Friendship With Russians Is When They Conquer Your Land Through A Genocide And Then Say: “we Can Live

They failed, because as the blogger Epicurean Dealmaker pointed out on Twitter, “Markets distill the biases, opinions, & convictions of elites,” which makes them “Structurally less able to predict populist movements.” The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social media last night. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. A lot of my professional colleagues seemed to, and the dominant tone framed this as a blow against the enlightened “us” and the beautiful world we are building, struck by a plague of morlocks who had crawled out of their hellish subterranean world to attack our impending utopia. Surrendering traditional powers and liberties to a distant state is a lot easier if you think of that state as run by “people like me,” not “strangers from another place,” and particularly if that surrender is done in the name of empowering “people who are like me” in our collective dealings with other, farther “strangers who aren’t.” These sorts of tribal affiliations cause problems, obviously, which is why elites were so eager to tamp them down. Unfortunately, they are also what glues polities together, and makes people willing to sacrifice for them.  Elites missed this because they're the exception -- the one group that has a transnational identity.

Megan McArdle “'Citizens of the World'? Nice Thought, But ...”

You licked houmous off my fingers which is one way to win an argument — Shailja Patel, Love Poem for London

At times it seems we are living our lives as if we are going to write an autobiography after we're done.

- Experience

We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.

Unknown

Julius Sergius von Klever - Erlkönig (1887)

Last rays in a snowy forest

niiloi

What I really object to... is that there is a rhetoric out there of trying to convince people that they’re insufficient and that everything should be the private property of a small number of people for this reason when in fact, if it was really the case that those few people were so important, and great, and powerful, they wouldn’t need to have all this rhetoric to convince other people of it. People would just see it, they would get it. If there were really a few X-Men floating around, it would be manifest to everyone. In fact, those X-Men wouldn’t even need everyone else. They would do the Atlas Shrugged thing like go off, do whatever you want, and have no connection to the outside world. If you’re really that great, just do it, and stop bitching, and trying to convince everybody else that they’re inadequate, and stupid, and useless, and that you’re the elite. Fine. That doesn’t bother anyone if you want to go do that, but don’t take as private property all the stuff that was produced in this society that we created. Go off on your own with nothing into the forest and build this great Atlantis that you’re capable of doing, and that no one else can do. Great. Honestly, if there were a bunch of X-Men, they would do that. They wouldn’t bother with everyone else. They’d just go off into outer space and do their own thing. That’s not what’s actually going on. What’s actually going on is that there’s this elite of people who’s trying to use rhetoric to dominate others, and to take the collective work that others have done, and expropriate it to themselves. I think that’s nonsense.

Glen Weyl Radical Institutional Rerforms Podcast on 80,000 Hours

I've started noticing online how people from countries that don't need national defense really do not understand the nature of mandatory military service and wartime duty.

I had happened to scroll my way into a discussion on some american influencer family, who are all about being wealthy Conservative Christians who homeschool their kids so they won't get exposed to any other kind of values. Anyway one of the daughters married a man from Ukraine because there's no sufficiently white, conservative and christian men left in America I guess.

And originally this girl (who was sheltered, homeschooled, didn't speak any other language than english, and had zero experience of living independently) was supposed to move to Ukraine to live with her new husband, but then shit hit the fan. So they shipped their little family back to the US to live cozy on her parents' money.

So I happened to scroll into discussion about the Ukraine husband and the apparent vitrol happening online among the people who keep tabs on this family out of sheer curiosity. And there was someone, an american I guess from their writing style, who was baffled by the community's attitude towards him dodging the draft in his homeland. Like yeah the guy is a smug homophobic jackass, but isn't it fucked up to demand that he should volunteer to go fucking die??

And I kind of paused right there, having a kind of epiphany about how different worlds we come from, and how I really could not begin to explain this to someone who did not grow up this way. I'm not from Ukraine and I've never personally known war, but coming from Finland, I've got an understanding of how countries with a border and history with Russia are raised to think about war.

War isn't something you volunteer for. It's not something you can opt in or opt out of. It's something that comes to you, inevitably and eventually, and you're just lucky if it doesn't happen during your time. But if it does, that's just the cards that were dealt to you.

From the perspective of an invader, it's easy to equate "volunteering to fight" with "volunteering to die". It's easy to think that if you simply refuse to fight in war, there will be no war. That's not what it's like for those being invaded. When the war is brought to you, your choice is between "get shot in combat" and "get shot in your living room". Death is not voluntary, you only get to choose when and where.

Choosing to shake off that sense of duty doesn't make it disappear, it simply drops the weight on someone else's shoulders. Somone who may be more capable than you or less capable than you. If you were in a room with a button, knowing that there's a chance that you might die if you don't push it, but that there's a stranger in the next room, who has an equal chance of dying if you do push it. You don't know what those odds are, but if you decide to save yourself, you've chosen to rather risk the stranger.

Resenting someone from dodging military duty when their country is being invaded isn't a matter of hating someone for wanting to live. It's about knowing that this person decided: "Someone else's son deserves to die more than I do."

Every winter an absent joy pains you and you walk under the rain one in two: you and the person you were in another winter. You speak secretly to yourself words you don’t understand because of memory’s inability to retrieve a previous emotion, and because of longing’s ability to add what did not exist to what existed. Such as the tree becoming a forest and the stone a quail, such as being happy in a prison cell you see wider than a public garden, and the past standing waiting for you tomorrow like a loyal dog. Longing lies and it doesn’t tire of lying because it lies truthfully. The lying of longing is a profession. ... It is the fusion of instinct in the conscious and the unconscious. It is lost time complaining of the sadism of the present.

Mahmoud Darwish 'In the Presence of Abence' Translated by Sinan Antoon