4 Comments

Bravo! Perfectly hilarious. The fatal clown show marches on, never reaching its destination.

Another Substack blogger put it very well just yesterday : “There’s something to be said here about the analytic model that prevails in our time - there’s a machine that instantly springs to life, taking in rumors and partial information in an environment of extreme uncertainty and spitting out formulaic results that match ideological presuppositions. Information is not evaluated neutrally, but forced through a cognitive filter that assigns it meaning in light of predetermined conclusions”. In other words, yeah, who fucking knows anything?

The pic with Prigozhin in his wine cellar (or is it actually the most Russian looking catering office that anyone has ever seen?) is the coup de grace.

I kept thinking of Onegin too. And how my Russian schoolmates in the math department corrected my pronunciation and called me Pushkin cause in the first place I was an incorrigible poet who shouldn’t have been a math major. But yeah Pushkin someone should do a hip-hop version, right?

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You guys are hysterical..You left out that one academic-Evgeny Morozow? I originally signed up because I liked Yasha's Baffler piece on EFF (saved me at a time when I was almost descending into weird bunker person anti-tech sentiment fostered without irony by bs si valley style privacy concerns-Social Dilemma etc. Apple got some money out of me that way..I bought a mac i didn't end up using because as much as I distrust Nadella, you can't switch os in your forties)..

But I have stayed because I enjoy your show. I must try Gogol. I grew up reading some Russian and even Ukrainian folktales. I still remember Sir Cat O' Puss...

Dostoevsky's book on patricide is the only adult book I have read though..its name escapes me at the moment.

Yeah it sounds like a third of Russia is named Evgenxx...

(Edit: This Notes stuff has a certain utility re: Episodic memory. You did this show on June 28, 2023 and now it is September 24, 2023 and Prigozhin has been dead a little over a month).

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is there a source for *objective* information on this war? US media will always say the war is going bad for Putin--but it has been doing this for what, 2 years now? I only kept up closely for maybe the first 8 months or so, and I saw enough nazi savagery out of my Ukraine 'allies' that I did not support Ukraine, and I sensed that normal Ukrainian and Russian people in the region also did not support the US's puppets.

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This was so much more epic than Jan/6. I wonder if anyone over there was cheering it on back then.

We had petty bougie camo-clad dad bods and they got pay-to-kill contractors. Great theatre!

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