Dclcq - Dclcq

St. David’s Day is on Sunday! Grab a leek and celebrate with Fluellen.

(Note: Scallions make good miniature leeks.)

Ad Reinhardt, from ‘How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture’ (1946)

Finnish bread advertisement, hinted to me by anonymous submitter. “Only in this country you can avertise bread this way.” This piece has no subtitles but here’s translation:

Father: “Well are you hungry or not?” KOVAA KUIN ELÄMÄ (HARD AS LIFE)

(And if you’re interested in the last part the guy says that you can get jälkiuunileipä or after-oven-bread in smaller bits too)

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."

untitled by vamitos on Flickr.

Glengarry Glen Ross is on Netflix, you should watch it a lot.  The easy "critique of capitalism" is that "second prize is a set of steak knives" because that's how little it costs to motivate you to work harder for them, and if that doesn't work there's always "third prize is you're fired."   But the real wisdom which is not about capitalism but which is about narcissism comes from understanding that first prize isn't a Cadillac Eldorado, you think Alec Baldwin needs a car?   There is no first prize.  Real closers don't want the prize, they want to be the best, that's why they will practice practice practice and don't play the lottery.  The car is a temptation only for people who do not know their own value, the value of their own work, who won't lift a finger to advance themselves, who are motivated only by threats or by rewards, who would rather have the appearance of success than actual success. "I got an article in the Times!"  celebrates the person whose brain is broken.  "Alec Baldwin's character is a raging narcissist!" Jesus are you stupid, Alec's name is MacGuffin, that's why he's in Act I and never again yet propels the story forward.  It is irrelevant whether Alec Baldwin has metal testicles or pathological grandiosity, what matters is that after years of C minus work, what finally gets those dummies fired up is First Prize or Third Prize, left to themselves they meander in mediocrity while deluding themselves that they are more than what they do. "I was number one in '87!"  So was Alf.

The Last Psychiatrist

Christina Olson, 1947. Andrew Wyeth,1917–2009. Tempera on panel.

Ma hakkasin postitama, et kuidas tõlkida kadakasaksacore inglise keelde, et kas peaks hoopis olema salsakeelne wachholderdeutscher-core sest "omg uskumatu sakslastel on sõna kõige jaoks!!!!11" (höhö joke's on you) või junipergermancore, mis keskmisele inglise keele emakeelena kõnelejale ütleb umbes-täpselt mitte midagi.

Siis tulebki, nagu @mistermooneyes seda juba tegi, lahti kirjeldada, et tegu on esteetika, mis peegeldab kolonialistlikku suhet kohalike ja võimul olijate vahel ja, kuidas oma identiteet tuleb maha salata, et jõuda üldse selle esteetikani. Ja see terve jänese urg vallandus sellest.... et mingid tüübid siin lehel riisuvad igast suvalisi tääge kokku??

Ja ma tean, et see pole mingi uus nähtus. strangeaeon kirjeldas seda, kuidas riisutud ühte kuhja nii queer-eskapism kui ka padukatoliiklased. Ja nüüd seda tohuvapohu vaadata....

Kuidas ma siia jõudsin? Millest ma üldse jahun?

Võib-olla polegi oluline, mis on kadakasaksacore inglise keeles, sest võib-olla ei olegi enam võimalik cottagecore'ist kolonialismi välja juurida

btw, the molotov cocktail got named that by Finns who used them when fighting back against the Soviet Union’s imperialist invasion of their country, as a mocking reference to Vyacheslav Molotov’s propaganda about said invasion (“we’re not bombing them, we’re just flying in food deliveries because they’re starving!”)

so i’m not gonna stop y'all from making molotov cocktail jokes, but you’d better not turn around and post soviet apologia afterwards. respect the cocktail’s history