On the other hand, the West pushed too far. The Crimean Peninsula is a historically Russian enclave; indeed, a place that even the best-known Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, argued shouldn’t have been cleaved from Russia when Khrushchev did so in 1954. Ukraine is the Slavic breadbasket. It is the home of Kievan Rus for god sakes! No Russian leader could ever survive another day in office if he did not act as if Ukraine was the reddest of redlines.
Read MoreWhy Bothness?
Why bothness?
Bothness is acknowledging you are unorthodox. It is having the humility to concede you are not pure, acknowledging that you are not 100%. But bothness is also knowing, feeling, and sharing as much as possible--in two domains.
Bothness isn’t just stopping at 50%. “Less than 100%” can mean 50%, surely, but it can also mean 99.999%. Those five nines mean a lot. Bothness is stretchy, real stretchy.
There are two basic rules of bothness: 1) bothness means two things, not three, not four—not everything; 2) bothness means two things that meet as two equals.
Read MoreAbsurdity and Discovering "Bothness"
But the older I get the more I gravitate to the absurd.
Indeed, it is absurd for people to tell you what you are not. To be so sure, to be so callously dogmatic about something--anything, to presume an entitlement to make decrees is absurd. I admit I can't profess I am 100%. On the other hand, no one can say I'm 0% Chinese. I'm somewhere in-between. But there is something remarkable going on here. And I don't want to miss it.
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