Why do very educated, relatively well-off people vote for low-intelligence, bumbling morons like Darializa Avila, Mamdani, or all the rest of them?

They don’t want to be people on whom changes are inflicted. They prefer to see themselves as people inflicting the changes. In the incoming high-tech favela, they want to associate themselves with the high-tech side and not the favela side. They believe that Darializa is their ticket out of victimhood and into control. “It’s not something that others did to me. It is what I did to others” is the positioning they seek. If it’s coming anyways, why not associate oneself with the forceful nature of the inevitable?

Of course, in the world that is being ushered in by Darializas and Co., there’s no place for the very people who are voting for her. They are three levels of subjectivation above the favela part of the new societal order and one level of subjectivation behind its high-tech part. They’re stuck in the middle between these two extremes, so they’re doomed to be tossed away as soon as the transformation they so hopefully enable is completed.

A DSA candidate who recently won a primary in New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier believes that schools should be abolished. You know why? Because, as she correctly says, they are an inevitable foundation of the nation-state, and she hates the nation-state:

Avila Chevalier supports abolishing traditional schooling, describing schools as “parallel to prisons,” tied to “settler colonialism and white supremacy/racism,” and linked to “genocidal practices of the nation-state.”

Back in 2013, I explained on this blog that the nation state is being taken down, together with all the forms of welfare that it provides, including policing and public education. Of course, Avila Chevalier also supports police and prison abolition. She says directly that this is due to her hatred of the nation-state.

I knew that this was going to happen over a decade ago. This all sounded insane back when I first said it, but only 13 years later, New Yorkers go and vote for a politician who advances these ideas.

My new prediction is that soon enough, the Democrats will run candidates alongside whom Avila Chevalier will look downright moderate. They will offer a hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated and extremely bizarre measures that can only be understood if you realize that they have one common goal. That goal is the change of the form of statehood in which we live.

I can’t stop thinking about the terrible waste of it. Charlie is dead. His tiny children are orphaned. Tyler Robinson is likely going to be convicted, and rightfully so. And for what? So that Lance Twiggs could play with makeup for a couple of months?

Instead of accepting that this is a phase, youthful experimentation, nothing serious, which is exactly what it was, these young people were taught to turn Lance’s play acting into an existential issue that demanded a blood sacrifice.

Little boys would always clamber into mom’s high-heeled shoes and pretend that they were mom. Little girls would make a beard out of cotton wool and strut around with dad’s briefcase. Kids always did it. It was funny, a game. Then, all of a sudden, we decided that this play acting had to lead to medication, surgeries, and a campaign of societal bullying.  Is it any wonder that some impressionable young people took it seriously? This does not remove an iota of responsibility from Tyler Robinson. The guy is trash, and I hope he gets the death penalty. But there is a bigger issue here than his evil nature.

Tyler Robinson’s formerly transgender boyfriend testified at the preliminary hearing today in a suit and a tie, looking very male. I very much hope that before Robinson’s capital punishment is carried out, he gets to see Lance get married and have children. Nothing else will bring home the message of what an enormous moron he was to murder a man for explaining Lance’s affliction so correctly.

There is no better proof of how right Charlie was than Lance’s performance today.

Mom was demanding and cold.

I have a feeling that I probably go to this resort way too often. It was here that I found out that Rafael Chirbes had died. I was pregnant with Klara, by the way. And now I’m finishing his diaries while sitting in the exact same spot on the beach in front of the same hotel.

Guess what I found out? Chirbes was planning a new novel. Based on the little excerpts and the general description in the diaries, it was going to be extremely good. And then he had to go and die at the age of 66. It’s so unfair.

The lesson is that while we can write, read, work, and do our thing, we shouldn’t delay. Just go and do it, whatever your “it” is.

The glaringly obvious has been publicly confirmed. The U.S. military and intelligence have been helping Ukraine to target its strikes on the Russian oil and gas industry since January. As I keep repeating, this is a complete change of course in comparison with the Biden administration, which prevented Ukraine from striking these facilities.

This form of cooperation, as confirmed by the New York Times, began at the precise time when Ukraine’s goose seemed to be cooked back in January. If you remember, I said it here on the blog that if Ukraine survived February, that would be a miracle. Since then, Ukraine’s situation on the battlefield and outside of it improved dramatically. The Trump administration came through in a truly big way.

Again, motivations, feelings, mind-reading, psychoanalyzing: none of that matters compared with the results. The results of the Biden administration for Ukraine were enormously worse than the results of the Trump administration. What anybody wanted or wants right now is of zero concern to me. I only want Russia to be defeated and stop creating dysfunction, particularly of the anti-American kind, around the world. The Biden and previously the Obama/Clinton method were strengthening Russia. I don’t care what they wanted or thought they wanted. We’ll never know that for sure. All I know is that the results were horrible. But they said a lot of correct supportive words, and people tend to confuse that with reality.

The EU today introduced the new requirement for all new cars registered in Europe to have installed cameras filming the driver’s face.

The system is called Advanced Driver Distraction Warning, ADDW, and is part of the EU’s General Safety Regulation.

The camera tracks the driver’s gaze, head movements and attention.

According to the regulations, the system must be active from 20 kilometers per hour. At lower speeds, it should be able to warn if the driver looks away for too long, while the requirements become stricter at higher speeds.

Chirbes explains in his diaries that all these measures are aimed at infantilizing people. And the purpose of doing that is economic. People who are infantilized are likelier to accept the childish lifestyles that they are offered. Living in rented apartments with roommates instead of owning. Serial dating and situationships instead of marriage and children. A succession of crappy part-time gigs instead of a career. Adults are habituated to seeing themselves as eternal children so that they would accept the economy which deprives them of every marker of adulthood. This is achieved through the concept of safety. What always was a normal adult life is perceived as unsafe.

The social contract between an individual and the state is transformed. The state no longer has to guarantee an acceptable standard of living and maintain a social structure in which one can transition through the appropriate stages of life. Now, the state’s role becomes limited to creating an illusion of safety through a succession of fussy, infantilizing control measures.

Chirbes would say that what is being announced in this safe driving measure is yet another drop in the standard of living for which this is in preparation. Something is going on economically behind the scenes. Back in the day, Chirbes became famous in Spain for predicting the collapse of the real estate market and the incoming crisis of 2008, at a time when everybody else in the country thought that the economy was doing great. His instinct was always to look at the economic causes of things. I think that that instinct is what is missing from a lot of our analysis of everything we observe.

The Dems are having yet another one of their sex purity scandals. A woman came out today to state that she also dated Graham Platner in the past and he was always kind, sweet, and respectful towards her, which is why she believes that he is a rapist.

It’s quite extraordinary that people who believe that disordered sex lives are crucial in order to be truly free would experience the need for regular public manifestations of extreme sexual orthodoxy.

When Chirbes’s supposedly last novel, Paris-Austerlitz, was published posthumously, I read it and was completely disappointed. I expressed my disappointment here. It made no sense to me that somebody who was capable of producing the masterpieces Crematorium and On the Edge would write something as trivial and clumsy as Paris-Austerlitz. The publisher’s promotional materials claimed that Chirbes had spent 20 years working on this novel, but as you can see from the linked post, I said from the start that that made absolutely no sense to me.

And guess what? My instincts were absolutely correct. Chirbes had written Paris-Austerlitz back in the 1990s. He didn’t publish it then because he didn’t feel like making his homosexuality a big public issue. In his diaries, the novel is mentioned as a text he wrote a long time ago and then put aside. You could see this in the writing. It’s youthful, immature, and nowhere remotely on the level of the writer’s later work.

I feel completely vindicated as a literary critic.

Also, I know that everybody is sick and tired of hearing about Chirbes, but take heart! I have only 150 pages left to go.