Opinions, art, debate
The entire issue of immigration hinges on one’s reaction to the following news item:
You either believe that violence and beheadings in Haiti and Syria are a disembodied force that occurs in those geographic areas without any human involvement, or you believe that people who are violent in those places will be violent in any other places. The authors of the AP article clearly think the former. The SCOTUS decision recognizes the latter.
To be a citizen of the world, a being without tribe, homeland, or God, is to be unprotected labor up for grabs.
Rafael Chirbes, Diarios
I’m 1,200 pages into the diaries, and it’s become clear that few things annoyed Chirbes as much as the concept of cosmopolitan citizens of the world. He knew that it was all one big scam.
Chirbes thought about nationalism a lot and deeply. He explains, for example, the differences between the Basque and the Catalonian nationalisms. The former, he explains, was a nationalism from below. Basque patriotism is that of regular people, peasants, workers. The Catalonian nationalism is the nationalism from above. It’s a favorite toy of the fancy people. The regional nationalisms of regular people, such as, for example, Chirbes’s native valenciano, were stamped out by the Catalonian nationalism of the wealthy bourgeoisie.
In her book Little Soldiers, journalist Lenora Chu tells about a university professor in China who asks his students to put a paper bag over their heads and then gives them a minute to take off one object that they don’t need. The students take off all sorts of objects: eyeglasses, jewelry, shoes, etc. Almost none of them do the very first thing that occurred to me when I read about the experiment: take off the paper bag.
After conducting this experiment on thousands of students, the professor says that only three out of a hundred Chinese students respond to the prompt by removing the paper bag.
IQ is important, but other things vastly outweigh its importance.
I very sincerely don’t get this:
In the year 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion. This was during the industrial era, long before robots and AI did away with an enormous number of jobs. There was culture, civilization, people lived and loved, and everything was fine.
Why can’t we accept that the population going to 8 billion was a fluke, and now things are peacefully evening out to the actual norm?
In the 1870s, the population of the United States was about 40 million people. If the TFR remains exactly the same as it is today and there is zero immigration in 300 years, the population numbers will revert to what they were in the 1870s. That’s assuming that nothing changes, which is unlikely, but simply for the sake of the experiment, let’s accept these numbers. What is catastrophic about them? This is not people dying out because of famine or genocide. It’s a simple population correction. Completely natural, no violence involved. Where is the catastrophe? I think it’s harder to argue that the population should always be growing. In what concerns long-term trends, why isn’t it rather that the population explosion of the last century and a half was due to the unprecedented need for manual labor brought about by the Industrial Revolution? Now that the industrial revolution is long over and we are experiencing the digital revolution, why not assume that the population trends are simply correcting themselves back to normalcy?
I was a few years old yesterday when I found out that some people who are chronically late everywhere claim that they’re suffering from a disorder called “time blindness.”
Of all the snowflake-y behaviors, this is probably the worst one. Blind people have a serious physical disability that they cannot help. Being constantly late everywhere, on the other hand, is not a disability. It’s a character flaw.
I’m one of those people who are notoriously and hilariously early everywhere. My kid ribs me over this all the time. I never inflict myself early on people who invited me. I take walks until the agreed upon time.
It’s not that hard to avoid being a pest. All that is needed is a little bit of respect and concern for others.
I’m going around whispering under my breath, “Not my problem anymore, not my problem anymore. It’s nothing to me.” It’s very difficult to disconnect after six years of being in charge. I want to go away. It’s the right decision to go away. Intellectually and rationally, I’m extremely willing to go away, but the brain loves stasis.
I’m making enormous efforts of willpower to snap out of it.
I truly thought I’ve seen everything, but here is an article from the New York Times criticizing women for going out in public while pregnant and not trying to conceal their pregnancies. The article suggests that pregnant women should wear “the maternity muumuu.”
I vaguely remember reading that back in the 18th century, it was considered unfashionable to appear outside when you were pregnant because many people thought that was indecent. It’s… curious that we’ve gone a full circle and they’re now reverting to bashing women for daring not to make a huge secret of their pregnancies.
Coupled with yesterday’s win in the NYC Democrat primaries of a Haitian woman who recently converted to Islam and is wearing a burqa-type outfit, these developments point in a bad direction.
It will never quit being entertaining that women hiding in burqas and muumuus are the next frontier of women’s liberation.
Woman who emptied Knicks trashcan on street— then stole it — fired from JPMorgan Chase, was DEI exec.
I told you, people in business, the DEI obsession is worse than in academia. This doesn’t mean that it’s absent from academia. No, it’s extremely present, but the world of big business has been conquered to the extent that most people don’t even realize.
The Mamdani Socialists who won their primaries yesterday in New York, meaning, of course, that they have won the seats, achieved their victories because of the overwhelming support in wealthy areas. These are people who feel bad for having servants, and they’re saying that electing somebody who looks like their servant to Congress is an appropriate compensation.
The victories of these DSA candidates are a gift to Republicans because whoever will be the leader of the Democrats in Congress will have to expend a lot of energy on controlling a runaway faction of lunatics. It’s also helpful that the socialist crazies will get a large platform and will be able to scare normie voters into running far away from the Dems.
These are excellent news, so we should celebrate.
I’m so sick I had to put the Tooth Fairy on my calendar for 40 minutes from now, because if I don’t, in 40 minutes I’m likely to forget. I’m re-reading Sophie Hanna’s The Other Woman’s House for the trillionth time. There is no moment in my life when I do not want to be re-reading this book, but it’s only when I’m completely felled by sickness that I have an excuse. By the way, if you haven’t read it yet and are looking for a perfect beach/poolside/sickbed/summer read, you can’t do any better.
I even have a fever, and I can’t remember the last time I had a fever. Ok, it’s a very tiny little fever, but still. The worst part is I could only do a single German exercise to keep the streak alive, and that without using my voice because I barely have any.
On the positive side, I discovered that if one is a scholar working on a project, one can arrange a visit to Rafael Chirbes’ house in Beniarbeig. You can even get permission to stay overnight, which I probably won’t seek because that would be very creepy. I don’t think I can swing it on my next trip to Spain because I already have many obligations for that trip. But the next next time I’m there, I’m totally going. The previous sentence is supposed to have the word “next” twice. I’m not sick enough to write things twice and not notice.
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