Putting Klara in a Christian school brought some unanticipated benefits. For instance, when the kids are taken to the school library to pick out their books for the week, I don’t have to worry she’ll bring home some garbage about the anti-racist baby, “non-traditional families,” or a boy who decided he was a girl. All of the books are sweet and wholesome. Today, for instance, she picked out a book about an old lady who knitted hats and gave them away to anybody who needed them.

Also, there’s a gigantic nativity scene in front of the school. And a million Christmas activities of the kind I approve.

Speaking about giftedness, my processor might not be extraordinarily powerful but it’s extremely fast. I figure things out with great speed.

For instance, we have a new, extremely complicated bureaucratic-type platform. People are going nuts trying to get it to work. There are complex, multi-day training sessions to teach people to use it. The manual alone is 1,8 megabytes.

I figured out how this little bitch works in under 10 minutes. And much of that time was taken up by a colleague who dropped by to chat.

This is why it’s easier for me to be department chair than for other people. It takes me very little time to figure out the byzantine bureaucratic processes for everything and fire off the required paperwork in the required format in minutes.

Of course, psychological makeup is crucial, as always. I find ways to game the system to do as little work as possible while looking like the most hard-working bastard on campus. This is, of course, a cultural thing. I don’t believe in rules I haven’t freely chosen. My highest loyalty is to myself and my only trusted authority is, again, myself.

I have one hour to teach students something about Argentina, and I decided to forego the usual yarn about the Dirty War. Instead, I’ll be talking about Menem, the corralito, and Javier Milei. It’s time to make our teaching more contemporary.

Many people are aware that primary and secondary education, academia, journalism, the professions, the tech fields, and big business have been captured, completely and profoundly, by leftism (wokeism, progressivism, etc).

The more lucid among these people realize that this didn’t happen overnight. It was a process that took several decades.

Unfortunately, even the more lucid don’t seem to understand that what took so long to create doesn’t have a magic pill cure. There isn’t one thing you can do or say to talk people out of supporting a system of beliefs that they’ve been indoctrinated into over decades. You can’t start a university or publish a book and put an end to it. You need 500 universities and libraries full of books. You need to create your own story that explains the world and then make sure people hear it. And hear it. And hear it some more.

But that’s not enough. The story has to be attractive. There has to be art and achievement attached to it. It should be embraced by the cool people whom everybody wants to imitate.

It’s a boring, slow, painstaking labor that nobody particularly wants to do because it will take very long to see any results. But remember what we discussed recently? The iron butts always win. If you can’t be assed to do the slow, painstaking work, somebody will. And they will win. They are winning right now.

So we must get to work. Because the only alternative is to wait for the grandchildren of today’s 18-year-olds, and it’s impossible to predict what form their rejection of the mandatory leftism will take.

I’ve been teaching college in North America for 20 years. This year is the first time that I have students whose response to absolutely any question or essay topic is “white men are bad and they make things worse for everybody.” Absolutely any question at all.

“How is the use of metaphor different in the pre- and post-Boom writers? Do you believe that the sonnet is a format that works well for this poet’s purpose?”

“White men, white men, white men.”

“The author is a black woman. Can we talk about her writing?”

“White men, white men, white men.”

It’s like you press a button and a pre-recorded statement unspools.

These are not all students or most of them. Yet. So far it’s just a few. But, friends! Next year it will be 40%. And then 60%. And then absolutely everybody will have the pre-recorded statement installed in their heads.

“At 4:40am, it was reported that three people from the Centre for National Resilience scaled the fence and fled the area,” an earlier statement from NT Police reads. “Police and staff at the Centre for National Resilience are currently confirming the absconders’ identities prior to releasing further information.” The facility is currently holding people affected by the NT’s Katherine region COVID-19 outbreak as well as returned travellers from repatriation flights.

Please read the whole article and observe the photographs. “The Centre for National Resilience.” “Absconders.” If you saw this article two years ago, you’d think it was ludicrous fantasizing.

And now please imagine where this will all go two years from now. In just two years, we went from freedom to national resilience camps and completely innocent people being transported in cages. Canada has effectively suspended the concept of citizenship and repealed the Charter of rights. What will two more years bring?

Think back to December 1, 2019. Remember how it was? I do. I was preparing for a trip to Canada and had no idea it was going to be my last one. Think about everything we have lost since then.

And now imagine that this is December 1 of 2023. Everything continues in the same direction – because why wouldn’t it – and we are now… Where?

For the first time in 30 years, Cook County, IL had over 1,000 homicides in a year. And 2021 isn’t over yet. It was 600+ in 2018 and 2019, as far as I can remember. A thousand nine people. I can’t even imagine.

80% of the victims were black. 15% Hispanic. Call me extremely stupid but when BLM started and I was an early supporter, I swear I thought it was going to be about this slow-motion genocide. Then I realized nobody gives a fuck. I’m still not over that monumental, ocean-wide disappointment.

This is just one county. There’s also East St Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York. When I think about all those needlessly dead people, I feel so much anger towards every stupid, smug idiot nattering about structural racisms and putting BLM in their email signatures. They are self-promoting and advancing their stupid little brands off real tragedy.

We had 4 candidates for Chancellor. Three black men and a white woman. The search committee was the diversity office. Here is the breakdown of the candidates:

1. One was brilliant, charming, an alumnus with a great knowledge of our campus, our programs, and our issues. He was the only candidate to talk about the physical buildings on campus. His understanding of diversity is heavily oriented towards helping the disabled students. Also, he’s the only candidate to use the words “research” and “productivity.”

2. The second one was. . . OK. Not a superstar like the first but a perfectly reasonable, decent candidate.

3. The woman was. . . not a star. A typical plodding bureaucrat with no original ideas.

4. The fourth candidate was so neoliberal he looked like a parody. We need data! And dashboards! We need software that shows us data on dashboards! And an app! How great would it be to have an app? Once we get the dashboard data on an app, we can start “taking difficult decisions about the workforce.” We need to work harder, deliver fewer services, and move much of our operations online. Because online education is anti-racist! And so are data dashboards in apps!

The neoliberal guy evinced zero knowledge of our campus. He was the youngest, the least experienced, and the most robotic in his delivery. The spoke in a bureaucratic jargon and not a single glimpse of anything human shone through the wall of meaningless neologisms. Every colleague I spoke to was dismayed by this guy. Obviously, the diversity office voted for him and he was hired.

Delivered at my doorstep at 6 am today! Just when I have a review to write and a stack of papers to grade. Duty or desire? What will win?

We all know the answer.