Have you seen the images of the 💯 th anniversary of the CCP? Scary, right?

Do you think it is possible in the US? Why or why not?

Klara now listens to books and / or plays on her own for hours. I’m free to do whatever I want. Read, watch Mexican soaps, take baths while reading and watching soaps. This situation plunges me into intolerable feelings of guilt. If you ask why, you are probably not a parent. Guilt is the default state. I feel like a horrible mother because I’m not entertaining her. Even though she adamantly refuses to be entertained and insists she wants me to leave her alone.

In the USSR, you weren’t allowed to sell your apartment. So if you needed a bigger or a different apartment or one located in another neighborhood, you had to swap. Rarely did people find partners for a direct swap where each family would need exactly what the other family had. So what you had to do was build chains. If I go to A’s apartment, and A goes to B’s, B’s family splits and goes to C’s and D’s apartments, while C and D get married and move into mine. Then you have to get everybody on board and make sure they all move in and out at the same time.

Something similar happens in my work as Chair. Today, I had to close an under-enrolled section, open another, swap two more, and shuffle a bunch of people around so that everybody goes into the correct section, nobody’s schedule is disturbed, teaching loads are preserved, students don’t get lost, and the Dean’s Office is happy. It’s like a mathematical puzzle, and I love it. I had no idea I’d enjoy this kind of stuff so much. My Soviet skills are in high demand.

And to people who think socialism would be so much better, what I have to say is: you poor innocent child. You have no idea and good for you.

The ‘natural framework of the human body’ fixed limits to pleasure and performance that have become unacceptable today. The body is now the product of a choice, a style, self-fashioning. Everyone is accountable for their body which they reinvent and transform as they please. The new discourse of pleasure and performance obliges people to furnish themselves with a body that can always surpass its current capacities for production and pleasure

Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. The New Way of the World: On Neo-Liberal Society (2009).

A great country, a wonderful people. Many happy returns to a country that is so much bigger and stronger than any passing insanity of its rulers. Soon enough the exasperated “oh, Canada. . .” that I so often say these days will be replaced by an admiring, happy “oh, Canada!!” And then I will come home.