Day: December 30, 2013

The Last Link Encyclopedia of 2013

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

Don’t forget to promote yourself or other bloggers in the comments. Remember that every link you post defends blogging from being eclipsed by Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and all other refuges of mediocrity.

Italy’s Supreme Court reverses a sentence to a pedophile who raped an 11-year-old child on the basis that true love on both sides motivated the rape. Seriously. The link is in Spanish.

First, we heard that the Democrats couldn’t achieve anything because they are in a minority. Now they tells us they can’t get anything done because of being in a majority. I’m getting a feeling that even if the Dems get 100% of seats in both senate and Congress, they will get even less done.

The weirdest kind of journalism I have seen in my life: a journalist combines an interview with a famous philosopher with a restaurant review. The article is seriously bizarre, people.

The sickest Christmas gift this year was the one touted by the Governor of South Carolina.

A very good article that explains why unknown little colleges pretend to charge enormous tuitions. Maybe this is old news to everybody else but I was shocked at the pretentiousness and sheer stupidity of people who swallow this kind of sad little class-bait.

“An Australian priest who supports the ordination of women has been excommunicated by Pope Francis.” Of course, this will not be noticed by anybody who feels a passionate need to believe that this Pope is somehow different from the previous one.

“I have never quite managed to understand this weird DC notion that the goal of politics is to settle all questions once and for all and create a country that’s united on every issue. That we can somehow end debate once and for all, and exist in a tipnronnie world where it’s always 5 o’clock. People disagree about stuff. They always will. It doesn’t bother me.” Exactly.

Even the people who have invented ADHD are horrified with how pharmaceutical companies use this silly label to poison people and make money.

In car-crazy LA, there is a veritable war on pedestrians going on. Shame on  you, LA!

A really great rebuttal of the insidious meme that “breasts have nothing to do with sex, they’re just “sacks of fat”. . . whose only purpose is to nourish babies.”

An absolutely classic example of projection performed by David Brooks. Do read the linked post to the very last line, it’s priceless. If you have no time, just read the first and last lines.

And here is another exercise in projection from Feministe. It’s really bizarre how people invest pictures with meaning and then battle that meaning which they invented completely on their own. 

It’s not my fault that people don;t seem able to string two words together without projecting their beliefs onto the universe. See this: “The world was shell-shocked when the Beytomic bomb exploded on the musical landscape.” Yeah, because “the world” begins and ends with you and your buddies.

“When it comes to the boycott of Israel, who has the real double standard?”

“Great — the only time in decades that hating government was not a majority opinion in America was when we wanted government to hunt down and exterminate a significant portion of the globe’s practitioners of one particular religion.”

“The most damaging and widespread fiction in the US that both the Left, Right and Middle believes and implicitly subscribe to is that the government’s fiscal affairs in any way resemble that of a household or have any relation at all to bank accounts, loans or saving as experienced by the average person.” So true. Whenever somebody says, during a discussion of economy, “well, it’s like balancing your check-book”, I shut down the discussion and leave in order to help my interlocutor avoid embarrassing him or herself even further.

A funny headline about a Missouri professor.

And the post of the week: The top ten news photos of 2013. A really great post, check it out.

Why Are There So Many Female Terrorists in Russia?

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

In the aftermath of the horrifying terrorist attacks in the Russian city of Volgograd, people keep asking me why so many of the perpetrators of these terror acts in the Russian Federation are women.

Consider the situation of women in places like Chechnya and Dagestan. In the USSR, It never occurred to anybody to doubt whether women were fully human or make them shroud themselves like old, useless pieces of furniture. Religious fanatics had to hide from persecution and had no power to impose their barbaric ideas.

Now that these areas of the Russian Federation have turned to religious fanaticism, there is a single path in life open to women: being sold into marriage in early adolescence and being treated worse than an animal in the husband’s house. No education, no career, no friends, no money, no control over one’s own life. Imagine being 16, 17, 18 (these are the ages of some of the most recent female terrorists) and realizing that this is all that awaits you. In a society that has never known anything else, this can be accepted with resignation. In a place where things used to be very different just a short time ago, it is much harder to conform to this form of intense barbarity.

This is why so many women in Chechnya and Dagestan choose the only kind of protagonism that is still available to them and join terrorist organizations. They get to control their own destinies, even if that control is reduced to choosing death.

Mind you, this is not specifically about Islam. The Russian Orthodox Church’s official position on women is exactly the same as that of the Muslim fundamentalists: shrouding, no control over any aspect of their lives, yearly reproduction as the only goal of female existence, etc. The good news is that this is a religion only practiced by 2% of the population or we would see veritable horrors take place in Russia on top of the horrors we are seeing already.

As you all know, I hate the Soviet Union. Still, it has to be recognized that beating down religious fanatics was an enormous and amazing achievement on its part.

The Worst Books of 2013

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Before I share my list of the books I really enjoyed in 2013, I want to acquaint you with some of the books I detested this year.

1. Zygmunt Bauman’s Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All. The great philosopher disappointed me majorly with this book. All it contains is a collection of worn-out platitudes about the idiocy of trickle-down economics that he seems to consider a huge revelation. There wasn’t a single interesting, new insight in the entire book.

2. Elizabeth George’s Just One Evil Act. An unbelievable snoozefest.

3. Jeremy Treglown’s Franco’s Crypt. An obnoxious Franco apology of a self-involved, stupid Brit.

4. Paula Treick De Board’s The Mourning Hours. Absolutely nothing whatsoever happens in this book. The author is a product of a Creative Writing program. I wish I had known that before I started reading the book. An MFA is always a sign that a person can’t write worth a damn.

5. Janice Steinberg’s Tin Horse. Immigrants, Jews, sisters – how can you spoil such a great premise? Fear not,  this writer can do that, and then some.

Gosh, one has to sift through a lot of garbage to uncover something good.