Clarissa's Blog

I considered doing the whole Marie Kondo thing but it’s useless. “Throw away everything that doesn’t give you joy”?

I grew up in the USSR. We had shortages of shoe laces. And food. And clothes. And toilet paper. And books. And scrunchies. Actually, scrunchies didn’t exist at all.

Everything gives me joy! You should have seen me when I bought a toilet paper roll stand. I was literally going nuts with joy. It was years ago, and I still get a warm and fuzzy feeling about the stand every day. Marie Kondo can’t help me. It will take a couple more generations for us to get ready to be Mariekondoed.

In the photo is my sparkly scrunchie collection. And yes, it gives me joy.

Tucker had a great segment today on how Purdue Pharma engineered the opioid crisis. You can never say enough about the issue for my liking, so I’m happy.

I don’t know, maybe Maddow is talking about the evil Sacklers, too. I haven’t been able to make myself watch her for a year.

Nobody even knows who the Sacklers are, yet they caused more deaths of human beings than Trump ever did. And so did Obama but that we do know, right?

At least, there is one journalist somewhere who managed to feel bad about mobbing the Covington kids:

The men, who looked to be in their 30s or 40s, maybe younger, were taunting the kids from Covington High. Perhaps thinking he had a message that would really resonate with kids in MAGA hats, the man who seems to be leading the group tells the kids to look up some videos on YouTube of Donald Trump kissing Rudy Giuliani. “Your president is a homosexual,” he yells out, probably, like me, expecting the kids to object.

And that is when I started to get confused, because the reaction from the boys wasn’t disgust or even protest. Instead, several of them spoke out, “Who cares?” “Yeah, who cares?”

“Your president is a homosexual,” the street preacher yells back. “You give faggots rights,” and then, the crowd of MAGA hat-wearing boys actually starts booing. “The Bible condemns homosexuality,” the street preacher yells, and one of the boys calls out, “They’re still human!”

Those bigoted Nazi religious fanatics! Defending gay people! How dare they!

The really funny thing is that there were real bigots in that video. A real hate group according to SPLC. Spewing homophobic and racist slurs. But people were so fixated on red hats that they somehow missed it all.

I suggest reading the whole linked article by a very liberal journalist because it shows what a crass liar the lionized Mr Phillips is. I so hope this would serve as a lesson and people will at least take a pause before jumping on the next outrage bandwagon.

“Daddy, are you taking me to the coffee shop?”

“No, Klara, I’m taking you to school.”

“Mommy takes me to the coffee shop. You are a parent, too! You need to take me!”

I have no idea where she got the “you are a parent, too” line.

And by the way, if I were looking for more clicks – like people have been suggesting – I would have written a post titled “Why you shouldn’t feel guilty for spending too much time on social media fighting Nazism.” That post would have been very popular.

What’s really disturbing about yesterday’s events is how many adults thought it was a good idea to form a huge Internet gang to bully a bunch of kids and even plot to destroy their entire futures.

Without even trying to find out what really happened or listening to the other side, a gang of self-righteous folks jumped to judgment about a bunch of kids and prepared to mete out punishment based on nothing whatsoever but their clothing choices. Because that was the reason why it became so easy to condemn and mob them without any pause for reflection. They wore baseball caps people don’t approve of.

This is not an isolated case. This is one person after another who gets mobbed and destroyed by an online mob of folks outraged about something they can’t even fully verbalize. And it gets worse. First, it became ok to mob people for something they may have done as teenagers. Then it became ok to mob actual teenagers. What’s next? Preteens? Toddlers? Let’s go all Michael Green and Co and pledge to destroy the prospects of every infant who looks like he might grow up to believe something we don’t like.

A lot of profit is gained from the formation of these angry FB or Twitter mobs. While you are posting on them, you are exploitable. The moment you exit the app, you switch off its access to its only product: you. So the app needs to keep you hooked by offering up these manufactured outrage stories. Plus, you contribute to creating the environment of fear where anybody can be accused of anything at any time. Are you sure you haven’t been? Go check your social media, fast, and in the process sell some product for somebody else and invest some time, the only valuable thing you have, to help somebody else make a profit.

But who cares about boring things such as profit or exploitation, right? It’s all worth it because you are doing something really important. You are fighting Nazism. And the very people who profit from your belief in this will conveniently manufacture proof that there is Nazism everywhere around you.

The whole thing is extremely pleasant, extremely addictive. It gives an easy and accessible sense of purpose in a world where you’d have to work really hard to figure one out yourself. But it’s the pleasure of a drug addict. The cost of the enjoyment is too high.

Putin is mentioned a lot less often on the state-owned, completely propagandistic Russian TV than in US media.

More importantly, the state-owned, completely propagandistic Russian TV doesn’t portray Putin nearly as omnipotent as the US media does.

Think about it. The entire cadre of Putin’s very experienced propagandists doesn’t even try to sell to the bamboozled Russian public (60% of which has no source of news other than the propagandistic state TV, by the way) the image of Putin as the brilliant genius of foreign policy that Rachel Maddow easily sells to her audience every day.

People in Russia would pee themselves with laughter if they could see an episode of Maddow’s show or read a single issue of the New York Times. Not only because the quality of life in Russia has dropped off a cliff since 2016, which kind of undermines the “Putin owns the president of the US” narrative, but also because the whole thing needs the kind of gullibility that no Russian is capable of.

It pains me that we are making such massive fools of ourselves for absolutely no reason other than to express, for the millionth time, our dislike of Trump. It just isn’t worth it.