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Update

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Clarissa

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Actually, I’m glad that the surgery had to be rescheduled for much earlier. Yes, my vacation had to be cut short but it’s good not to have anything looming ahead of me any longer. I’m not a patient person, and it’s much easier for me just to get it over with.

I was worried Klara wouldn’t understand why I suddenly can’t pick her up or come get her from school. I play-acted the situation with dolls, showing her how a doll gets surgery and then can’t pick up the baby dolly for a while. And she understood it extremely well. She’s a very bright child.

My sister and niece are arriving on Monday to help me with Klara. I can’t be left alone with her at all because I can’t lift her.

I can’t wait to get back to work.

18 responses to “Update”

  1. el Avatar
    el

    “I was worried Klara wouldn’t understand why I suddenly can’t pick her up or come get her from school. ”

    I think as long as the mother is calm and fine, kids will adapt to many changes, if necessary.

    Started reading links on “Love Joy Feminism” blog and was stunned by evangelical missionaries fighting to present child murder while Leftists fought to preserve it:

    The Right to Kill

    // The Kamayurá are among a handful of indigenous peoples in Brazil known to engage in infanticide and the selective killing of older children. Those targeted include the disabled, the children of single mothers, and twins — whom some tribes, including the Kamayurá, see as bad omens. Kanhu’s father, Makau, told me of a 12-year-old boy from his father’s generation whom the tribe buried alive because he “wanted to be a woman.” (Kanhu and Makau, like many Kamayurá, go by only one name.)

    The evangelical missionaries who helped Kanhu and her family move to Brasília, the capital of Brazil, have since spearheaded a media and lobbying campaign to crack down on child killing. Their efforts have culminated in a controversial bill aimed at eradicating the practice, which won overwhelming approval in a 2015 vote by the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Brazil’s National Congress, and is currently under consideration in the Federal Senate, its upper house.

    But what may seem an overdue safeguard has drawn widespread condemnation from academics and indigenous rights groups in the country. The Brazilian Association of Anthropology, in an open letter published on its website, has called the bill an attempt to put indigenous peoples “in the permanent condition of defendants before a tribunal tasked with determining their degree of savagery.”

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    1. el Avatar
      el

      To prevent, not present.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yep. There have been enormous scandals in the field of anthropology, and now the only accepted position is that you can’t judge anything that “cultures” are doing. Infanticide, rape, FGM, etc – it’s all “cultural” and having an opinion about it is colonialist.

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        I really recommend reading this short article about the adoption of would be murdered disabled girl, the authorities’ reactions to it and now another similar child testifying in court.

        I think the authorities do not want spend money on medical treatments for those people, but literally want them to commit suicides and murders to solve the problem.

        Who you think Kanhu’s speech will change anything?
        I knew nothing of the matter, but this was really informative and heartbreaking articles conveying voices of everyone from authorities to former kids.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          It’s an important article. I will assign it to students because they have their heads filled with Howard-Zinnish crap about idyllic indigenous communities where feminism and all sorts of paradisiacal wonderfulness existed before evil Westerners brought them the original sin.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            Have you read «Трудно быть богом» Стругацких? It’s totally about this dilemma of whether to interfere or let “a culture” do its thing.


            https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.js

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          2. el Avatar
            el

            \ It’s an important article. I will assign it to students

            Wow. 🙂 Now I am glad I shared. If you want to assign it, I would’ve saved it as a Word file or as a Web page on your computer since it may be behind a paywall (when I entered the site, it looked as if a number of free articles could be limited) or simply not be there till you assign it.

            I also enjoyed the discussion about “The Right to Kill” here:
            http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2018/06/saturday-link-love-the-right-to-kill-a-reckoning-and-a-discontinued-swimsuit-contest.html

            To summarize, one side argued that “Over 230 tribes in Brazil have been contacted. 3/4 if them went extinct. The ones who didn’t lost 80 percent of their members […] By giving them the common cold. This isn’t just about disabled children. This is about tribes that are completely autonomous to the point that their immunity system has developed completely differently.”

            The counter-argument was presented by a child of an anthropologist ( who “spent the first decade of my life living with my mother while she was working. I saw enough of anthropology that I decided to avoid it as a career” ) :
            “Someone is going to get to these people eventually. It would be far better for that to be a cultural ambassador accompanied by medical experts than some yahoo on holiday. […] All it takes at the moment is one ignorant tourist, or one capitalistically-minded logging company, for them to be wiped out. Given the current state of the world, it’s not a matter of if it happens, but when.”

            My position is expressed by a quote of another person:

            ” I still see their children as basically condemned to having no choices at all. Even of being allowed to live.
            But, given a perfect world, I could live with it. This is by no means a perfect world. They WILL have contact with the outside world. There WILL be situations, such as those of the children in the article, of outsiders intervening for “their best interests.” And instead of getting skilled anthropologists and linguists and teachers to ease them into some sort of rapproachment with the outside world, their going to stumble into the best and the worst Brazilian culture has to give them, and given what’s happened to other cultures in a like situation, the outlook is grim. And possibly bloody.
            What will happen if someone reports back to the government in Brasilia that this tribe or that is starving due to a prolonged drought? Or forced elsewhere by flooding? Does the government stand by their “autonomy” and let them die? Or does it move in with aid – and forever change their existence?
            Their culture as it is is doomed regardless. Better to save the individual than try and resuscitate the dead.”

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          3. el Avatar
            el

            I haven’t read Стругацких at all. Do you like them?

            I was suprised to learn that:

            “The Brazilian government listens to what [ anthropologists] say. If they suggested making contact in an appropriate way, I think some good things might come out of that. […] Instead, the anthropologists are sticking to the idea that no outside contact is the only way forward.”

            I have previously thought that the Brazilian government simply didn’t want to bother with ‘savages’ and spend money on them, but quietly decided to let them die out one day.

            What is going on now is a state being a bystander to an ongoing atrocity, with officials exhibiting pluralistic ignorance of those who decided to ignore victimization and ensure other bystanders also continue in this vein.

            There are always rationalizations why helping is impossible, futile or even morally wrong. (!)

            I feel that not contacting those people is like treating them as animals in a zoo. They are completely defenseless against modern weapons; one person with MK-16 could kill the entire tribe in 5 minutes. Apparently, they are also defenseless against common cold. I still don’t understand how there could have been a situation in which they received the cold but not medicine to treat it, if we talk about relatively modern times.

            They are there only because of everyone’s mercy and capitalistic interests simply not caring yet about their part of woods. There have already been complaints of natives about logging companies (learned it from the comments). What happens if the tribe/s start killing logging companies’ workers?

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              I’m not a huge fan but you’ve got to read «Понедельник начинается в субботу ». You just got to. It’s beyond funny. The favorite text of Soviet programmers.

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            2. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              The problem with the indigenous tribes is that this is the only real way to preserve their way of life. Anthropologists do rein supreme here. Their justifications are all very cute but I believe that they simply want to preserve their object of study.

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    // they have their heads filled with Howard-Zinnish crap about idyllic indigenous communities

    Have they read any classics? Now remembered Jack London’s short story “The Law of Life” about [wiki] “the last hours of the old Eskimo chief Koskoosh. His tribe needs to travel in search of food and shelter so he is left to die because of his age and inability to see properly. Even his son has to leave him because he has a new family to feed and take care of.”

    May be, some people gushing about idyllic communities cannot imagine themselves as disabled children, but everybody becomes old one day, unless one dies earlier. Would they want to commit suicide at the relatively young age?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Jack London is a classic only to us. Here nobody knows him.

      It’s fashionable to believe in the paradisiacal nature of life in pre-colombian times. Students gasp and refuse to believe when I show them historical documents about what was really happening in these fairy-tale communities because of the kind of crap they are taught. I have had to forbid essays on “indigenous feminism” because I can’t read one more mealy-mouthed collection of these childish myths.

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  3. el Avatar
    el

    \ Jack London is a classic only to us. Here nobody knows him.

    You have once mentioned that “American Tragedy” wasn’t widely known either. Why?

    Do you see any laws regarding which literature is preserved and which – not? Is it because London was a socialist? But Dreiser wasn’t, so what is the problem?

    Regarding London, I loved him in childhood, but didn’t like “Martin Eden” as literature when recently tried to reread it. However, I still think his short stories are good literature.

    \ The problem with the indigenous tribes is that this is the only real way to preserve their way of life.

    Then it simply cannot and should not be preserved.

    I thought why I felt such emotions and desire to discuss this topic till understood. I have studied the topic of human rights and their connection to literature, but the phrases like “human dignity” left me cold. Now, when I was reading those texts, I felt like the natives lacked precisely that in our eyes. They are watched and dissected like insects under a microscope, not treated as fully human beings.

    The girl which was born in a forest and dreams of university, as I did at her age, is fully human and surprisingly successful considering her origins and lack of culture of learning. How are the supporters of “let them be” not worse racists than “blacks are less intelligent” people? The latter at least do not usually claim African Americans should move to a jungle.

    Do you remember any good novels or stories regarding the natives? I should write a paper this summer and would’ve loved to discuss this issue.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This novel by Vargas Llosa is close to the subject:

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storyteller_(Vargas_Llosa_novel)

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        Thanks! Is there something that is considered a part of English literature too? From USA, Britain, Australia’s authors?

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This novel by Vargas Llosa is close to the subject:

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storyteller_(Vargas_Llosa_novel)

      It depends on how you want to focus it. I’m very interested in the question of the encounter of civilizations and the moral issues arising from the encounter.

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    3. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      London and Dreiser were realists with socialist politics. It was a strong literary movement back then with some amazing writers. But then postmodernism came down like a ton of bricks and nobody cares about the struggles of the working classes any more. I still believe it was the best that US literature had to offer.

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        \ nobody cares about the struggles of the working classes any more.

        That’s why I recommended “Bastard Out of Carolina” which seems to care and is a good book.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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