14 April 2026
The Search for the Other
The circumlunar flight in April 2026 clearly exposed the crisis of the idea of space exploration.
Such a flight around the Moon does not require humans at all—they could have sent dogs. The spacecraft was launched despite critical safety issues. Trump gave the order—they took the risk, eager to please. In exactly the same way, space launches in the 1960s were organized for propaganda, when the United States and Soviet Russia were trying to prove whether capitalism or socialism was more economically successful. In Russia, however, there was no socialism—there was capitalism, only in a state form.
The 2026 lunar flight was a promotional, propagandistic act, which only underscored that the grand plans formed in the 1960s were never fulfilled.
But there is a more important aspect.
Spaceflight was a symbol of freedom and knowledge. It also promised imminent and meaningful achievements—like teaching a donkey to read the Qur’an. But in the end, it became a powerful military machine, oncology, a parasite on Tsiolkovsky and Zander. The same is true of the internet. Perhaps people would already be living on the Moon if money had not been spent on war. Now the rocket is прежде всего a means to ruin, to turn a potential opponent into a failed state. I can’t quite find the right English word—cripple? A crippled country, an invalid state. Exactly like Roman raids on barbarians, Mongol raids on the Rus, Russian princes attacking one another, and so on. All “preventive wars,” plus a bit of profit. For some, war is war—but for many it is precisely super-profit, and not only in Russia.
But there is an even more important question.
What did spaceflight symbolize?
It symbolized an encounter with the Other.
Robert Sheckley sarcastically noted that for the bourgeois everything is the other way around: he wants there to be a Hilton on Jupiter, with the usual set of services. The Other is discovered only to be destroyed and replaced with one’s own pathetic comfort.
Yet one need not fly into space to encounter the Other. The Other is always nearby—and not absent within oneself either. But trying to organize a dialogue between a millionaire and a professor is as laborious and hopeless as teaching a donkey to read the Qur’an. And the professor is no more interested in speaking with a millionaire or a cleaner. He cannot even speak with another professor, or with his own wife—unless he is a professor like Einstein, and not a bourgeois professor, seeking not the Other but the same comfort and security.
Money is a secondary question. The primary question concerns goals and the ideals that determine them. The ideal of universal brotherhood is absent everywhere—even among today’s humanists.
There has been enormous progress in medicine—and what of it? In England, the most expensive medicines and procedures have simply been excluded from public health insurance. Too expensive—there isn’t enough for everyone.
Science fiction once imagined that life on the Moon might be easier for some disabled people, because of lower gravity. But is everything possible being done now to ease their lives? No.
The ideal of the intelligentsia—of people like Tsiolkovsky—is not the ideal of the bourgeois, who is selfish by nature. The bourgeois enriches himself through inequality in the distribution of resources; he makes business out of scarcity. He benefits from the growth of scarcity—in knowledge, health, security—not from its disappearance.
Rockets and drones have become primarily military technologies. It was not the military who invented axes or rockets. The same applies to the internet. The military would not have had the imagination to commission the internet—but they had enough intelligence to appropriate it.
Starlink is a great achievement. And what of it? It is used as a weapon, as a means of collective punishment against entire countries, including the one I live in.
Those living in Russia cannot access my website because the whole world is blocked there and a VPN is required—but VPN users are not allowed onto my site. And those living in Ukraine cannot access my site because all of Russia is blocked there.
Are we to justify this by war? Shall we also justify the killing of civilians by war? This is already being done—by everyone, both aggressors and victims. I do not justify it; I do not justify any violence.
The internet must exist. I need it desperately, like air. The speeds we have now are enough for me. Can Starlink give me internet that Russian authorities cannot block? I don’t know. Perhaps technically this is already possible—but kept secret, because Starlink is not interested in overcoming the informational slavery in which I live, not in breaking through the fence built around me. It is interested in erecting a second fence—I have seen such double fences side by side in garden cooperatives. Both democratic bourgeois and dictatorial bourgeois are united in their fear of me, of the self-growing logos. I pity them—but I do not approve.
If Russia suddenly became democratic at the level of the United States, Google Books would still not open for me. Absurd, anti-legal copyright laws—granting libraries and publishers rights over books from Sumer to the present—would remain. Pay, and you will be admitted. Want to read a scholarly monograph? Pay—or join a circle of professors, but to do that you must pass a loyalty test. The system is not ideal, but what can one do.
And then AI lectures me (though I did not ask) that one cannot compare Bucha and Gaza, because in Bucha there were no battles and it was a clash between states, whereas Gaza is not a state. But when Hind Rajab was killed—along with her family and the medics rushing to help—there were no battles. It was a massacre. There was no one with weapons nearby. Moreover, Gaza is worse. In Bucha it was a war crime by a single deranged officer (other occupied towns did not see such atrocities). In Gaza it is a war crime that has been and continues to be carried out—both by orders from above and by the malice of officers and soldiers.
Gaza is not a state—but what difference does that make to a girl whose mouth slowly filled with blood, whose half-decomposed body was recovered only two days later when the shelling stopped? And if you value the state so highly—as a bourgeois would, since the state is the roof over his business—then why are you silent about the 170 Iranian schoolgirls killed in the state of Iran by the state of the United States? Silence is a reasonable tactic—after a few years everything is forgotten and moves into a dusty basement, where Auschwitz—real, not mythical—lies alongside Shatila, Song My, Grozny. The bourgeois know how to remain silent. I do not.
In the killing of Rajab, and in the killing of Iranian schoolgirls, not only Trump and the military are guilty, but also all those bourgeois and their hired workers who invented AI, Starlink, and tons of similar deadly goods. Metal does not kill—its inventors and manufacturers do.
This is why the flight around the Moon inspires in me no delight, only sadness. It testifies to a further decline of democracy in the United States, to growing ignorance, to collectivism—for how can a single person melt at the sight of the Moon, experience “moonjoy”? That is only possible in a group, which is why a collective was sent. And this collective—whether produced by Putin’s system or Trump’s—will destroy the Other, and even anyone in whom it suspects the potential to become Other.
13 April 2026
The idea of order, of ordering, is the principal enemy of humanity, creativity, and freedom. Even the idea of safety is secondary to the idea of order: what is considered “orderly” is what is safe. Everything dangerous is treated as a violation of order.
But what is order from the perspective of communication? Two approaches are possible.
Order as something simple, intelligible — something that explains, directs, points the way. And, conversely, order as something that unsettles the familiar structure of the world; order that provokes reflection, invites doubt, calls forth the creation of the new.
The first kind of order is communication as command, as instruction — a dominant form, flowing from above downwards. It is the order of monologue, neither expecting nor accepting a reply.
The second kind of order is one that calls for response, that longs for dialogue, that disrupts the established norm.
An image of communication grounded in the first kind of order may be found in the speech of Trump. It is the speech of the advertising slogan — simplifying, and by that very simplification exaggerating, amplifying to the point of hyperbole:
“I am the most intelligent person in the world.”
“I have stopped a hundred wars.”
“America is respected only because I am American.”
These are not verbatim quotations, but a parody of Trump’s manner of speaking. Parody strives towards a different kind of order — one that demands thought, that seeks resemblance within dissimilarity.
The antithesis of Trump’s model of communication is that of Noam Chomsky. A professional academic, he speaks in a highly ordered and lucid manner — yet Trump would not understand a single word of it. This is a kind of speech that calls one to think, whereas Trump recognises only agreement with himself, for such is the order: I am the boss, you assent.
In many religions of the Middle East, God overcomes chaos and fashions order from it. An exception may be found in the biblical account, where God does not vanquish chaos, but rather makes use of it to create an order of the utmost complexity — one in which creativity, love, and even dissent are possible: an order deeply unsafe, profoundly intricate. This is the world of Shakespeare. The world of Trump is the world of the slogan.
Many people claim to support both Ukraine and Israel. This strikes me as irrational. Israel is doing to Palestine and Lebanon much the same as Russia is doing to Ukraine: seeking to seize territory through overwhelming military superiority while disregarding ethical constraints. Although the territories in question are far smaller than Ukraine, the scale of Israel’s actions appears considerably more severe. The tragedy in Bucha, where several dozen people were killed, is overshadowed by the tragedies in Gaza and Lebanon, where the number of civilian casualties—often involving what could be described as extreme brutality—runs into the thousands.
Just imagine—ChatGPT had the nerve to contradict me, even though I hadn’t asked for it. It wrote
:“In Bucha, the matter concerned the deliberate killing of civilians away from active hostilities. In Gaza and Lebanon, a substantial proportion of casualties arises from intense fighting in densely populated areas.”
Classic wartime propaganda. Pure sophistry. In Gaza and Lebanon as well, a considerable number of casualties were not the result of any genuine fighting, but rather the killing of civilians under the pretext of “combat”.
12 April 2026
Americans came to San Diego specifically to watch the Artemis landing. One spectator explained, “It’s history!”
No, it’s not history. What was the mission’s goal? They talk about one thing: the longest flight. But flight range can’t be a goal and doesn’t constitute progress. It’s a quantitative, not a qualitative, achievement.
What scientific experiments were conducted? Not a word about them. Only the astronauts’ emotions. Only the record-breaking distance of the “run.” This isn’t a scientific or technical achievement; it’s public entertainment. Like the wars in Iran and Lebanon, it’s a way to distract from real problems. The worst thing isn’t that Trump is trying to distract, but that his calculation is correct: people want entertainment, not accurate knowledge.
Is it because they lack education, an insufficient “cultural level”? Are those who don’t educate others to blame? No, it’s the personal choice of each of those who consider quantity, not quality, to be history, who consider something meaningless important simply because it’s large in size. As far as I can see, the Europeans are completely uninterested in this flight, unlike in the 1960s, and don’t attach the slightest significance to it. Unfortunately, they’re right.
Truth disappears wherever double standards appear. My friends are my allies, my enemy’s’ friends are his proxies.
Truth, however, has a more terrible enemy: when standards disappear altogether, when the absence of standards becomes the standard. The denial of ethics becomes ethics. This is what whataboutism is.
I kill, but everyone kills or would like to kill. I lie, but everyone lies or, deep down, considers lying the best means of survival. I am an egotist, but everyone is an egotist.
What is most terrible now is not the brazen, unpunished atrocities. Atrocities have always existed and will continue to exist. There has never really been any “international system of law” — only the appearance of one. Nor is the most terrible thing even the deathly silence of Europeans about these atrocities.
At most, people are alarmed that Trump might withdraw from NATO. The idea that NATO should exclude Trump, that the UN should exclude the United States, and so on, does not even arise. (And yes, of course, Russia should also be excluded from the UN.)
The most disturbing thing is that anti-Trump rhetoric in the United States — and there is plenty of it — appeals to crude, almost animal self-interest. One should not wage war in Iran because petrol and buckwheat will become more expensive, not because it is wrong to kill people.
As for Russia, Ukraine, and Israel, I will say nothing. That lies beyond reality. The amount of falsehood and self-deception there is such that it is impossible to speak of sanity.
A person’s normality is measured by their ability and need to say that lying and killing are unacceptable — regardless of nationality, beliefs, or whatever threat a person may pose to others. To say it, and to propose discussing it. The irrational, of course, will refuse any discussion — that is precisely what makes them irrational. If any rational people can be found, that is simple human happiness.
27 March 2026
I was asked about euthanasia—in connection with the Spanish case, a very typical one, and similar to a recent Dutch case in which a young woman applied for euthanasia five times and withdrew her request six times.
At a moment when moral principles can and perhaps must be reconsidered from the ground up, one thing matters above all. There is only one innate human right: the right to life.
One may add “the right to a dignified life”, but this is superfluous. Why superfluous? Because so long as the right to life itself is not recognised, it is premature to speak of anything else.
So long as killing is permitted in the name of order, self-defence, and the like—so long as people are being killed in Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine, Iran in the name of stability, security for the chosen, and so forth—it is not appropriate to speak of a right to euthanasia. It is hypocrisy, and bourgeois in the worst sense of the word. Let everything collapse around me, while I retain the right to know nothing of it, to live in bliss and to die in bliss. I have the right not to see pickets and demonstrations in the streets; I have the right to attend lectures where nothing is said about war or injustice. I have the right to eubios—a blissful existence, the happy life of an animal.
The second consideration follows from the first. The right to die without pain—let us suppose it exists—does not entail an obligation on anyone to assist you in doing so. There was a time when attempting suicide was considered a crime—but that does not mean suicide should now be treated as a service, in which the provider (the physician) cannot refuse the customer.
A doctor, too, has a right to blessedness—not the blissful life of an animal, but the fulfilled life of a human being, which includes the refusal to kill and to assist in suicide.
24 March 2026
Trumpism is a unique phenomenon. Its essence has been described as “the destruction of international law” and “the end of the familiar system of international relations.” This is inaccurate and superficial. Trump has destroyed language itself as a means of communication. Trump’s statements are completely unreliable. This is not just lying. It is inconsistency in everything—both in falsehood and in truth.
Trump’s language differs from the demagoguery of ordinary politicians, differs from propaganda, and differs from the mockery typical of Putin. Demagoguery, propaganda, and mockery are consistent. Trump’s language lacks consistency.
Trump’s speech brings to mind the theorem about monkeys that, by randomly striking keys, could—given eternity—type out all of Shakespeare’s plays. But Trump, in contrast, does not aim to produce anything rational. He consistently generates texts that do not form a coherent whole. In essence, he turns all parts of speech into adjectives: great, smartest, strongest. These are adjectives without nouns—definitions without what is being defined, frames without paintings.
22 March 2026
Art as imitation, realism, mimesis is an old idea, but it's not a creative one. Imitation is kitsch, banal, and vulgar. It's a desire to stop the river. "Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!" "Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!." It's deceitful. It's precisely what's frozen that seems beautiful. Such art fears development, movement, life. It's an art oriented toward domination. Any movement is perceived as disobedience, a potential danger. The world is as if nailed to a cross—fixed in painting, sculpture, music; it's static and repeatable, reproducible.
Art as creativity seeks a reality that is by no means apparent. Reality is used as a foundation, from which something is fashioned that allows for dialogue with oneself and with others.
For example. One site, two different compositions. The meaning is elusive, it is changeable, and that is precisely why it is productive for the one who looks at the image.
For example.
21 March 2026
Communication doesn't always create something in common. A person communicates with themselves, but not in order to create a community with themselves. The community already exists, a complete, 100% community of a person with their inner self, their soul. Communicating with oneself realizes the potential inherent in this inner unity. On the contrary, communication as knowledge excludes the establishment of any community between the knower and the known. The scientist has nothing in common with what they study, and cannot have anything in common. Pantheism and Romanticism attempt to correct this. The opposition between the knowing subject and the known object seems false, inhuman, and soulless. Quite the contrary: such an opposition protects the uniqueness and freedom of the human being.
16 March 2026
Trump is called a fascist. A man who replaced international law with the rule of force. But it wasn't the fascist Mussolini or the Nazi Hitler who dropped atomic bombs. Could Trump drop an atomic bomb on Iran? Could Netanyahu drop an atomic bomb on Iran?
Yes.
After that, the Iranians will, of course, surrender, just as the Japanese did. Democracy will be established in the country, just as it was established in Japan.
After that, Putin will, with a clear conscience, drop an atomic bomb on Kyiv. Israel on Beirut and Cairo. The world will have slightly fewer states and much more stability. It will be divided among the nuclear-armed countries.
15 March 2026
God is not at rest; God is not rest. God is peace. "Peace" is the absence of movement. "Peace" is absolute movement, compared to which light crawls like a turtle.
We live on a train driven by God. We can jump off the train. Then we will have rest. The rest of death. Eternal rest, lying on the beach, languishing.
It's scary to rush on a train hurtling at unimaginable speed. This is a positive fear, creative, the fear of God.
Sometimes we suddenly see a completely motionless world. This doesn't happen because everything has stopped. This happens in the moments when the world outside the train window finally begins to move at the speed of the Creator.
We would like to drive the train ourselves. To control the passengers and the route. We don't trust God. We think evil comes from an incompetent driver, not from us.
That's where God splits into two and comes as Jesus. He comes not to steer and rule, but to freeze on the Cross.
Peter begs Jesus: "Don't!" Peter isn't worried about Jesus, but about himself. Jesus is his patron. If they kill Jesus, they'll kill Peter too. His dreams, rather selfish and dictatorial, will collapse. "To take up the cross" means to accept life as a train, driven by God, not us. Not to rush to be the engineer. To accept hopelessness. To accept that I'm not the first. Like Jesus—he spoke only of the Father, only for the Father's sake, and He Himself took the nails in His hands and froze on the Cross. And I must freeze. At this moment I die. This death leads to resurrection. Not to disappearance. I disappear when I rush to command. When I stop, God moves me with His Spirit. This is supersonic, superhuman speed, overcoming hatred, inhumanity, discord.
2 March 2026
On February 28, 2026 three missiles hit Minab in Iran. One missile hit a school and more than 100 girls perished.
American Tim Hawkins said, according to BBC: "The protection of civilians is of utmost importance, and we will continue to take all precautions available to minimise the risk of unintended harm."
This justification means that the tragedy was «unintended». Intention was to bomb army base which is located about 600m. from the school.
This is a pseudo-justification. It is based on the assumption that intention I very important. But any murderer candy that his intentions were good. Any aggressor has a good intentions. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
BBC gives another justification:
«One user wrote: "Even if the regime did not directly target schools, the deaths of children in Minab remain the responsibility of the Islamic Republic. People have no shelters, the internet is cut, phone lines are down, and there has been no warning to keep children out of school. In these conditions, the minimum requirement should be to stay at home."
The attack was unexpected. It was unexpected to the degree that all leaders of Iran were killed.
BBC forgot the best (although false) justification: Iran made a "live shield", placing the army base in the vicinity of a school.
All these reasons can be summed up in Aesop’s fable about a wold and a lamb and English proverb "Might makes right".
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1l7rvqq51eo
5 February 2026
The concept of "communication" encompasses very diverse phenomena. You can tie a dog and a cat together with a rope. There will be a connection between them. They will be dependent on each other. Similarly, you can tie two corpses together and throw them from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. There will be a connection, a communication between them.
Communication of such type is purely mechanical and is determined by the laws of gravity. Such mechanical communication ("connection," "contact") is also abundant in relationships between living people. True, this is not always evident not joyfully recognized.
It is not always a negative phenomenon, of course; it is often simply the basis of existence, which goes unnoticed, just as the existence of trillions of bacteria within a person goes unnoticed. But such a mechanical connection can be precisely communication, in which the other person is treated as an object. This is precisely the inhumanity of the relationship between slave owner and slave.
А slave, however, can rebel, unlike a corpse. However, his rebellion is not communication in the strict sense. It is a monologue. Here we come to the next type of communication. The second type of communication can be described as "biological communication." A plant, an animal, or a human sends an impulse ("monologue") and monitors the result.
This impulse may be necessary to seek warmth, light, shelter, water, food, reproduction, or entertainment. This is not a monologue in the strict sense—a monologue is merely a truncated dialogue.
Dialogue is precisely the type of communication specific to humans. Human self-awareness can be considered a "brain hallucination," but it cannot be denied that humans are capable of a type of communication that is absent—or, more accurately, has not yet been identified—in other animals, including humans' closest relatives.
This communication is far from merely verbal, completely unnecessary for survival and reproduction, "purposeless," "a-pragmatic." This communication doesn't always create community, but it also doesn't always create personality. This communication can also be a destructive force, generating "evil" in its specific human sense.