I’m writing a review of a book that claims that feminism is anti-materialist by nature. This is so deeply stupid it makes my head hurt. The feminism of the book’s author is made possible by her having access to every gadget, domestic appliance, and processed, prepackaged good in existence. Try being a feminist without a washer, dryer, microwave, diaper, paper towel, hygienic pad, and supermarket, and then we’ll talk.

Capitalism made feminism because, in the solid stage, it needed women in the workforce.

Now capitalism is dispensing with feminism because it entered into the fluid stage and no longer needs a large workforce, and especially not the female workforce that, by definition, tends to be sedentary.

As for materialism, women need things a lot more than men do. If you don’t get it, ask yourself which object plays the same role in a men’s life that a tampon plays in a woman’s.

I have this unfortunate habit of sleeping with an open window and a ceiling fan on full blast. When the temperature drops, I wake with up with back pain. Today is the second time it happened, and just when I was taking Klara to an activity.

At the activity, I met a colleague who gave me a bunch of little pills that worked so well it was as if someone had switched my back to a different channel. Nothing this enjoyable can be good but she swears she got them at Walmart for a buck.

I’m worried now.

MIT researchers make the painfully obvious point that “social distancing” is completely useless.

It’s been known forever that there are no mitigation measures that stop or control the spread of an airborne, aerosolized respiratory virus. It’s going to come, do its thing, and gradually become less potent while still reoccurring in seasonal waves forever. The only thing that helps mitigate – not the spread, remember, you can’t stop that – the severity of symptoms is strengthening your immune system and living a healthier lifestyle. Or, more recently, torture your immune system with highly experimental treatments that also don’t stop the spread but might decrease the severity of symptoms at God knows what long-term cost. We all know which method sounds more appealing to consumerist mentality.

A very powerful essay by Michel Houellebecq on euthanasia. He clearly dropped the idea that Islam is the scariest power in Europe and noticed somebody a lot scarier.

If you start researching the intellectual movements of the first 30 years of the twentieth century, you will find that eugenics was extraordinarily popular on the left. I’ve been looking at Spanish feminists and co-operativists of the 1920s and 1930s, and they were all eugenicists. And so were their colleagues and friends in the rest of Europe and the US. Margaret Sanger was not an outlier. She was extremely typical.

The reason for eugenicism’s popularity among the leftist crowd of the early twentieth century is that these were the people who were absolutely convinced that their ideas were going to save the world. They were possessed by a missionary zeal. But what stood in their way was that the masses were completely uninterested in their ideas. There are only two conclusions you can draw when that happens: the ideas are no good or the masses are defective. And nobody likes abandoning their pet theories.

The rhetoric of the urgent need to eliminate the “inferior” masses that stood in the way of “superior” human beings changing things for the better had to be abandoned by the left once Hitler adopted it. But the sensibility that informed these beliefs never disappeared. A belief in dumb, unwashed masses that stand in the way of everything good because something is physically wrong with them is still an organizing principle on the left.

We had a real office party at work today. It was glorious. People ate, mingled, argued about politics, gossiped. A couple of grad students flirted. A few people showed up uninvited just because “it sounded like fun.”

I even eagerly initiated small talk with strangers and kind of enjoyed it. And I got to find out how some of my employees look. I’d never seen them without masks before and was surprised to discover their actual faces.