that your existence is a great misfortune and a crime, what positive outcomes can you expect? Look at Mexico today and you’ll see your answer.

I’m very psyched about this author. He’s just so very rare because it’s been impossible to find a historian of Mexico who doesn’t shit either on the Spanish or on the indigenous side of the Mexican equation. And it’s so dumb. Whatever happened in 1521, isn’t the way to go kind of just embrace it? Especially since you are very clearly a result of it?

Zunzunegui has many more books on Audible, and I want to see what else he’s written.

Kushner and Witkoff traveled to Moscow and very predictably got no results.

I would much rather not be embarrassed by some dude who’s a presidential relative with zero knowledge of anything and even less trust from the American people representing our country abroad. I think this is not too much to ask.

This Kushner fellow is a blight on the second Trump administration, just as he was on the first.

Witkoff sucks absolute ass, too.

Please, somebody, link to some good news for a change.

Ain’t democracy great? No jury trials, people arrested for saying mean words in private conversations, parties banned, political candidates imprisoned, deeply unpopular policies forcibly inflicted on citizens. Truly, a system that should be preserved at all costs.