Day: September 17, 2020

Everybody laughed when I said somebody refused my offer to teach an online course for us because he was afraid of catching COVID.

But it’s not funny. These poor bastards have been so brainwashed, they think they are at risk of immediately dropping dead if somebody who will never physically be around them socializes with other people.

Yes, you read this last sentence right. See the article at the link.

The worst ones are those who scream SCIENCE!!! FACTS!!!! in all caps. Any mention of actual facts prompts a psychotic break in them.

Please read this article, people. Betsy DeVos is elegantly and brilliantly trolling Princeton. It’s a work of art. I so admire that woman.

Where do I go to vote for her?

This is why I’ll always be lonely:

82% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans support single-payer healthcare when told that Obama supports it. When instead told that Trump supports it, Dem support drop to 46% and Rep support increase to 44%.

https://twitter.com/johanknorberg/status/1306577600786108422?s=19

These people, all of them, are aliens to me. This is not some minor, trivial issue! It’s really important. And they can’t be bothered to have an opinion of their own.

I used to despise the genre of the male “change of life.” (I don’t like the expression”midlife crisis” because it erases the physiological aspects of this process). Now I feel a lot more compassionate towards it because I understand it better.

Unfortunately, even though there is a rich “change of life” genre in women’s literature, it’s useless. Almost without exception, it’s about women who have reached the change of life stage* in a completely infantilized state and decide finally to grow up. (Think Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Esther Tusquets’s The Same Sea as great examples.) And then they almost invariably fail and self-infantilize even further.

For women who grew up long before hitting 40, this is boring and irrelevant. What do I care about some coddled, spoiled woman who’s pouting at the world for not taking her seriously when she’s done nothing to deserve being taken seriously?

But I have never read any novels about adult, mature, non-infantilized women who reach this stage. Any recommendations, anybody?

When men write about the male change of life, they come up with Don Quixote. When women do, they come up with Mrs. Dalloway. It’s understandable why this was true in Cervantes’s time but what about today?

* Not to be confused with menopause. The stage I’m talking about happens in the decade before menopause. There are specific words for it in many languages but absolutely nothing in English because God forbid English-speakers are made to notice that physiology exists. No, you are supposed to be all about will-power, individual choices, and a disembodied spiritual existence.

Every day between 6 and 8 pm, N plays with Klara. Except on weekends when he plays with her for a lot longer.

They play mermaids and princesses, dress up, paint, listen to music, build castles. This is every single day, and she’s four, so she can be really annoying. But he’s never raised his voice at her once in her whole life. (I have when she dropped a 60-pound mirror on my head last year).

I’ve seen a lot of good fathers. I actually never meet anybody who isn’t a fantastic father. It’s true, all of the men I know in any capacity are crazy about their kids. But N is on a totally different level because of the sheer consistency of the effort and how little he perceives it as an effort.

In 2016 John Kerry was assuring everybody that there was going to be no peace between Israel and Arab nations without concessions to Palestine.

At that same time, Obama was assuring us that it was absolutely impossible to achieve a less sluggish economic recovery post-recession.

And then we discovered that both things were actually very possible.

We were duped by a bunch of incompetent people who spoke in condescending voices (see video at the link) and bamboozled us for decades to accept their incompetence as the norm.

The sheer self-assurance of John Kerry – whom I have always considered to be one of the most useless, dumb individuals who ever existed – shows why nothing ever got done.