Book Notes: You Will Eat Flowers by Lucía Solla Sobral

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If an incel groyper woman-hater decided to write a novel on how feminist theory turns women into crapbuckets of entitlement he couldn’t have provided a more humiliating portrayal of modern womanhood than a young feminist writer from Spain Lucía Solla Sobral. Her novel Comerás flores is a big bestseller among crowds of young female readers who praise the book for its “stunning and brave” depiction of how all men deserve to be #MeTooted into infinity.

Marina, the main character of the novel, is a 25-year-old woman who shares the greatest hope of most female characters in Spanish literature since the death of Franco which is to attach herself to a man who will treat her forever like a cute, endearing toddler. Marina wants a boyfriend who will provide her with designer clothes, a chic apartment, expensive vacations, fancy restaurant outings and who will respect her as an independent career woman even though she is utterly helpless and makes no money.

Young men who can offer a luxury lifestyle are thin on the ground in Spain, and Marina attaches herself to Jaime, a successful businessman and a single father of an adult daughter. At first, Jaime seems moderately enthusiastic about babying Marina but eventually she realizes that he’s abusing her. For example, he asks her to share the gigantic closet in his luxurious apartment with his adult daughter. That’s abuse, isn’t it? Jaime doesn’t remember Marina’s food fads and is not mega happy about her getting sloppy drunk with friends at 4 am and whoring around with other guys. He buys her an expensive bag from the designer she doesn’t like instead of guessing which designer she does like. Such an abusive prick! After 3 years together during which Jaime pays for everything and somehow manages to be supportive of Marina’s pretense at being a career woman, he expects marriage and family. This is the form of abuse that really tips over the scale.

Marina is shocked that years of reading Judith Butler and doing “feminist activism” didn’t prepare her to recognize such egregiously chauvinistic behavior. She finds courage to reclaim her independence while #MeTooting poor Jaime. As I’ve been saying since back in my doctoral dissertation, the main goal of women’s liberation for female characters in contemporary Spanish fiction is to be liberated from the need to grow up. Lucía Solla Sobral and her readers have once again proven me right.

Live in a Cell

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That’s what I’m saying. You have to provide your own cell. Either move the disciplining agency inside of yourself or be eaten alive by self-indulgence.

Sind Sie sich sicher?

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Love German but the pronunciation is murdering me. Have you ever tried to pronounce this, for example?

The cat stares at me like I’m nuts when I start the “zee zee zee zee”.

Liberators of Potential

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

I can experience great tolerance for all kinds of people. But these cheerful morons drive me up a wall:

I hated then when I was on the left and that feeling remains unchanged now that I’m on the right.

No matter how many deaths of despair the destruction of work brings, there’s always some bright-eyed bimbo prattling excitedly about “liberating our true potential” by way of being excised from productive life.

Useless Laptop Jobs

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People who are happy that AI will destroy “useless laptop jobs” are not smart. Do they really want the disciplinary regime we all experienced in 2020-2023 to be imposed by machines?

When my father died, I went to Canada and broke the COVID regime. A government employee started calling to hassle me. I told her, I’m here to bury my father. I can’t quarantine indoors. And I heard her voice break. I heard genuine human compassion for my loss. I wasn’t hassled after that and could do everything I needed. She probably had to remove me from the baddie list and committed an infraction to help me.

Do we really want to have machines do this instead? Leave no sliver into which human solidarity can penetrate? We want to leave ourselves completely without options so that woke Jack Dorsey can add another billion to his fortune and install an algorithm to punish us for transgressing the speech codes he happens to find pleasing? Are we nuts?

There’s a trillion things I manage to do in my work, bypassing the impersonal regulations, because I go to talk in person to a young guy or a middle-aged woman with a “useless laptop job”. Laptops are not the important part of their jobs. That they are human is what makes things work.

Q&A: Soviets and Nukes

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

This is a great question. Thank you for asking it! I love these excellent questions I get in the Q&A.

In order to start a nuclear war, you need to be a fanatic. You need to believe in your cause to the extent where you’d make huge sacrifices for it, possibly even die.

By the time nuclear weapons were invented, there were no such fanatics in the USSR. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, there were fewer believers in communism in the USSR than there are Trump supporters at the meeting of specialists in “gender-affirming medicine.” Not among the regular people and most certainly not among the leadership of the country would you be able to find anybody who believed in the victory of international proletariat.

It was World War II that killed communist idealism. Soviet soldiers saw Europe. They saw that even the devastated, bombed out Europe had a standard of living nobody in the USSR could imagine. People who were evacuated deep into the country discovered such depths of materialism and corruption that they got cured of any communist belief forever.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were many, and I mean MANY, more sincere communist believers in the US than in the USSR. Soviet people were plunged into extreme materialism. Materialistic people don’t want a nuclear holocaust. They want TVs, washers, and furniture.

The West suffered back then from the exact same incapacity to comprehend people in the region as it does now. Westerners imagined hordes of commie fanatics ready to erase civilization in service of an idea. But the Soviet problem was the exact opposite of a powerful ideology. It was the incapacity to take any idea seriously that was the real issue. It was the extreme cynicism of people who have soured on the very concept of an idea and a belief. You can imagine what the arrival of capitalism did to such people. One can be very happy in capitalism as long as one has an organizing idea beyond wanting to acquire material objects. But if you don’t, it destroys you.

Emotional Incontinents

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Matt Walsh released a video debunking Candace Owens’ conspiracy theories about Erika Kirk. I admire it as I would any doomed, quixotic endeavor because he’s trying to present a rational argument to people who are engulfed in emotion and can’t engage in rational thought.

“There’s just something not right about this Erika” and “it just doesn’t feel right” is what they will repeat dumbly to any argument. These are the emotionally incontinent people I keep talking about. They worship their emotions and have never heard of the proposition that feeling can be wrong. Those who have no mechanisms of emotional self-regulation have an impoverished emotional range. They oscillate between primitive pleasure and resentful suspiciousness. This is an addictive combo that has a similar effect to smoking and drinking alcohol at the same time. Trying to engage the rational side of an emotional junkie is useless.

All of these people are in the process of being “liberated” from their jobs by AI.

Catch On

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Jack Dorsey just fired half his company because of AI, yet people are still blethering on about fertility rates.

What School Is For

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Today in the car Klara and I were memorizing lines from Scripture for her Memory lesson. They have Memory every day, and as a result, she now probably knows more Scripture by heart than I do. Outside of religious considerations, I can say as a literary critic that there’s no better exercise for literacy and the capacity to appreciate great works of literature than this. It would be much easier for me to teach if my students knew their Bible. It’s tiresome to have to explain Cain and Abel every time I teach Unamuno, for example. One keeps wishing for some basic level of shared culture when one teaches.

Tomorrow, Klara’s class is performing an operetta for which they memorized some lines in Greek. This gave me an opening to talk about antiquity and Greek roots of some words.

This kind of school does make sense. It’s not AI’s fault that in many places school has been perverted through the use of education fads and application of inane ideology. You can make school useful. It’s not hard. Simply throw away all the fads and go back to the basics.

An AI Experiment

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

I asked AI to create 20 fill-in-the-blanks sentences to practice a grammar concept in Spanish.

Out of the 20, I had to throw away 6 because they illustrated a completely different concept.

Out of the remaining 14, eight needed heavy editing.

Three more needed light editing.

In the end, I spent slightly more time rewriting than it would have taken me to do the whole thing myself.

On the subject of AI, here’s a disturbing news item:

The next step is to put headsets on professors to see how many woke slogans they emit during class times. You can set a goal and punish everybody who doesn’t reach it.