Day: November 25, 2020

As always, from Clive James:

The left is always at its weakest when it argues for an alternative past, administered by better men. They can only mean men like them. (This assumption of personal superiority is where the perennial left comes closest to the classic right.)

This quote hits the spot for me because I’m very tired of hearing how the cause is good, the ideas are great, and the only reason why this cause and these ideas have always produced terrible results is that they weren’t put into practice correctly. “If only somebody sufficiently special got on it…”

Clive James disliked those very special cookies as much as I do.

My Thanksgiving plan is to cook chicken thighs in the suite, pretend they are turkey, and then go swim in an outdoors pool after sunset because it’s lit with colorful lights.

We have “tier three mitigation,” whatever that means, waiting for us back in Illinois, so we need to milk this vacation for everything it’s got.

Just so people understand, this is why I think Shrier’s book is useless:

It’s an absolute joke to talk about a loving relationship when there’s such a breakdown in communication between parents and the child that they are somehow completely unaware of this.

And yes, these measures are horrid. The idea of “trans kids” is ludicrous. Absolutely. But you don’t solve this problem by pandering to the very people who effed up these kids in the first place.

Western Europeans aren’t at the resort this time. We usually get crowds of Germans, Danes, and Swedes here but this time there are none. No Hispanics either. But Eastern Europeans are out in full force. I feel like I’m in Poland or the Czech Republic. Everybody looks like me and speaks an Eastern European language. Zero Russian speakers but we never met any here before either. Russian speakers go to Miami.

My sister went back to school this year. She’s pursuing a graduate degree in business administration. Of course, she already created a multimillion business, so academia bullshit doesn’t impress her.

(Why she needs a degree? Because that’s how we are. We spend our lives getting educated. It’s a family thing, and, in larger terms, a Jewish thing. We can’t pass by a door with a plaque saying “get more education here” for love or money. It has magnetic attraction to us.)

This week my sister has been suspended. The reason is that she didn’t do the obligatory training on sexual harassment. What she didn’t know is that these trainings are extraordinarily infantilizing. You’d be ashamed to offer that kind of thing to a bright 14-year-old, let alone to the evening school adults.

“I can’t believe this!” my sister kept saying. “I’m a grown woman. I have children. I make a good living. I get invited to speak all over the world. And here I am, answering ridiculous questions about how putting your hand on a person’s thigh during kissing is sexual violation. What is this?”