LRS
Did you hear the one about…
Russians love jokes — anekdoty. The question “Do you know a good joke?” “is so ubiquitous, it’s almost rhetorical,” writes the Russian scientist-turned-novelist Konstantin Asimonov. They are sometimes laconic, sometimes silly, some of them are “about what Russians are feeling in the depth of their hearts.” But they are also, he argues, “an important and often overlooked genre of Russian folk fiction.”
Asimonov lists a series of dark, gallows-humor anekdoty about Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine: “My son wears an ‘I’m With Putin’ t-shirt for the last two weeks,” one says. “Since then he was beaten, spat at, thrown bottles at. I’m afraid to think what will happen, if he ever dares to leave the house.” Or “Good morning, here is your conscription notice.” “Who are we fighting with?” “Fascists, of course!” “OK, and against whom?” These jokes are shared despite the fact that “there are times where a poorly timed anekdot would lead to the joketeller’s arrest, imprisonment, and even death… so yeah, jokes are important in Russia.”
Marx out of 10
There is a theory among the online right that Marxists deliberately targeted institutions — the judiciary, the media, school boards, Hollywood — to bypass democracy, allowing them to pass liberal laws, such as desegregation, abortion, and affirmative action, by judicial fiat, in what they call the “long march through the institutions.” This isn’t pulled out of thin air: Several leading Marxist thinkers did say that capitalist power should be challenged by a communist intellectual “counter-hegemony,” and it is true that left-leaning people dominate many key cultural bodies.
But, says the philosopher Arturo Dzvyenka, it’s not a conspiracy. Leftists had started to take over institutions before Marcuse and Gramsci suggested they should, and mainly the people doing so were liberals rather than Marxists anyway. The real story is one of class: The rise of a group of people with technical, managerial skills who tended both towards liberal politics and success within institutions, rather than some conscious or planned decision.
We are become Death, destroyers of worlds
“As humans, [we] possess an awesome capability known to no other species on the planet,” writes the political scientist Brian Klaas: “We can make ourselves extinct.” No matter how hard chimpanzees or octopuses try, despite their intelligence and facility with tools, they cannot destroy themselves. In one philosopher’s representation, each of our inventions is like a ball we draw from an urn: Most are white, and improve our lives; some are gray, and cause both positive and negative effects, like fossil fuels. And perhaps somewhere there is a black ball, or more than one, which “if plucked out, unleashes a technology on us that will inevitably lead to our extinction.”
Recently scientists agreed that research into “mirror microbes,” life which looks just like natural life but in which all the molecules are mirror-images, should be stopped, in case it is just such a black ball. That’s good news, says Klaas, but too many times humanity has depended on the fluke of a single decision going the right way to avoid potential existential risk. And as technology improves, it democratizes the threat: More and more people will have the power to create deadly things. Humanity should start to take care, says Klaas: “We don’t have to accept reckless courting of existential risk. If we fear a black ball is being withdrawn from the urn, we have the power to stop it.”