We used public transport in the USSR all the time. People hoping to get on a subway train or a bus would stand very close to the doors of the stopping vehicle in a thick crowd. The doors would open, and there would be no way for the exiting passengers to disembark. The entering crowd would press against the people trying to exit. As a result, few people managed to enter the vehicle, even though the middle of the carriage might be completely empty. Some of those who needed to exit had to miss their stop. This happened every time. Zero exceptions. That’s how it always worked.

It would be much more convenient for everybody if the people waiting for the train stood to the sides of the doors, letting passengers exit, and then entered the vehicle without having to shove and push. How many experiences of this kind do you think people need to figure out that it pays off to stand to the side? Years, decades, a lifetime of experiences? None of this was enough. Mockery in the media, endless discussions, daily discomfort of having to beat your way in and out of a subway car. You don’t have to be Freud to figure out that this behavior wasn’t about finding a comfortable way to use public transportation. “I will not step to the side for anybody because it’s dog-eat-dog out there, and the moment you blink, people will eat you alive” is the motivating idea behind the behavior of those Soviet and post-Soviet passengers. It was a point of pride not to give way.

I’m back in America, and the absolute wonder of a culture where people control their tempers, control their impulses, and proceed from kindness and rationality hits hard as I spend more time than usual in public spaces. What causes me the most pain is that the people whose ancestors traveled for many generations this uncommon path of reason over instinct and civilization over jungle beast have absolutely no idea that their enormous advancement is not humanity’s default. What’s worse, they feel apologetic for their advancement.

Standing to the side of the door which you want to enter is a non-trivial cultural achievement. It shows that you can delay gratification. You can tame down the brute animalistic competitiveness and privilege collective peace and cohesion over the natural impulse to trample on others. Cultures that have learned to stand to the side have a much higher standard of living than those who haven’t. Third-world countries are the way they are not because of colonialism or oppression but because their inhabitants’ way of being produces exactly that system of social relations.

I found the car of my dreams. It has a completely transparent roof. Not a puny window, but the whole roof is see-through. I don’t know from engines or fuel efficiency. This transparent ceiling is where it’s at for me.

And please don’t say convertibles have the same effect of an endless sky above you. Can you imagine what a convertible does to my Yeti hair?

The lights on the interior of the doors light up in purple. It’s a bloody paradise of a car.

Why aren’t people making more cars with transparent roofs is beyond me.

This explains so much:

They are simply scatterbrained. They can’t stay alone with their thoughts for 4 minutes, and have no idea that it’s not normal.

i have…

– an amazing girlfriend
– making ~$450k this year
– can work anywhere / anytime
– live in a house w/ a pool

yet i have anxiety every damn day, tight chest, hard to take a deep breaths, intrusive thoughts, always feeling not enough, can never relax

what went wrong

— Matt Welter (@_mattwelter) October 23, 2025

His father did a great job while his mother did a piss-poor one, that’s what went wrong.

Social and professional success = great father.

No anxiety, feeling comfortable in the world, feeling that the universe loves you = great mother.

Obviously, you need both to function well.

During this trip, I met a great number of people who vote for Vox, admire Santiago Abascal, and are fans of Trump and Nayib Bukele. Most are half my age. These were conversations that arose spontaneously with grocery clerks, store cashiers, cab drivers, Uber drivers, and an occasional young adult child of a colleague.

[Yes, I feel enormously more sociable in Spain than anywhere else. I initiate a lot of conversations, and it’s not even a language thing. Yesterday, for example, a had a 30-minute conversation in German with a guy from Stuttgart who’s lived on Spain for 31 years. And then people will say that Duolingo doesn’t work.]

Going back to my original subject, yes, I encountered raging right-wingerism in Spain. People slide into the political part of the conversation cautiously. Nobody walks around announcing, “I’m right-wing. Let’s be right-wingers together.” Everybody tests the ground before launching into their spiel.

“It always makes me glad to see people put up the rojigualda [the Spanish flag]. You are from America, I heard everybody really respects the American flag there. It’s important to be patriotic.”

“Did you see the October 12 ceremony? It was so beautiful until that piece of shit [the Socialist Prime Minister] spoiled everything.”

“Say what you will, but in many case Santi Abascal [the leader of the right-wing Vox] is right.”

“Sure, Trump is totally crazy. But is he all that wrong?”

“I really hope Pedrito [the Socialist Pedro Sánchez] crashes in his stupid car and dies. Did you see the princess? Even she’s mocking him.”

“I don’t think Bukele is all bad, do you?”

The moment you give the slightest indication that you are receptive, people launch on a right-winger tirade of the century.

This might be a class issue. I avoided all colleagues except the Ukrainian one and only talked to working-class people. On the way back to the airport, the Uber driver, a very young father of a baby boy, couldn’t get the toll pass to function. A toll worker in her sixties came up. We all immediately became friends, and the representatives of the different generations of Spaniards engaged in an excited tongue-lashing of “those Socialist shits.”

The young people in Europe are angry. Forget young. I haven’t met anybody under the age of fifty who’d be rah-rah for leftism and for the European status quo of infinity migration, speech codes, and the lack of economic protectionism.

I come to Spain all the time. This is a huge change. Fifteen years ago everybody was very lefty, especially the 20-year-olds. And everybody said contemptuously “el Estado español” [the Spanish state] instead of Spain. Now I feel one could get socked in the face for disrespecting the country publicly like this.

This is the kind of thing I meant the other day when I talked about people who make it very hard to support their cause:

Where the word "Jew," JD? The "amazing" people who excavated the Pilgrim's Walk were Israeli Jews, using funds raised by Jews. The people who laid out the Pilgrim's Walk were ancient Jews, a path to the Jewish temple. Read this to know how to speak of this:… https://t.co/QzVsAfPIZm

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 24, 2025

“Read this to know how to speak of this” is insulting. Aimed at somebody who spread himself very thin to help your cause, it’s smug and stupid.

This annoys me to an extraordinary extent. Vance is nothing but sweet to Israel to the point of subservience in this tweet. And this is still not enough? He still gets lectured haughtily to educate himself?

My post is not about Vance or Israel. It’s about every cause whose supporters don’t know how to take a W and move on. There’s a lot of this going on. If you express support for people once, they begin to act like this grants them the right to throw tantrums at you for all eternity. I’m not Vance and don’t much like Vance but this exact thing happened to me. I was expressing support when I was rudely interrupted and told I was using a wrong term and needed to keep to the exact (and very fussy) terminology that they preferred. It was shocking that people would choose to antagonize a sincere supporter for absolutely no reason.

I have a great travel hack courtesy of my sister.

Bring your favorite tea bags everywhere you go. Mine are the German fennel and anise or the Spanish manzanilla con anís. For some reason, I’m really into anise.

Tea bags mean you don’t have to waste money on bottled water, you can turn any snack into a meal with a hot cuppa, and it always feels homey and comfortable.

Remember how we all collectively #MeTooted about whorish starlets and bad dates?

Nobody is #MeTooting about this:

"He destroyed me": 16-year-old Meija Åberg in an interview with Norran, describing a traumatic rape, its aftermath, and lifelong scars.

Mohamed, an 18-year-old Eritrean migrant, raped Meija and avoided deportation after a Swedish court ruled the rape didn’t last long enough. pic.twitter.com/wt2MeYi9Cb

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 23, 2025

The purpose to all leftist fads is revealed long after they are mainstreamed. Land acknowledgements are a way to take property from people. #MeToo was created to redefine sexual violence to deny justice to actual victims. Leftists play the long game while we bicker over inanities, accuse each other of being the bad guys, or defend leftist lunacy from each other.

I’m 37, talking to my 8 year old. I found out she sits and reads at recess.  I have a look of absolute disgust on my face. I balled out at recess. NEVER sat and read, that would be punishment.

I asked “Why not go play with your friends? Why not play soccer or go on the park?”

She said “when I read,  I can make a movie in my head.”

I just realized, I don’t know how to read.

This is so beautiful.

Reading is a healthy, socially valued form of hallucinating. It’s interesting that a hallucination that occurs when you interact with a product of someone else’s brain is healthy and wonderful. Yet a hallucination that happens without such an interaction can be a sign of schizophrenia.

The same thing is healthy when it creates a channel between you and the world and unhealthy when it connects you with more of you.

An excess of self produces monstrosity.

Every word. Respect to @SethDillon. The point is obvious: if the right replicates every mistake the left made it will end up in the same place. https://t.co/bL8hCjg6uI

— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) October 23, 2025

Is that the place of complete domination of all cultural institutions, the judiciary, academia, the corporate world, and the media?

Because OK, these terms are acceptable. If conservatives can end up in a place where we can gather in large groups and hold events without fearing that our speakers will be murdered, I’m happy to end up in that place.

Yesterday, AAUP published a tweet saying that conservatives have no place in academia because we are all fascists. I’d like to end up in a place where that’s not a normal thing for an association of university professors to say. People on the right keep pretending that leftism suffered some huge cultural defeat as a result of its mistakes but I’m still waiting for even a smidgen of evidence.