I have no interest in what the butthurty costume is, but look at the date and tell me that woke is over.
By its nature, it can’t go away, get better, or lighten up. It can only get worse.
“Gay marriage will never affect you in any way!”
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Continue reading →: Against Abortion
The widespread, massive, and global support for Lindsay Clancy is the most effective argument for a total ban on abortion. After observing it, for the first time in my life, I am less supportive of abortion rights.
Like gay marriage, trans rights, and every other progressive cause, it’s become clear that abortion has no off-ramp. The only reason for abortion is because pregnancy and childbirth would inconvenience the mother. One would think that the first 3 months of pregnancy would be enough to figure out if a woman is too beaten down by this inconvenience. But we are now seeing that large groups of women don’t believe that 6 years is enough.
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Continue reading →: My Leadership Mistake
Today is the first day of the academic year, with me not being department chair. I am strutting into the office feeling ecstatic that I don’t need to care about anything this semester except for my research.
At the same time, I am realizing that I made a big mistake in the six years that I was in this role. I invited lecturers – part-time temporary faculty members – to department meetings. Nobody had done it before I became department chair. I started doing it unthinkingly, and I now know it was a false move. We ended up in a situation where the hierarchical order is broken and lecturers behave in unreasonably demanding and prima donna-ish ways. And it’s all my fault. I allowed this mold to fester and grow.
I, of all people, should have known better. I love hierarchies. I understand why they’re important. I can’t even fully explain what led me into this pig-assed behavior. I most certainly don’t care if people like me, so it wasn’t about that.
The new department chair immediately kicked out everybody who is not tenure-track out of the department meetings. And the craziest thing is that I hadn’t even realized that I’d been making a mistake before I found out that she did that.
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Continue reading →: Church Food
How you know that Ukrainians have joined the parish:
I make these crepes for my family but unfortunately I can no longer eat them myself.
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Continue reading →: Tasteless
The administration of my university is refusing to negotiate a contract. The overpaid, incompetent top administrator is wasting gigantic amounts of money on vanity projects. Expensive new buildings are being built, but they stand filthy because janitors can’t take the terrible working conditions and leave in droves.
Yesterday, people went out to protest. And what I found interesting in the whole thing is that the top administrator called them tasteless to discredit them. Not dishonest, not wrong, not lazy, not confused, not entitled, but tasteless.
This is not the first time he does this. When people complain about low pay, inflation eating up the salaries that haven’t seen a cost-of-living increase in years, and the lack of a contract, this administrator routinely tells some anecdote that positions him as a fancy person with refined tastes and an expensive lifestyle. What’s really entertaining is that flaunting one’s wealth in the faces of people who say they struggle to put food on the table because you’re underpaying them is the most vulgar, low-class thing of all.
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Continue reading →: Snippets and Jingles
I have now read the phrase “Lindsay Clancy begged for help” in six different languages in my X feed. Obviously, there is no international propaganda campaign in defense of this horrible woman. People are chanting the same meaningless sentences around the world because that’s how most people are. Their entire inner world consists of snippets and jingles that they heard somewhere and repeat because the snippets sound smart to them.
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Continue reading →: Age-related
While, once again, I do not recommend this life strategy, being an old mother is in many ways really great. Yesterday I woke up at 5:30 a.m. to prepare a 3-course hot lunch for my fifth grader. In spite of numerous reminders, she forgot to bring it with her and ate some weird thing served at school.
Was I annoyed or snippy with her when I found out? Not a bit. My capacity to get upset over little things is about fifteen years past its sell-by date. I live amongst a husband who has never been nagged and a child who has never been snapped at or criticized. Not because I’m a wonderful person, but because I’m extremely middle-aged. I’ve simply aged out of all of the stuff that strains marriages and complicates parenting endeavors.
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Continue reading →: Verbal Tics
Even right-wingers have adopted much of the left’s obsessions and verbal tics. They keep criticizing “white liberal women.” One in every three sentences they emit is a condemnation of these “white liberal women.” They don’t stop to think whether black liberal women are so much better than the white ones. Which, of course, they aren’t. But that’s not the point. It’s the leftist habit of using “white” as an insult.
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Continue reading →: How to Make Yourself Depressed
The real problem is that it’s socially acceptable and prestigious to pose as a victim. Victimhood and suffering, even if they are completely fake, are prized social achievements.
Our brain believes what we tell it. If you pretend to be overworked, overwhelmed, and miserable for social clout, soon enough your brain will believe it and you will feel overworked, overwhelmed, and miserable.
In academia, for instance, whining is everybody’s favorite hobby. Throughout my years at department chair, we had a self-pity group for female chairs. They’d go to restaurants and bars together to discuss how they are disadvantaged as women. I never went.
Even writing productivity groups are infected with the poison of self-pity. Once you tell yourself that you never have time to write and that everything around you is set up to prevent you from writing, you will most certainly end up not writing. Yet this is exactly what people do.
But it’s everywhere, not just in academia. And it’s getting worse. People talk themselves into believing that somebody’s out to get them or that their suffering is profound, and then they actually start to suffer. Yes, you get social acceptance and prestige from it, but is it worth it? Unless you’re a sociopath, you will end up integrating the fake persona into the real one.
People methodically drive themselves into depression out of social conformity. Yes, the woman in the image above is posing. It’s all fake. But she’ll get herself into feeling exactly what she’s enacting very soon.
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Continue reading →: Postpartum Psychosis
When my daughter was between two and a half and three years old, she went through a tantrum stage. The way she organized her tantrums was hilarious. She would look around, scout a location where she would be visible to me but be in no danger of hitting any furniture, lower herself very carefully to the ground, arrange her clothing so that it wouldn’t get crumpled, and proceed with the tantrum. I would get up and go to another room. She would stop the tantrum, get up, follow me to wherever I was, and repeat the procedure.
What conclusion did I draw when observing this? The same one that you drew when reading my description. This was not a real tantrum. A real tantrum happens when a child is so overcome by a powerful emotion that he is unable to complete these hyper-rational steps and most definitely is incapable of caring about the convenience of the exercise and the state of his clothing.
This is how I know that Lindsay Clancy did not experience postpartum psychosis. Postpartum psychosis is real. It is a terrible and extremely rare affliction. It is incompatible with planning, scheduling, and calculation. You cannot choose to put off a psychotic episode to a convenient time that fits your schedule. The reason why psychotic people are found not guilty by reason of mental defect in court is because they have no control over their actions. A real psychotic break is a physiological event. In this sense, it’s like a heart attack. You cannot say, “OK, it’s inconvenient for me to have a heart attack on Tuesday, so I’ll put it off until Wednesday afternoon.”
The capacity of creating and executing a plan is evidence of rationality. The plan can be despicable, but the evil nature of your actions in pursuit of executing this plan is not evidence of irrationality.
That Clancy “asked for help” or was on a cocktail of strong meds is irrelevant to the issue of whether she was in control of her faculties during the murder. She did not flow off the handle and start hacking at strong adults who could physically overpower her. To the contrary, she schemed to get such a strong adult out of the house and attacked people who could not defend themselves. That she attempted to commit suicide after the murders is also not evidence of psychosis unless we decide that all suicidal people are psychotic.
It’s the same thing with Decarlos Brown. He targeted a small, skinny woman. He explained that he targeted her because of her race. He positioned himself behind her to be able to attack her successfully. None of this is psychotic or irrational. It’s evil. But it’s not a foundation for a not guilty verdict.
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