Our Souls Long To Belong, We Carry An Emptiness With Us, And The Moment Our Beloveds Fill Themselves

- Roald Dahl

guys, yesterday in my so-called virtual diary i wrote an extremely spontaneous and emotional thought. “like i don’t belong anywhere. it feels like this all the time”. and here it is. the answer of the fkn tumblr post appearing out of nowhere. do i still have a need to share my feelings with actual people or what?

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

EXACTLY.

I read. Obsessively. Because, when I read, there is purpose to my loneliness.

“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

I honestly feel that working in a little old bookstore would solve all of my problems.

The feminine urge this, the masculine urge that, what about the the morbid longing for the picturesque at all cost???

Hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin offered “denazification” as a flimsy pretext for his invasion of Ukraine, Russian missiles hit the Jewish hub of Uman, Ukraine, killing at least one civilian. Ukraine has begun evacuating its cities of civilians, including Uman.

This article is from February 2022, but the pictures below are from April 2023, as Putin continues bombing Uman, an historic city with a mostly Jewish population.

Ah yes, Russia is bombing and attacking heavily Jewish population centers like Dnipro, Uman and Odesa to “denazify” Ukraine. Of course.

Makes total sense, IF you’re a braindead tankie who eats up Russian propaganda.

“If you still believe Vladimir Putin’s propaganda that he’s trying to de-Nazify Ukraine, you should talk to Ukrainian Jews. They don’t buy a word of it.”

Again and again and again I see (mostly) westerners accusing Ukraine of "opressing russian-speaking minority" by our language law (without reading the language law itself, obviously). It really looks like people have some kind of pavlovian reflex to the word "minority", immediately jumping to the assumption that minority = opressed by the majority. But a minority by numbers does not automatically mean minority by power. Billionaires, too, make up a minority of population, does that mean that they are opressed by the majority class? Are gaelige speakers in Ireland priveleged in comparison to the English? Are Elon Musk's white emerald mine owning family opressed by the majority black African population?

For the 1000th time, the relationship between Ukraine and russia is that between colonised and coloniser. It is russian identity, russian language, russian culture, russian world that has been privileged on the territory of ukraine for at least last 400 years. It is ukrainian language, ukrainian culture, ukrainian identity that people have been repressed and killed for.

russian propaganda takes this assumption westerners have about how the world fuctions (minority=oppressed) and uses it to twist the reality. To make you believe that Ukrainians somehow "deserve" to be genocided. To make you believe that it's the best course of action for the West to abandon Ukraine to be raped and plundered by russia. But we can call it "peace", because russians won't allow western journalists to report on it, and we all know that if the west doesn't talk about something, it means it doesn't exist :))))

Here are statistics about the "opression of russian language" from 2012 - during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovich, russian puppet and a literal mafioso [source]:

More than 60% of the total circulation of newspapers, 83% of magazines, and about 87% of books (most of which are imported from Russia) are published in Russian in Ukraine.

In October 2012, only 28% of the prime time on the top 8 TV channels was devoted to Ukrainian-language programs, 44% to Russian-language programs and 28% to bilingual programs.

On the 6 top-rated radio stations, songs in Ukrainian account for only 3.4% of the total number of songs in prime time (last year - 4.6%). At the same time, songs in Russian account for 60% of the total number of songs.

Out of 290 restaurants in 29 cities, only 50% of them have signs in Ukrainian, 46% have menus in Ukrainian, and only 36% have employees who answer Ukrainian to Ukrainian-speaking customers (in another 11%, employees switched to Ukrainian during the conversation).

The "oppression of russian speakers in Ukraine" is nothing but the tyranny of russian chauvinism and imperialism losing its footing. Y'all had no trouble understanding how white ethnonationalists complaining about "the great replacement" is nothing but fear of losing the privilege. Y'all had no trouble understanding that "white cis male is the most opressed person" is a moral panic not grounded in the real power structure of the western society. But in this question, you've decided to ally with the opressor.

Finding old music you used to love is like getting back in touch with an old friend.