Day: July 9, 2020

We had a big dust-up on the university discussion board today. I’ve put up with so much COVID panic-mongering but there’s a limit to what I can take. The local authorities have decided to reopen the schools in the Fall. (Obviously, giving the nervous parents the option to choose eLearning.) We’ve had very few deaths in the county, with 59 out of 71 being in nursing homes. No kids have been sick. The deaths have ended weeks ago.

But people started agitating to push the school authorities not to reopen because… life is scaaaaary.

So I had to mention that there is no evidence that kids are a big factor in transmission. The reaction was like I’d announced that I was voting for Trump. OK, not that bad. But pretty close. Not a single person supported me. I’m hoping they are either scared or indifferent to public debate. But I wonder, what if they believe it? What if everybody honestly believes that schools need to be closed until September 2021?

That’s what is really scary.

Every discussion with the COVID obsessed follows the same pattern.

“Yeah? And where are your studies demonstrating that masks don’t work / children aren’t significant transmitters, etc?”

I provide links to 16 studies.

The opponent triumphantly whips out a headline from Washington Post in response.

Alternatively, the opponent pouts and declares that she doesn’t want to die and I’m trying to make her die.

Discussion ends.

I found this great TV program I love. It’s Canadian and it’s titled “Love It Or List It.” It’s one of those houseporn reality shows where people are looking for a new house. There are two hosts, a designer and a realtor. The realtor looks for the perfect house for the family while the designer remodels the existing house. In the end, the family decides if they want to stay in the remodeled house or put it on the market and move.

I’ve watched many episodes, and every one so far has started the same way. The wife wants to move and the husband is desperate to convince her that the old house can be made good enough to stay. Every single time. Even though all the work of packing and moving – and it’s gigantic work – will fall to the wife, it’s the husband who dreads having to move.

It’s the same reason why women are the ones to seek divorce in over 80% of cases, I guess. Men don’t like change. I have no idea how this works.

Does anybody have any insights?

For as long as political leftism has existed, it allied itself with the interests of the workers. This was often dishonest, the workers were often shafted and duped but at least lip service was always paid to the cause of the working classes. It was always “proletarians of the world, unite!” not “wealthy entitled dickwads unite to make fun of the proletarians!”

This is why it’s stunning to see very leftist people like Susie Steiner openly mock workers for wanting to have normal working hours and lunch breaks. “Immigrants don’t need lunch breaks! They can work from 4 am to midnight without break! Yes, it’s because they get beaten and brutalized if they don’t but whatever. There won’t be any broccoli for the elites to buy if migrants can’t be dragged in and put to work.”

I’m very aware of all the defects of leftist political movements. I’m also aware of their great achievements. Of those achievements, tolerable working conditions were the most important. And then all of a sudden we see leftists mock 8-hour workday and lunch breaks. I can’t get over this.

This could have been a nice police procedural if Steiner didn’t insert utterly inane woke diatribes into it. She has so much to say about the reasons why people’s personal lives suck and a great gift for portraying familial and relational dysfunction. If only she stayed on that instead of forcing her superficial and dumb political opinions on the readers.

The novel is about Lithuanian migrant workers in the UK who end up being exploited as slave labor. Steiner does an excellent job portraying the desperation of the migrants who realize they’ve been tricked into coming to a place where they shouldn’t be. The mental and physical torture the migrant workers experience is very realistically depicted, and it’s obvious the writer did a lot of research for the book.

Unfortunately, it all falls apart when Steiner tries to use the facts she learned about the exploitation of migrant workers to serve her idiotic political agenda. The exploitation of migrants is terrible, she tells the readers over and over. But it’s necessary because Brits won’t do the jobs that migrants do because Brits are lazy and unmotivated.

The argument makes no sense because the only reason why migrants work as hard as they do in the novel is that they are tortured by Edikas, the Lithuanian slave trafficker.

Steiner goes out if her way to portray as real evildoers the working class Brits who lose their jobs to slave handlers like Edikas and who can’t compete with the labor prices he can offer because his slaves work for free. They are UKIPers, they are Nazis, they are somehow so powerful that they infiltrated state schools to teach that Nazism is no big deal.

The logic of the novel goes contrary to Steiner’s political goals. The Lithuanian migrants in the novel cut off a UKIPer’s head and store his body in a freezer. Steiner still stays doggedly on message and makes the protagonist, a police detective, resign from the job because of how unfair it is that a head-chopping migrant should go to jail for beheading the evil, disgusting UKIPer.

The problem with the authors of junk lit introducing political manifestos into their novels is that they aren’t smart enough to have politics beyond primitive slogans. Steiner did a lot of research for Remain Silent. She even traveled to Klaipeda to talk to Lithuanians at home. And she discovered really important stuff about the horrors of human trafficking.

The truth about human trafficking, though, doesn’t fit in with Steiner’s leftism. This is why she tries to position the UKIP character’s resentment against the very white Lithuanians as racist and constantly repeats the tired old canard about the laziness of non-slave workers.

I’ve been seeing in British authors in particular this trend in turning every piece of writing into a political screed. I’m not seeing this in US writers of genre lit. Or not yet, at least.

The novel is still valuable because it shows you how brainwashed people like Steiner are and how utterly bankrupt leftism is. Even a couple of decades ago, any leftist worth a dime would have easily recognized that the British worker who loses his job because he wants decent pay and benefits and a migrant slave worker are both victims of the exploitative class that wants to exploit labor and undo the advances achieved by the British workers in the 20th century. Agree with it or not but this was real leftism. Today, though, leftism is all about setting one group of poor exploited bastards against another for the benefit of the wealthy clueless brats like Steiner herself.