There is an absolutely horrifying article in The New York Times Magazine titled “White Debt” by one Eula Biss. The article documents calculated and relentless instances of psychological torture inflicted on a 4 – year-old boy by a mother who bullies the child and makes him feel guilty for. . . being white.

The article is absolutely heartbreaking in its first-person depiction of emotional abuse. Guilt is the favorite tool of all manipulators. Once you manage to make somebody feel guilty for something they didn’t choose and can’t change, you’ll own them forever.

The horror of the situation is that this Eula Biss creep knows enough faddy terminology to bamboozle those who are dumb enough to believe she cares about racism. The truth, however, is that her fake preoccupation with racism is just a way to torture a sad little boy.

People often ask me what I mean when I talk about erosion of borders. Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik are a great example. Islamic State got at them without anybody really needing to cross borders. It can just as easily get at somebody who never left the US at all.

Those Russian guys who were in ISIS’S gruesome head-chopping scene I told you about pledged allegiance to Islamic State before leaving Russia. And no borders stopped them from getting there, first psychologically,  and then physically.

Indoctrination happens in a space where national borders are irrelevant, and there’s nothing anybody can do about this.

The otherness of immigrants* is often exploited to channel the anxieties generated by the contradictions of the capitalist economy into a direction that will pose no danger to the preservation of this system of economic relations. An immigrant is imagined as a tireless worker bee who, instead of feeling disconcerted by the liquid flows of capital, interacts, gladly and easily, with the fluidity and exploits it for his or her own advantage.

Instead of questioning the economic system that expects workers to renounce any sort of rootedness and connectedness in favor of a constant displacement in search of employment, members of the growing precariat aim their anger at immigrants. The desperation that forces immigrants to accept subpar working conditions is easy to mistake for complicity with the system that insists on a constant increase in productivity amidst the erosion of the last vestiges of stability. 

At the core of the fear of an unknowable stranger leas the terror of an opaque and incomprehensible future in a rapidly changing world.

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* It’s very crucial to see the differences between a refugee and an immigrant because otherwise this particular discussion becomes confusing.

Among people who really scare me are those who are insistently turning the discussion of the San Bernardino massacre into a debate on gun control. I have nothing whatsoever against gun control or an outright ban on all objects that can shoot a bullet (as I said, this is not my issue at all.) But these people scare me because they practice Orwellian amnesia to a very disturbing degree. 

Not a month ago we saw a far deadlier terror attack in Paris conducted by people associated with the same organization to which the San Bernardino killers pledged allegiance. The terrorists used Kalashnikovs in a country where buying a Kalashnikov is illegal. As we all know, that did not prevent the massacre. 

Surely, it is not possible for people to have forgotten this so soon. Yet they keep repeating “gun control would have prevented the massacre, gun control would have prevented the massacre” in a way that, frankly, sounds deranged. There were bombs at the scene, indicating that the killers would have just blown the place to bits if that were their only option. There was nothing to have prevented them from creating an extremely powerful explosive device even if no guns existed on this planet at all. 

Once again, yes, let’s discuss gun control but I’d prefer to see it done in a way that is less insane than “the weather is nasty today, the NRA must be to blame.” 

People’s brains are so lazy that all they can do is reach for some familiar, comforting narrative whenever anything happens. If, at least, their repertoire of narratives were a bit more varied, but no, usually it’s just one or two broken records than are being put on for everybody else’s enjoyment.

This is why my blog is so popular even in the age when blogging is losing out to Facebooking and Tweeting. Readers who are desperate for something other than the robotic narratives delivered everywhere else and want something more intellectually challenging flock here. 

The New York Times today published yet another contribution to the “evil colleges are dens of iniquity filled with heartless evildoers” genre. This time, colleges are blamed for pushing students into expensive meal plans and then sneakily using some of the funds for academic programs. Of course, the article’s author doesn’t deign to explain the desperation of state colleges that are simply not getting any money from the state and are driven into collapse by a growing bureaucratic apparatus they are forced to maintain with God knows what money.

Of course, this is not solely the journalist’s fault. Readers are eager for fresh contributions to the anti-college genre and will lap up any bit of idiocy that tells them what they want to hear. The actual reason for this college-hatred is, in reality, the general public’s unease with the new reality where everybody will need at least one college degree in order to be even marginally employable. This reality is not going away no matter how much one rants about meal plans, elitist professors, manipulated rape stats, etc.

 

The valiant American journalists have found the true culprit in the San Bernardino massacre: a mouthy Jew.

No, seriously.