The New York governor is in the news for saying on Wednesday that America “was never that great.” He went on to explain that the U.S. “will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged” — while complaining that Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan was “retrospective” and intended to return the country to darker times past. As political gifts to the Trump 2020 campaign go, it’s hard to think of one so perfectly wrapped.

For the young people I teach and the older people I meet off campus, this is political poison. Most folks are still very much steeped in the rhetoric of the nation-state, and “our nation isn’t the greatest” is anathema to them. Every nation exists because it believes itself to be not only the best but also eternal. That’s the price of admission to the nation-state game. The only game, I must repeat, that brings welfare protections with it.

Obviously, nobody but the eggheads on this blog and equally obscure places can verbalize what’s happening here, but people still feel a great sense of unease when they see somebody like Cuomo toss away the necessary myths of the nation-state. The Cuomos and the Cynthia Nixons of this world will be perfectly fine without the nation-state, so they can’t see what the fuss is about. But while they vie for the title of the most eager promoter of fluid capitalism, we are losing the only political party that could potentially have some interest in protecting us from it.

To me, there are two factors I care about in our presidential candidate.

1. Does the candidate have concrete ideas on how to shore up the nation-state against the fluidity of capital?

2. Can the candidate hold off the crazy faction of the party that is aggressively pro-fluidity and anti-nation-state?

If you denounce global capitalism while simultaneously aggressively promoting the ideology of fluidity that it rests on, your denunciations are empty and useless.

Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act sounds quite good. It’s sufficiently complex and detailed to avoid being one of those empty populist slogans that appeal to idiots yet have no substance to them.

Of course, the articles that supporters are writing about Warren’s proposal are idiotic enough to make anybody sour on the idea. But if you meticulously avoid the Matt Yglesiases of the world and concentrate on the text of the proposal, it’s good.

If only she made herself a little bit more electable, and I don’t mean to a bunch of folks who already worship her but to the other 89% of the country who have no idea who she is. A voice coach might help. Also, if the genuinely cooky among us could tamper down their enthusiasm because they scare people away.

I’m having a really brilliant day. Nothing special is happening but it’s back to school on Monday, and that’s putting me in a great mood. To express my joy, I started to jump in a really weird way.

“Don’t act like a nincompoop, mommy,” Klara said judiciously.

She learned the phrase from one of her Froggy books, and I’m happy she didn’t choose to use it on any of the adults at the playground.

From a scholarly publication in the UK that is being massively downloaded on Academia:

Ultimately, we call for an intellectual and organisational embracing of the complexity of identity as it figures in contemporary conditions; being a core organising-principle of capitalism as it functions today, a paradigm that Leftist struggle can be organised through and around – and yet all with a recognition of the necessity of historicising, and ultimately abolishing, these categories along with capitalism itself.

For those who can’t plug through the jargon, the authors are saying that they are all for identity politics but their ultimate goal is abolishing both identities and capitalism. No, this wasn’t published in 1925. It was published last month.

These folks totally deserve the mentoring system we discussed yesterday.

Instead of all these ridiculous and useless activities – Spanish, yoga, sign language, natural sciences, etc – wouldn’t it make more sense just to let two-year-olds out into the beautiful playground in the wooded area and let them run themselves silly?

For those who don’t read carefully, I’m not saying Spanish is useless. I make a living teaching Spanish, so I definitely don’t think it’s useless. I’m talking very specifically about the preschool schedule of two-year-olds.

They have the best playground I’ve ever seen in my life and they do take kids out. But I’d prefer for the kind did to stay outside all day instead of all these crap “educational activities.”

Fortunately, I have a prescription for hydrocodone. I took one of those pills, and it brought the pain under control. Now I can do my work, and get on with my day. When I tell you that I thank God for this medication, I mean it literally. It makes my work possible when I’m in pain. I’m really fortunate in that this medication does not make me feel high. It stops the pain, but that’s it.

And that’s precisely how people get addicted to opioids. They keep expecting “a high” – hallucinations, elation, feeling good – which never happens with this sort of drug. So they decide they are not the addictable kind and keep ingesting the poison. Their brains start manufacturing pain – there’s a medical term for this that I don’t remember right now – to keep getting the drug. The pain becomes “chronic” because it’s necessary to get a fresh dose.

People need to get massively educated about opioids. Or they will keep getting addicted. It is absolutely mind-boggling that even educated folks with every resource at their disposal believe they aren’t addicted because there is no recognizable “high” when the very nature of their pain screams addiction.

There is zero difference between this and alcoholics who say “I just drink socially, I can quit any time, I’m not addicted.”

A couple of years ago, over beers at a bar in Texas, my dad — a white construction worker from rural Kansas, described in my piece — shocked me by saying, “If you get past everything you’ve been told and really read up on it, ‘socialism’ doesn’t sound all that bad.”

I’m pretty sure the Dad was trying to get his idiot daughter to like him by saying crap he doesn’t believe but still, it feels like somebody is spitting in my face when I read this kind of thing.

And it’s not about forgetting or because the Socialist USSR hasn’t existed for a long time. Cuba is there right now. Venezuela is starving at this very moment. But they don’t care. These idiot kids read something that seemed profound to them on Twitter and now they know that socialism isn’t all bad.

Fucking idiots.

Illouz concludes her book with a story of a brain-damaged person whose brain damage resides in the part of the brain that is responsible for emotional or what we call intuitive decision-making. The patient with this defect preserved all of his rational capacities. In fact, he became hyper-rational because there was no emotional baggage lying in the way of his decision-making.

And you know what? He couldn’t make any decisions. Even trying to choose between two dates for a doctor’s appointment was an insurmountably task. The poor fellow would conduct an exhausting cost-benefit analysis of every possible consequence of choosing either date, and that would go on forever.

Observing this patient helps us think about the ways in which the demands of contemporary capitalism turn us into these hyper-rational idiots:

While industrial and even advanced capitalism enabled and demanded a split self, shifting smoothly from the realm of strategic to domestic interactions, from the economic to the emotional – the internal logic of contemporary capitalist culture is different: not only is the cost-benefit cultural repertoire of the market now used in virtually all private and domestic interactions but it is also as if it has become increasingly difficult to switch from one register of action (the economic) to another (the romantic).