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Announcement: On May 3rd, we will have a special guest for our paid-subscriber Zoom meetup: Ilya Khotimsky, translator of Russian economist Mikhail Khazin's Recollections of the Future: Modern Economic Ideas. I wrote about his summary of the book here. If you want to the chance to ask Ilya about the book, and Khazin's economics, you know what to do!I recently watched Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), in which Robert DeNiro plays a low-life psychopathic mafia parasite, Johnny Boy, who is coddled and protected by his friend Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel, past the point where any sane person would've broken Johnny Boy's legs purely out of principle. For those who haven't seen the film and don't want to, here's the plot summary: low-level mobster doesn't pay his boss, doesn't do anything of substance for the next couple weeks, then gets shot in the neck after telling said boss to his face that he's a sucker who's easy to rip off, and no, he's not going to pay him. Charlie, the actual main character, repeatedly makes excuses for Johnny Boy, vouching for him, spotting him a few dollars here and there, and believing he can get him to get his act together. After Johnny Boy's final confrontation with their mutual boss, Charlie tries to get Johnny Boy out of town until things cool down. It's while making their getaway that Johnny Boy gets shot in the neck, flailing around like a stuck pig, and Charlie gets shot in the arm. Roll credits.
Many writers and critics have recognized Gogol's deep influence on Russian, Ukrainian and world literature. Gogol's influence was acknowledged by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor and others.[9][10] Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé said: "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat."Some of the titles mentioned in the article, have been made into films, though mostly in Russian, for a list see this Wiki. If one searches the titel and then looks up video, it is possible to find some of them online. In general, the YouTube page that hosts the embedded video has many other Russian movies, though only some are with English subtitles.
"Being American, the neo-Freudians have no such conservative respect for culture; they are all too ready to tinker with its machinery of repression in the name of individual fulfillment."The Radical Progressive Party of Narcissus vs. The Dissident Right
— Rieff: Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.
"The elites of the emergent culture--if they do not destroy themselves and all culture with a dynamism they appear unable to control--are being trained in terminologies that have only the most tenuous relation to any historic culture or its incorporative self-interpretations."
— Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic
This is rarely observable or visible, however, as [the parents] often invest substantial effort into appearing to be a 'good parent' and grooming others to believe they are committed to their children while engaging privately in behaviours that are abusive, manipulative, intimidating, controlling, harmful, and/or undermining the other parent to family and friends.
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