These are all stories from the world that no longer exists. These “tiger” parents are preparing their children for a long-gone economy. I don’t care if they are Chinese, American, or Alpha Centauri. They are behind the times. They have already lost.

The world that currently exists requires internal motivation. The disciplinarian society is gone. We can debate if that’s good or bad but the fact is, it’s now an anachronism. These tiger moms are chasing a dead dragon.

Everything today is about inner motivation. You have to have the fire inside for whatever it is you do. There’s no demand for obedient, quiet drones. You need to have a very strong sense of self. We are in the economy of selfhood.

I spent all evening yesterday telling my kid to be done with the studying already and just go and play. She refused and at bedtime showed me a timesheet of her own design where she recorded how much time she had spent on each field of study. This is not assigned at school. I have never asked her to do this. I have never asked her to study at all. I’m not doing anything to foster it. But I do intuitively know how to raise for inner motivation. You do it by pursuing the exact opposite strategy from tiger-momming.

We live in an extremely permissive, self-indulgent society. Maybe I wish it were less so. But it won’t be. The boundary between happiness and unhappiness in such a society lies inside everybody individually. You need to build an inner caparace for your fire and police its boundaries maniacally in order not to spill like a puddle of grey misery. Everybody will have to do it for themselves or they are majorly screwed. As a parent, you need to foster inner strength, not break it.

This is the problem with the socialist mentality in a nutshell:

In the hours before he wrote this post, Senator Sanders (or his aide) spent money on whatever he wanted to spend it on. And he didn’t spend money on whatever he didn’t feel like. Yet when Jeff Bezos did the same, it’s supposed to be a problem.

It’s his money, little dude. It’s vulgar to bitch about how people spend their money. Raising the issue of jewelry Bezos bought for his wife is extremely vulgar. Stop counting other people’s money. Stop trying to tell them how to spend it. If somebody is willing to donate to the causes you care about, show gratitude. If they aren’t willing, it’s their prerogative.

I’m not a huge fan of Bezos but I despise these attempts to spend somebody else’s money.

My friends, if you are into the mystery / mommy lit genre, you need to be reading Alice Feeney. She’s the best on the market right now. Her new novel My Husband’s Wife is excellent. There are surprises on every page. The novel is very well-plotted and hammers home the idea that there’s nothing more important than family. Don’t be a stupid workaholic. Don’t cheat. Don’t be a prima donna who’s jumping from bed to bed in search of excitement. Go home and be with your family, the novel says. Hold your child close and thank heavens that you have a child.

Feeney writes a lot about the children scarcity. This is a common thread among her books but My Husband’s Wife is her best. It’s really a perfectly plotted mystery. Scorned wives, betrayals, a shady tech company that promises to predict the date of your death. Massive amounts of enjoyment.

I don’t have a work husband, although I’m not as opposed to the concept as many people are. But I do have work daddies. My Associate Deans are usually my work daddies, and I’m already on my third one, with the exact same kind of relationship with each of them. I activate protective feelings in them. It’s a good thing because it makes for a great work process.

Many people at my department treat me like their mom, including much older colleagues. I hate it and can’t wait to rehome them to somebody else.

Conservatives are a lot more intellectually adventurous than their opponents these days. On the negative side, this sometimes leads to nuttiness and conspiracy theorizing. On the positive, it creates interesting ideas.

There was a lot of exciting thinking coming from the left until mid 2010s. Zygmunt Bauman wrote his best stuff in the period between 2000 and 2006. Dardot and Laval published The New Way Of The World: On Neoliberal Society in 2013. Sennett’s The Culture of New Capitalism is from 2006. Jim McGuigan came out with Cool Capitalism in 2009. Patricia Ventura published Neoliberal Culture in 2013. César Rendueles’s Sociophobia is also from 2013. But that’s it. 2013 was the last good year for leftist thinkers. Since then, bupkes. There’s such fear to run afoul of the increasingly severe speech codes that nobody is saying anything interesting or insightful at all.

This vacuum created a lot of space for conservative thinkers to come to the fore. Diego Fusaro, Renaud Camus, Jean-Claude Michéa, Patrick Deneen, Byung-Chul Han, Paul Kingsnorth, Curtis Yarvin. There’s a lot of great stuff coming out. All of it points away from liberalism. Ideas are brewing.

I have no idea if the left can come back from its self-imposed terror of words. It would be great if it did. I wouldn’t be anywhere without the philosophers I listed above, and I want people to think and explore in different directions. But the current stage in the evolution of thought is what I described. Great ebullience on the right and complete silence on the left.

A happy, chirpy administrator was giving a presentation today about yet another increase in federal compliance rules. The professors in the room were not excited about the need to redo the entirety of our materials by the end of April to be in compliance with this new round of insane compliance.

The chirpy administrator tried everything she could think of to get us as enamored of the proposed as she is.

“When I think about these different folders I have to create for compliance,” she twaddled excitedly, “I like to think of them as separate but equal. And that really helps!”

I hope somebody helps her figure out how great it is for her that it isn’t year 2021.

Now that I have expressed my philosophical objections to a moral framework grounded entirely in the concept of choice, I’ll be glad if people don’t appeal to it in discussions. I don’t find the idea that Choice is King either interesting or productive. This doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate individual choice at all. I do but I do not believe that it is the only factor that matters.

The previous post offers a clear example of what I mean. Cassie and Puff engaged in perverted, disgusting behaviors. We are not in a court of law, so it doesn’t matter to us which part of their activities was legal under the existing legislation. I propose that we discuss this issue outside of the framework of who consented to what. It’s simply not interesting.

During the #MeToo freakout, we were all hopelessly bogged down in the issue of consent. This made it impossible to discuss the larger and much more important issue of why so many situations arose where women (and a couple of men) sincerely thought they had been mistreated, even though there seemed to be consent.

Consent and choice are sucking all the air out of the room on many different topics. To see things from a slightly different perspective requires that we all look beyond the raging, overinflated egos and see what else is happening beyond the “But I wanna!” of individual choice.

In addition to what I said about the Netflix documentary about Sean Combs, the makers of the series suggest that Combs was acquitted of the charges relating to his longtime girlfriend Cassie Ventura because the jurors were fans and couldn’t bear to convict the mega star.

It’s true that the two jurors interviewed for the film behaved on camera like lovelorn groupies. But nobody would have convicted on the Cassie charges. She spent a decade in a relationship with Puff. There’s a mountain of emails where she begs him for every perversion to which he subjected her. In the moral framework we currently inhabit, no objections can be raised once we know that she consented.

We have turned consent into the cornerstone of our morality, and Cassie not only consented but insisted. Our worship of consent makes us unable to say that something is perverted. We can’t say that it’s immoral and disgusting. As long as everybody consented, we are supposed to say that it’s all good. A loving sex act between husband and wife is supposed to carry the same moral value as Combs’ freakoffs with a crowd of eager male and female whores. God forbid, we say that any consensual action is morally superior to any other. No, no, no. Everything is equal to everything else. The only morality is that of choice. If people exercised their consumerist right to choose, nobody is supposed to have any objections.

Consumerism is our God. A minimal prison sentence for Combs is unavoidable. It’s a miracle he got convicted of anything at all.

I can bet any amount of money that there is no liberal on my campus who reads more than I do. I understand that he’s talking about general statistical trends. But trends get extrapolated onto individuals all the time. Many times when I’ve said I’m a conservative, people with maybe 1/10 of my readings started trying to condescend to me.

Since Zygmunt Bauman died, I have not found any remotely interesting ideas originating on the left. Nothing, zip, zilch, a vacuum.