Bigger government handouts won’t win working-class voters back. This is the fallacy of the left, believing that voters just need to be shown how much they are getting in government benefits. 

This is worded in an extraordinarily obnoxious way, I know. But it’s a valuable quote because it points to a gaping hole at the center of Liberal and especially progressive thinking today, namely, it’s failure to put in place convincing, positive, inspiring “structures of feeling” 🚾. 

I’m happy that Illinois finally has a budget and my university will be funded. But what really inspires me and makes me feel elated is not the money but seeing how Madigan’s Democrats didn’t moan, didn’t whine, didn’t complain about “racism and sexism” 🚾, didn’t back down, and didn’t wallow in cheap moral superiority in lieu of doing the work. 

I’m tired of hearing about which one of us a bigger victim of “structural oppressions.” I want to hear how we are all, together, jointly and separately, unvanquishable. I want us to go back to “Yes, we can” and “Yes, you totally can” from “No, we can’t because racism/ sexism / global warming/ gerrymandering.” 

This week, let’s access news from the sources we normally don’t use and avoid our regular sources. It doesn’t have to be anything painful, like switching to Fox News. One can, for instance, pick a paper from a faraway town and read it online. For instance, if your regular paper is New York Times, it can be fun to swap it for The Dominion Post from New Zealand. 

I so wanted to see Klara play on the beach with a red plastic pail and a yellow shovel, and today my dream came true. 

My other dream is to see her play on the beach with her cousins, and one is coming on Tuesday. 

The third dream is to see her reading on the beach under a huge sun hat but that one will have to wait a couple of years. 

The “unsupportive comments sexually harass” debacle has helped me find out which of my former classmates are happy with how their lives gave turned out and which aren’t without asking a single question. 

Our town’s hub of criminality is located right around  Klara’s daycare. All of the well-to-do people have their kids there, and they always leave their expensive cars unlocked when they run into the daycare to fetch their kids. So we constantly get notified that a parent’s Louis Vuitton tote or Celine handbag has been stolen from the car. 

We are also the most ethnically diverse daycare BY FAR in the area. And everybody understands my accent because so many of the parents have accents. 

Also, a bunch of kids are brought to daycare by blue-collar dads in their work vans. So it’s not all doctors and lawyers, far from it. 

I don’t care about any of it, though: the rich people, LV and Miu Miu, the diversity, the dads in vans. I’m obsessed with the daycare being located in the woods and very far from highways. My Klara sleeps so well because she’s constantly outside, and that’s what I care about. 

I love radishes. But as I explained before, with me it’s never about buying a single bunch. I need to buy 5, 6 bunches and not have to count the radishes to make sure I have enough to carry me over until the next trip to the store. 

I don’t normally look at the price of radishes because how much can a bunch cost that I really can’t afford it? This is why I almost grabbed a stack of bunches at the store here in Florida. 

And then my brain registered something wrong and made me stop. I looked at the label and almost gagged. They were $6 a bunch. Because they are organic or something. I came out of my holiday stupor and realized that everything at that store was organically overpriced. Obviously, I didn’t buy these ridiculous radishes. And now I feel deprived. 

I’m in Florida! The weather is blissful. It’s the same temperature as back home but it rained here so it’s beyond nice and fresh. 

Klara loves the sea and isn’t in the least scared. I was afraid she’d be freaked out by the new surroundings, the condo, the different furniture , etc , but she loves having a new space to explore and run around. We gave her Mexican food (the very mild Floridian version), and she loved that, too. 

I’m now at a grocery store buying supplies. Life is good. 

Apparently, sexual harassment these days consists of making “unsupportive comments” aboyt one’s work (see penultimate post). I’m waiting to see when the word “uncaring” makes it into the definition. 

I detest, simply detest how these days “sexual harassment” has come to be used whenever one is unhappy about anything whatsoever. “My coffee is too cold. I’m sexually harassed! The weather sucks. That’s major sexual harassment! And you are the perpetrator because you weren’t compassionate enough about my coffee troubles and didn’t validate my feelings about weather.”

Here’s a good definition of neoliberalism from Ventura’s Neoliberal Culture:

Neoliberalism at one level is a set of economic and political policies and ideologies favoring corporatism, privatization of public enterprises, and the reduction of state power and intervention. But neoliberalism is also a governmentality—that is, the way subjects think about the collection of practices, techniques, and rationalities used to govern them and which they use to govern themselves. Neoliberal government represents the population’s wellbeing as intimately tied to individuals’ abilities to make market principles the guiding values of their lives, to see themselves as products to create, sell, and optimize.

Bluntly put, neoliberalism is the withdrawal of government from most spheres it used to control and the attendant belief among citizens that it’s a good thing.

Most people don’t believe that it’s great for the government to withdraw from all spheres of life. It’s a selective thing that is based on individual political preferences. Some folks think it’s great that the government withdraws from regulating business. Others, that the government should retreat from enforcing state borders. The really funny thing is that a free-marketeer and a free-borderist think they are politically opposed when in reality they are both adepts of neoliberalism.

But that’s how neoliberalism acts. It kills politics by erasing real political differences and putting fake ones in their place. No government, no political solidarity, just the freedom to sell and be sold that knows no physical or symbolic borders or constraints. Why, for instance, do liberals so eagerly attack their own for imaginary transgressions of speech codes? Because you need to be punished for being an imperfect product. Products in the same brand need to be identical, so off with you, freak, if your packaging is a bit faulty.

As I keep saying, spousal hires are a huge mistake. This is what happens when you do it. In case you read the link, you need to know that it’s all egregious, insane lies spread by a spurned spousal hire.