It’s fashionable to put on a show of ostentatious busyness. “I can’t sit down to eat. I’m too busy. I’m always eating in my car because I’m in such high demand. Lounging over a leisurely meal is an impossibility.”
The threat of being discarded by the market is high, and people perform these rites of pretending that they are in extreme demand because that’s how they deal with anxiety. There’s also a bit of a voodoo magic going on here, where people believe that acting a certain way will mold reality into making them into who they pretend to be.
I have noticed this in academia: the busiest, most overwhelmed people, who haven’t read a book in a decade because they are buried under mountains of work, never publish anything, never develop new courses and are never available during office hours. What the work that occupies them so thoroughly actually is remains a mystery.
You are not extremely busy. You are terrified. Find out what it is that produces this anxiety and work on that.
If Lindsay Clancy isn’t guilty of murdering her children because she is “mentally ill” and on drugs, then Decarlos Brown is not guilty of murdering Iryna Zarutska. Moreover, nobody is guilty of any crime, period. Everybody is on something or can claim to be on something. Everybody has some “mental” trauma or can claim to have it.
We can just go ahead and abolish the entire criminal justice system exactly as liberals want, because everybody’s a victim. Except the actual victims. Those bastards apparently deserved whatever they got.
The very fact that she is not pleading guilty and is trying to wriggle out of responsibility shows that she’s a stone-cold killer.
From what I understand, Clancy is not old. She can still have more kids. What is the justification for not sending her to jail so that she can’t kill any more children?
Reader el asked for suggestions on raising her daughter, who is now 15 months old. My best, most important, completely crucial advice is this:
Be kind to yourself. Make sure you do things that are pleasing to you and that you enjoy every day. Try not to put yourself on the back burner too much. Try to do things that are physically enjoyable. I don’t know what it is that you are into: baths, candles, chocolates, whatever gives you physical pleasure. You are not taking time and attention away from your child. To the contrary, when you do things that you enjoy, you are giving your child the greatest gift of a less anxious mother.
Whatever helps you to not be anxious and returns you to yourself, to your own center, is wonderful for the child. I discovered bullet-journaling when my kid was a toddler, and that made me a better mother than a hundred parenting books ever could.
At another difficult moment, I bought liquid hand soap with scratchy bits inside. I find it very pleasurable to wash my hands with these little scratchy bits. It’s a small thing, but it totally upped my levels of enjoyment of life in general.
People keep looking for situational remedies for children’s behavior instead of concentrating on the biggest contributor to a child’s well-being at this very young age, which is a low-anxiety, low-stress mother. And I understand that being a mother is anxiety-producing and stressful by default. Which is why I’m saying: small things, small enjoyable things that are not time-consuming and that make you feel a bit less anxious.
Here is another thing: you are both running on your psychic energy right now. She doesn’t know yet how to generate her own. When your psychic energy runs low, she begins to act out because that’s her way to demand that you recharge the energy battery. And the way you recharge the battery is by doing enjoyable things. Instead of feeling guilty for indulging themselves, as mothers often do, they should remember that this is the best thing they can do for their children. Obviously, I’m not talking about antisocial drug-addicted, prostituting mothers. My suggestions are for great, loving, dedicated mothers like yourself.
You’re doing fine. It’s going to start getting easier. Not very soon, but soon enough. You need to go through a tough couple of years, and after that it will get easier.
This novel by an Ecuadorian writer is available in an English translation, but I am not sure if I can recommend it. It’s not that Jawbone is bad. Parts of it are very talented. Ojeda is a promising writer. But she needs a lot of discipline and an authoritative editor.
The novel is not long, but it feels much longer than it is because some parts are very unnecessarily drawn out. Ojeda tries too hard to advance a political agenda, which makes about two thirds of the novel tortured and unnecessary.
Jawbone is about the sexual jealousy of mothers towards teenage daughters and the terrible effects this has on young girls. One could make that point and move on, but this writer decides to describe every perversion in which the girls engage in tedious, vomit-inducing detail. And then there is a teacher who suffered from her own sexually jealous mother and who decides to kidnap one of the girls and visit on her some extremely detailed, boring perversions.
But wait, there’s more. Sometime in the past, the teacher was in turn kidnapped by two other girls who tortured her and inflicted endless and similarly tedious perversions on her.
Don’t worry, there’s more where the above came from. The previous girls would get together with other girls, and they would inflict on each other—guess what?—yes, excruciatingly boring perversions.
And there is yet some more in the exact same vein. But I’ll stop now because even talking about these very detailed and boring perversions begins to feel like a variety of a boring perversion.
Again, it’s not all bad. Once you get past all the tedious perversions, there are several excellent, strong pages. Plus, the book was recommended to me because it would strengthen my argument in one of my chapters, and that is true. It most certainly will. But I rolled my eyes so hard and so often during reading that now my eyeballs hurt.
The most fun I had with this novel was when I was writing this review of it. I don’t interpret this as a good sign.
AOC announced that she broke up with her fiancé. People are freaking out, saying that she’s going to be the next president. Women will find a single childless woman withering alone so non-threatening that they will vote for her in droves, they say.
My take is that if the American people prefer a mother of frozen eggs to a father of four children, they deserve everything they get.
I wouldn’t have gone to this place either. Nobody wants to come off as desperate at 26. The hospital-looking metal tray with that selection of junk food reeks of female desperation. Unless she is hunchbacked and has one leg and three heads, I don’t see why she would accept.
As for the Jewish man in question, I think he needs to consider why he is feeding the worst stereotypes about Jews when he is so stinking rich. He pays for a matchmaker in a city that has crowds of eager single women. This means that he is ridiculously wealthy, yet he expects a young woman who probably obsesses over every calorie and plasters on half of the makeup available on the planet before every date to eat from a trough.
Scott Greer says that the Civil Rights movement was a weapon in the Cold War:
In the ensuing Cold War struggle for moral authority, America had to present itself as more tolerant and egalitarian than the Soviet Union. The civil rights era, while motivated by the American people’s earnest moral commitments, also served as a propaganda tool for democracy.
Whitepill (2026)
I guess, part of it was the hope that if you concede some things to the left, it will be happy and will leave you alone. Today, we all know that this is naive in the extreme. The left is never satisfied because the things they want never bring the desired results. Leftists respond to that by doubling down on more extreme forms of the policies they tried and found unsatisfactory under the hypothesis that these policies didn’t work because they fell short of the Platonic ideal of leftist policy.
Since 1960s, there’s been nothing but concessions to the identitarian left. The left only gets angrier and demands ever more outlandish concessions as a result.
Parenting has zero influence on any psychological trait after age 21.
Dr. Russell Barkley is direct about the data. Twin studies show parental influence peaks before age 7, drops sharply after that, sits at just 6% by the teenage years, and hits zero once someone turns 21.
Moreover, nothing has any influence on psychological traits after age 7. Genetics, the family history, the circumstances of conception, in utero experience and early childhood years make us who we are. Parents remain extremely important until you die but they have no power to reshape personality after age 7.
It is very important to know your family history because it will shape your life whether you know about it or not.
This type of conversation is why I abandoned most forms of sociability:
Yes, malls and department stores are wonderful for exactly the reasons described here. So why don’t people just go then? We have three within driving distance of us. We’ve been at least a dozen times this summer. The weather is bad. It’s hot and nasty, so one needs indoor activities with the kids, and this is an excellent one. We went for back-to-school shopping on Saturday. Then I went by myself on Monday because I like to walk around and clear my mind.
On Christmas, we went to, I think, three different ones in Montreal. Yes, the decorations, the displays, the festive mood. That’s why we went.
As for the gift wrapping, we went to our local mall, and there was a pop-up wrapping store run by a young African American woman, a single mother. She told us about how she really wanted to give amazing gifts to her children for Christmas but didn’t have the money. Then she remembered that she’d always been very good at wrapping, and the idea for this Christmas-time business came to her. Now she will be able to afford the best gift for the kids. And the two very cute kids are running around looking mysterious about the great gifts they will be getting. This all contributes to a great Christmas mood.
Another cute mall story, and I have dozens of them, is when we had to buy sneakers for Klara. It proved very difficult because she suddenly grew very picky, and nothing we tried was satisfactory. A very young store assistant noticed our struggle, came up to us, and talked to my kid like they were peers, with such kindness, patience, and respect that my daughter was immediately charmed. It means a lot to a 10-year-old to have a teenager with a job pay attention to her and treat her as an equal.
Why are people sitting there and complaining instead of going and experiencing all this? There’s mini-golf and cotton candy and funny Tik Tok trend goods. It’s great. Of course, I will now start hearing that I somehow lucked into the two only spots on the face of the earth where malls and department stores still exist.
Isn’t it more of the Covid era situation, though? People would go on and on about how they can’t do this and can’t do that because it’s supposedly not allowed, when it was allowed the whole time. I kept having these maddening discussions with colleagues who kept repeating how much they missed teaching in person and how desperate they were to return to the classroom. I was teaching in person and naively tried to share with them that it was very much possible. It took a while to clock on to the fact that they didn’t want to go back into the classroom.
Do people understand that this fake-complaining is trashing their nervous system? Even if the suffering is not real, the constant discussions of how you are miserable and deprived convince the brain to start believing them. It’s so much better psychologically to simply say, “I decided not to teach in person because I don’t feel like it” or “I decided not to go to the mall because it’s such a hassle, and I like shopping online.”
Fauci’s text messages reveal that he knew COVID vaccines dramatically increased miscarriage rates in the first trimester. He was a doctor, after all, and in his messages he even explains the mechanism that caused it to happen.
There was a campaign to convince pregnant women to take the COVID shot. Ob-Gyns pressured women into accepting. One had to be a very strong, independent-minded, contrarian, and possibly slightly autistic woman to resist the pressure. Given that pregnant women experience strong hormonal changes and find themselves in a weakened state, it was that much harder for them to stand up to the pressure.
It absolutely sucks that we live in a reality where we can’t trust any of our institutions or qualified experts. It’s great if you have the time and the capacity to become your own epidemiologist and figure this out by yourself. But many people don’t. They were punished simply for assuming that everything works as it should and everybody was doing their job.
I think the term is reductio ad absurdum. Phillip Dick wrote a short sci fi piece called The Pre-Persons in…
All valid points. Walnut
We have entered a weird dimension. I no longer know what’s supposed to be a parody.
Please say you are joking?
“just term these “very late stage abortions” and have done with it.” This is the most horrific and casually cruel…
Clancy, like Decarlos Brown, showed premeditation, planning, and coldness in execution. She schemed to get the husband out of the…
The good news is that with children, it’s never too late. Even if they are sixty and you are starting…
This woman is in a wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down because she threw herself out of a window in…
Of course, I’m sure you’re right. But I can’t help but think back on Willowbrook and the like, which I’m…
My parents briefly ran a halfway house for the newly deinstitutionalized, back then. AFAICT from the way they talk about…
Given that psychosis is a *side effect* of a lot of antidepressants, nobody taking them should be allowed to care…
>”What would you suggest we do with people like this?” ANSWER: Reopen all the state psychiatric hospitals that were closed…
Very similar to the Andrea Yates case some 25 years ago. Yates was initially found guilty, overturned on appeal and…
I think I was an “antisocial drug-addicted, prostituting mother” at times. How does one recover from that and become a…
Hardly surprising with government contracting. See how much effort Musk had to put into moving the space industry forward.
Mandela graduated from SA’s top law school. The idea that this Obama left has anything to do with with socialism…
By age four, it’s already much easier. Once they start talking and can entertain themselves, even in short 15-minute stretches,…
Totally see your point. Definitely not a bad place for a first date, honestly in my opinion. She definitely wanted…
Thank you for the wonderful post.I am on a summer vacation till 1.09, so it’s as low-anxiety and low-stress as…
Did she actually announce anything about her relationship status? The reporting on it is more like sleuthing – third party…
Exactly. Plus, this is a Jewish guy. He needs somebody else to find out if the young lady is Jewish…
“Why do you think he needed a match maker in The first place” Vetting…. in the past, there were armies…
It goes on and on in repetitive, excruciating detail. I almost started climbing walls in desperation before I finished the…
But who else do they have? Newsom is very white. Everybody else is incompetent. AOC is big on social media,…
That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s a vibe thing. Again, if this were a 20-year-old student from the Midwest, I…
“probably nicer than this place” People are judging from an out of context pretzel… I went to the site https://www.crownalleynyc.com/…
I dated a lot between my two marriages, but I always paid for myself. Never, not once, did I let…
\\ She wants a big, upfront monetary commitment (so probably high maintenance). May be, but not 100% true. When I…
Why do you think he needed a match maker in The first place. Doesn’t seem like a sociable high emotional…
If Democrats run AOC after running and losing with Kamala in 2024, they deserve to lose again regardless who then…
” hospital-looking metal tray with that selection of junk food” I don’t think it has anything to do with food but…
“this writer decides to describe every perversion” I’m going to assume that’s why she wrote in the first place and…
“She is …. imo stubborn” I guess that gives the lie to the genetics argument…. I mean, a stubborn Jew?…
Could you write a post on how to raise kids till this age, please? Tips, anything, what worked for you…
Hard to believe that there were at one time two first world nations in Africa ;-D
This is the exact text of the message I’m referring to: “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever…
I have no idea what you are reading into this text because it says exactly what I did.
Apparently this is not true, according to CBS news and other sources. Link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/texts-fauci-discussed-potential-risks-024148186.html
Yes, Freud said five but life expectancy increased since then and all the Freudian stages of development were pushed back.…
In a similar vein, I don’t see the collapse of Rhodesia or South Africa as net good either, in terms…