… resentment, even where justified or at least understandable, is never a constructive emotion: for in any given situation, it suggests to the one who feels it all that he cannot do to improve his situation rather than all that he can, thus inhibiting effort. And even when, despite his resentment, he makes successful efforts at improvement, his resentment often sours his success. Many are the successful men and women who carry their resentment with them to their grave.
Because resentment has certain sour satisfactions, it is one of the few emotions that can persist unabated for years: indeed, it tends to increase, because it exists in a mental echo-chamber. One such sour satisfaction is that it allows the one who feels it to think himself morally superior to the world as it is at present constituted, even if he has done nothing to improve it, or done something to make it a little worse. And where resentment leads to action rather than to passivity, it is almost always action that is destructive rather than constructive. It leads also to a considerable quantity of humbug, insofar as it primes people to look for new justifications for their dissatisfactions, and to claim that they cannot be happy until there is no more unhappiness caused by injustice in the world.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Against History-as-Nightmare”, Law & Liberty, 2020-08-11.
April 16, 2026
QotD: Resentment
April 15, 2026
QotD: Archaeological evidence of human achievement misses a lot
“What cultural achievements?” you may ask, eyeing the world’s few remaining hunter-gatherers, and it’s true: we judge barbarians of the past by analogy to barbarians of today.2 But that’s not entirely reasonable; there’s no reason to assume that a lack of cultural elaboration among, say, the highlanders of Papua New Guinea reflects anything about the Lapita culture, let alone about the Middle Stone Age or Neolithic Europe.3 It reminds me of the friend who once explained to me, quite seriously, that he would never work for a startup because they’re all culturally dysfunctional and have stupid products. And, you know, statistically he’s probably right: most startups suck, because if they’re any good at what they do they don’t stay startups for long.4 But we all know that different cultures are different: some groups of people see a horizon and burn with the desire to know what’s beyond it, and others don’t. Well, guess who those horizons are going to end up belonging to?
Of course there’s something nice about things that last: the written works and monumental architecture give succeeding generations something to point to and discuss, a jumping-off point for their own striving. Reading Latin is great, partly because you can read what the Romans had to say but more because you can read the same things that every educated person since the Romans has read. But that’s talking about their utility for us, not anything intrinsic to them; if the Huns or the Mongols or the Turks had come a little farther west and despoiled a little more thoroughly, it wouldn’t have retroactively detracted from the grandeur that was Rome. It would simply have turned it into a dark age because it would have left us blind.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Against the Grain, by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-21.
- Calvert Watkins argues for a Proto-Indo-European Ur-myth in the charmingly-titled How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, which really ought to contain more stat blocks than it does.
- Or, more often, a hundred years ago, since there are vanishingly few non-state peoples left.
- I can’t get over how annoying it is that there’s an entirely different set of terms for periods of human history depending on what continent you’re discussing.
- I’m sorry if it’s uncool, but by the time you employ someone with a certification from the Society of Human Resource Managers you’re not really a startup anymore even if your office fridge is full of energy drinks.
April 14, 2026
QotD: Holden Caulfield
Anyway, the point is, you name your kid “Holden” and what can you expect? The Catcher in the Rye is the greatest dickhead-identification device known to man. Even pretentious little snots in desperate need of a beating — I speak from experience here — think Holden Caulfield was a pretentious little snot in desperate need of a beating. It’s a 100% true scientific fact that the only people who liked The Catcher in the Rye are so repulsive to ordinary humans that they have no choice but to become high school English teachers, or go to work for the Washington Post.
I even once got linked on a site called “Kiwi Farms”, that seems to consist of nothing but Internet People making fun of other Internet People, and they all agreed with me (also with my interpretation of MTV’s Daria as “the female Holden Caulfield”, although that show took the piss out of itself more than once, and had actual human affection for its characters, and thus was actually pretty good (although of course serving the Catcher-esque function of mate sorting — if you met a girl who identified with it, run far far far away). I know, I know … MTV. And late-90s MTV, too, the guys who gave us both The Real World and Road Rules. Yeah, I’m scared too).
Anyway, though I think The Catcher in the Rye is the worst book ever written, and anyone who liked it should be beaten with the entire Jack Reacher series until their serum testosterone raises at least 300 points or whatever, I’m willing to hear other opinions: Is there in fact a worse book? Not in terms of writing etc. — even I have to admit that it’s not technically bad — but in terms of influence?
Severian, “Alt Thread: Worst Books Ever”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-10.
April 13, 2026
QotD: Cognitive Bias
Why do we have cognitive biases? They seem like a colossal failure of the evolution of the human brain. But the more we learn about them, the better we understand their purposes. One is that they save us time and effort — the frugal reasoning argument. Suppose we go into the supermarket to buy cereal. You carefully read all the boxes, figuring out whether the All-Bran or the Just Right gives you the best nutritional balance and value in dollars per kilogram or pound. I grab a box because I like the colour or because it has a sponsorship deal with my football team. You make the more rational choice, but I spend much less of my life in the cereal aisle at the supermarket and more doing other things. It’s easy to see how the same logic gets applied to, for example, voting. Assuming that the consequences of voting the “wrong” way don’t cause me to lose as much time and effort as I would have given up to carefully select the right candidate, I come out ahead in the end.
And then there’s the prospect that cognitive biases could simply be side-effects of useful and valuable short-cuts our brains have developed. Our tendency to see patterns in randomness leads to the spread of conspiracy theories. Our ability to generalise from a few points of information leads to prejudice. The knee-jerk reactions to danger which kept our ancestors from being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers can also lead to irrational decisions in the face of more abstract threats like crime, terrorism, natural disasters, or stock-market crashes. And finally, shared beliefs, even incorrect beliefs, might promote group cohesion. Our brains are imperfect at reasoning, but they may be so for good reason.
Adam Wakeling, “George Orwell and the Struggle against Inevitable Bias”, Quillette, 2020-08-08.
April 12, 2026
QotD: “Disinformation”
Neil Stone @DrNeilStone
X is coordinated disinformation packaged as Free SpeechThe concept of disinformation is inherently authoritarian. It presumes some faultless source from which truth flows, such that all speech can be judged by its alignment with this source.
Yes, sometimes certain issues are fairly clear-cut and people are just lying, but more often people fundamentally disagree about both facts and methods. They disagree about who is trustworthy and what institutions and processes are most likely to produce truth.
I, as a private citizen, might call some claim a lie or some person a liar. That’s discourse. I hope to persuade others that I am correct. But to institutionalize disinformation is necessarily to institutionalize a priest caste of truth determiners. This is antithetical to the scientific method and the process of knowledge production in general.
Truth-seeking must start from a place of humility: we are not sure of our claims or our methods. We are doing our imperfect best. We demonstrate the value of our ideas via evidence, argument, and the practical utility they provide. Not by censoring competing ideas.
It is ludicrous to assume that modern academic or journalistic institutions are bias-free oracles, yet this is the basis of the “disinformation” concept.
Hunter Ash, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-27.
April 11, 2026
QotD: Kingdoms were not “nations” in the Middle Ages
It is thus a bit odd that the regions of Westeros are seen by its inhabitants as being clear and unchanging. For instance, the Reach has borders, those borders do not move and everyone in those borders is loyal to House Tyrell. This is not how medieval rule works. The borders of, say, France, shifted over time (some places we consider “obviously” part of France were added only quite late, like French Flanders or Provence) as the ability of the French king to control those regions changed. For long periods of the Middle Ages, large parts of France were effectively controlled by the Kings of England (because they were also Dukes of this or that French duchy).
The idea that France, or Germany or Italy was a distinct, permanent entity with its own existence apart from a given royal family – more than just a space on a map – which comprised a people, their language and the government of those people, this is a modern phenomenon. Indeed, one may argue, it – that is, the nation-state – is the modern phenomenon.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.
April 10, 2026
QotD: William Cobbett
Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue plaque on every place he ever visited. In his long life — he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 — Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, MP, agony uncle (his books include Advice to Young Men), and the founder of Hansard.
His obituary in The Times, after categorising him as a “self-taught peasant”, declared Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: when some town council somewhere banned his anti-Malthusian play Surplus Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.
Above all, though, Cobbett was the champion of the rural poor, the village labourer and the small farmer. He was their one true tribune. He spoke at The King’s Head in 1820 because country folk were suffering a triple wham from agricultural depression, enclosure and the rise of agri-business. Or, to precis, “Hodge” (his name for the generic farm worker) was low-waged or unwaged and deprived of the bits of land he had once enjoyed under commoner’s rights.
Cobbett railed against “The Thing” (the capitalist, manufactory system) and the centrifugal, corrupting force of smoky London (“The Wen”, in Cobbettian). But he was no bloviator: he was a farm boy, and hence entirely empirical and properly pragmatic. He spent a decade travelling around the English sticks to discover the true state of affairs. His descriptions of his horseback journeys were published in 1830 as Rural Rides, the first sociological study of the English countryside.
No dry-as-dust tome by the way, the Rides: it brims with pinned-to-the-specimen-board descriptions of people and places, nature, wit. Cobbett knew beauty and, the proper Englishman that he was, he loved horses:
The finest sight in England is a stage coach ready to start. A great sheep or cattle fair is a beautiful sight; but in the stage coach you see more of what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself, the harness, all so complete and so neatly arranged; so strong and clean and good. The beautiful horses, impatient to be off. The inside full and the outside covered, in every part with men, women, children, boxes, bags, bundles. The coachman taking his reins in hand and his whip in the other, gives a signal with his foot, and away go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.
One of these coaches coming in, after a long journey is a sight not less interesting. The horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole equipage is covered perhaps with dust and dirt. But still, on it comes as steady as the hands on a clock.
Speaking at The King’s Head coaching inn in Monmouth must have been the dream gig for Cobbett the horseman.
John Lewis-Stempel, “Why Britain needs a peasants’ revolt”, UnHerd, 2020-08-06.
April 9, 2026
QotD: Diffuse versus concentrated state power
Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.
April 8, 2026
QotD: Without You, There is No Us, by Suki Kim
Also note the passages about Her Relationship. That’s how she refers to the poor bastard. It’s something along those lines, I forget — maybe it’s “My Ex” — but either way, he never even gets the goddamn common courtesy of being referred to by name … because to Mx. Kim, he really doesn’t have one. He’s just another interchangeable character in the all-encompassing soap opera that is her life.
Severian, “Recommended Reading”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-09.
April 7, 2026
QotD: Advice for foreign leaders trying to deal with Donald Trump
I do not say this as meaningless praise, just to say, oh, he’s not a corrupt scumbag. I say it with a very specific meaning.
To understand Trump, you must purge yourself of all expectations you have learned from watching politicians, include the assumptions you are not even aware you are making.
Trump is a completely different animal.
Trump is a businessman, and while there are many sorts of businessman, he is of a very specific type. He rose to wealth and prominence by doing two things very well:
1. Brand reputation building.
2. Negotiation.#1 forms the basis of how he deals with voters.
#2 forms the basis of how he deals with other power blocs within the US, and with other nations.
You see, the true love of Donald Trump’s life is bargaining. He is a business deal sperg. And he’s very, very good at it, because the actual process is his idea of fun, and winning at it is definition of pure satisfaction and joy.
He’s never made uncomfortable by the play of offer and counteroffer, or by butting heads and seeing who blinks first. That is, instead, his happy place. This means that not only is he totally at peace in the moment, he’s also practiced a lot.
When he called his book The Art of the Deal, it wasn’t just because he wants to think he’s good at this, it’s because this is the meaning of his life. The man finds meaning in haggling the way Musk finds meaning in building technologies, or the way I find meaning in explaining things to an audience.
So when Trump is dealing with others, from political office, he’s negotiating as if it were his money. Because that’s just how he ticks.
Now, the ground rule of global politics for the past 100+ years is that no matter who you are, you are allowed to rob American taxpayers and voters, so long as you pay American politicians for the privilege of doing so.
All of us, even democrat voters who don’t want to think about it, know what 10 percent for the big guy meant, and who the particular big guy was.
For all that time, global politics amounted to treating America as a giant cash pinata, and the deals had only two guardrails on them.
1. You must pay American politicians a large enough sum, in a subtle enough manner.
2. You can’t buy anything that your paid-off politicians won’t be able to hide their personal connection to.That’s it.
Everything else was on the table.
Trump isn’t like that. He can’t be bought.
Not because he’s some kind of saint, which he isn’t, nor because corrupt-politician money is loose change compared to Donald Trump money, which it is.
But because Trump can’t stand to deliberately lose a negotiation for a bribe, any more than Floyd Mayweather wants to throw a match to get paid off by bookies.
And this is how Trump became involved in politics in the first place. He was a standard New York City rich moderate democrat. Believed in the Postwar Dream, bought into the raceblind thing, was all in favor of exporting democracy, and taxed capitalism paying for a moderate amount of welfare state. But as he realized the political machines were selling out America, he got personally offended.
Not because he was principled and deeply cared about middle America. Perhaps a little because selling out America was hurting his real estate interests.
But mostly because bad business deals give Donald Trump the ick.
Trump seems like a loose cannon to a lot of people, because they don’t what he’ll do next. And they don’t know that because they don’t understand what motivates him.
Trump wants America to make better deals and stop being taken advantage of. And to make those better deals, he has to demonstrate to the people who are used to buying American politicians that the rules in play have changed.
So what’s the deal with Venezuela and Maduro?
Simple. If you ride the NYC subway enough, it’s pretty likely that eventually a bum will come up to you, whip out his dick, and piss on your shoes.
Why? Because he wants to feel powerful. Because his day isn’t going well, and so he wants to ruin yours. Because he’s crazy. Because who the fuck cares?
But most of all, because he can. Because NYC is run by out of touch commie liberals, and he knows that if he is arrested, he’ll be fed and let out in the morning, but if you punch him in the teeth, your life will be ruined.
So when things change, people need to be put on notice. The bums aren’t going to read a sign that says “this subway now functions under Tennessee rules”, and if they do read it, they aren’t going to believe it. They’ve heard it all before as a bluff.
You have to actually punch someone in mouth and knock some teeth out. And then have the Tennessee cops show up and say, so what, you shouldn’t have pissed on his shoes, dumbass.
It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that Maduro was offered plenty of gentle offramps which would have preserved his dignity, lifestyle, etc, if not his pride.
But he didn’t take them, because everything is a bluff … until it isn’t.
Maduro is a head on a spike. A signal that the ground truth of how to deal with America has changed.
A signal that both violence, and personal consequences, are no longer off the table.
Because the whole reason for the existence of governments is to wield organized violence instead of the disorganized kind.
Other nations will now be coming to the negotiating table with this example in mind.
America is tired of being your ATM.
Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-01-06.
Update, 8 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
April 6, 2026
QotD: Taylorism
Taylor was unpopular in his own day and is even less popular today, because his particular brand of optimization of the great living machine was all about stripping autonomy (or as Marx would say, “control and conscious direction“) from workers. But the particular kind of optimization he advocated is less important than the conceptual breakthrough that while a nail factory and a car factory might look very different on the surface, they are both governed by the same set of abstract laws: laws of time and motion, concurrency, bottlenecks, worker motivation and so on. A master of those laws could optimize a nail factory, and then go on to optimize a car factory, and could do both without knowing very much at all about nails or cars.
Who could have a problem with that? Even I don’t think it’s entirely wrong — I may have misgivings about the sheer volume of people going into fields like management consulting, but I’ll admit that there remains alpha in asking a smart and incisive outsider to take a look at your operation and tell you what seems crazy. The trouble comes with confusing that sporadic, occasional sanity-check with the actual business of leading a team of people who are working together to achieve an objective. Because, get this, it’s impossible to lead such a team without a deep understanding of the details of every person’s tasks.
It’s surreal to me that this point has to be made, yet somehow it does. If the team you lead makes nails, you need to know everything there is to know about making nails. If the team you lead operates a restaurant, you need to be an expert, not in “management”, but in restaurants. If the team you lead sells mortgage-backed derivatives, you better know a heck of a lot about finance in general, mortgages in particular, the art of sales, and the specific world of selling financial instruments. There are a thousand reasons why this is true, but consider just one: a subordinate is failing at a task, and tells you that it isn’t because he’s lazy or unqualified but because the task is unexpectedly difficult. How on earth can a manager evaluate this claim without being able to do the job himself?
There’s another, very different reason managers need to be experts in whatever it is their team is doing, and it has to do with morale. A subordinate in any sort of hierarchical organization needs to see that his superior can do his own job as well or better than he can. Almost everybody gets this. In a high-pressure commercial kitchen, if a chef or sous-chef doesn’t like the performance of one of their line cooks, they will often leap in, take over that cook’s station, and begin “expediting.” This has a dual purpose: it both relieves a genuine production bottleneck, and also acts as a showy demonstration of prowess, reminding everybody that they got to be the boss through excellence. At the better tech companies, those managing software engineers are always former engineers themselves, and often the very best of the lot. Just like a chef would do, an engineering manager needs to be able to seize a computer and begin expediting under pressure, both to solve a real problem and as a dominance display. But it’s not just about keeping the troops in line, it’s about inspiring them. Nothing motivates a soldier like seeing his commander leading the charge, weapon in hand.1
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-28.
- This shows up in places you wouldn’t expect to. I was once cast in a show, and quickly came to understand that our director could (and often did) leap onto the stage, snatch a script out of somebody’s hand, and play their part better than they could. For any part. Before he did this to me, I found him annoying and bossy. Afterwards, I would follow him into the Somme.
Update, 7 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
April 5, 2026
QotD: The structure of a typical polis government
Because this week we’re interested in the politeia of a polis, that’s going to mean we’re mostly focused on the politai, the citizens, who we discussed last time as one of the key building blocks of the polis. Now, as we noted last time, it’s important to keep in mind that the politai are not all of the people in the polis or indeed even very many of them: women, children, resident foreigners, native members of non-citizen free underclasses and slaves were all set outside the politai and often had no means of gaining entrance. We’re going to talk about all of those folks in more depth in the third part, where we’ll look at the status layer-cake of polis society. But for now I just want to note that all of those people are there, even if they won’t figure very prominently in this discussion of the structures of polis government.
Now we’ll explore this question of how a polis was governed: first laying out the standard elements of a polis constitution, which as we’ll discuss were surprisingly similar from one polis to the next. Then we’ll deal with variations in how those elements are structured, which the Greeks understood to define the differences in the three kinds of constitution that a polis might normally have: oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Then […] we’ll look at what sort of magistrates a polis might have and what their jobs might be as well as the structure of the legal system a polis might have.
THis is going to mean that we’re discussing the “constitutions” of poleis, but I want to be really clear here at the start that these are almost never written constitutions. So when I say “constitution”, understand that we mean this in the broad sense of “the actual makeup of the state’s institutions” rather than in the narrow sense of “a formal set of instructions for the running of the state”. Some poleis did actually have the latter (the oldest we have that I know of is a constitution established by Ptolemy I Soter for Kyrene in 322; the fact that this is a constitution dictated by a king to a subordinated polis should signal how odd it is), but they seem to have been very rare.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIa: Politeia in the Polis”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-17.
April 4, 2026
QotD: Protect us from “disinformation”, Big Brother!
Troy Westwood @TroyWestwood
The only thing more important than “free speech” is protecting society from disinformation.Troy is trying to sound enlightened, but unfortunately he has the IQ of a lobster. “The only thing more important than ‘free speech’ is protecting society from disinformation.”
Translation: “I’m terrified of ideas I don’t like, so please, Big Brother, put a nanny filter on everyone else’s brain … just to keep us all safe, of course.”
Nothing says “I trust the marketplace of ideas” quite like demanding a government-approved Ministry of Truth to decide what’s true for the rest of us. Bonus points for implying that the plebs can’t possibly sort fact from fiction without an elite class holding their hand.
Truly the hallmark of a deep thinker. Admitting you don’t believe people are capable of handling freedom, then dressing it up as noble concern for society.
If free speech is dangerous, the most dangerous speech of all is the one declaring that some authority should get to silence the rest. But don’t worry, comrade, they’ll only censor the bad information. Promise.
Another swing and a miss for Troy.
Martyupnorth, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-28.
April 3, 2026
QotD: The Great Purge
Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.
The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.
This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.
The Z Man, “What Comes Next”, The Z Blog, 2020-08-03.
April 2, 2026
QotD: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain
Which makes sense if you think about it. When everybody’s snitching on everybody else, shameless is the only way to live. Everybody’s guilty of something, so own it — being, of course, perpetually prepared to snitch anyone and everyone else at a moment’s notice if someone drops the dime on you. Also, if you have to stand in line six hours to maybe get a few potatoes, damn it, you’re gonna get those potatoes. It doesn’t matter if you like potatoes, or have any possible use for potatoes at the present time. You’re going to take every single spud you can get your hands on, plus steal anything that isn’t nailed down, because you never know when you’ll get another chance.
As it turns out, overabundance creates the same conditions. When you’ve been standing in line for six hours with 1,000 of your new best friends just to get some tampons — and you’re a guy, you don’t need tampons, but you can always barter them for something — you’re not going to scruple to do anything and everything to get them. Indeed you want people to know Ivan’s got some tampons, because that’s how the black market works …
… anyway, as I say, we’re not in line for six hours, but we are perpetually at least under the threat of surveillance. And not from the Feds — just as Ivan’s not worried about the KGB, but rather his neighbors, so we don’t have to worry about the Feebs monitoring us. Instead, it’s that Basic College Girl with the iPhone. She’s not filming you, of course, she’s filming herself, but there you are anyway, in the background, doing whatever. Under those conditions — and when everyone’s volunteering the most intimate details of their lives on Fakebook and Twatter — shameless is the only way to live.
In other words, thanks to constant social media “surveillance”, it has gone in the blink of an eye from “It didn’t happen unless someone caught it on film” to “It’s all on film anyway, so fuck it, I’m gonna get mine”. I used to see this all the time in class. Basic College Girls will lie straight to your face, for any reason or no reason. They’ll do it on spec, just to see if you bite. More importantly, they’ll tell you such obvious, easily disproven whoppers that you start wondering if they’re having a schizoid break. You have to know I know you’re lying, right? That Dead Grandma Story is very sad, but you have pictures of yourself all over Twitter drunk at the sorority formal, when you told me you were at Nana’s funeral.
It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t care. Because somehow I’m the asshole for not believing them, despite the evidence of my own lying eyes.
Severian, “Friday Male Bag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-03.
