Trudeau is now blaming the trucker protest on Americans, saying that the protest is filled with Americans and funded by Americans. This is a welcome departure from the previous narrative about the truckers being Putin spies and / or Nazis but it’s still not a narrative that is going to bring him a lot of love. This whole “if you don’t do what I say, you aren’t a Canadian” spiel creates great resentment because people don’t like it when some slick bastard tells them he’ll decide if their citizenship is real.
Actually, that’s not true. If you are under 40 and you haven’t gotten pregnant within a year of trying, you are considered infertile and should seek medical help. Under the age of 30, it’s completely abnormal. Let’s not stretch the concept of fertility into the infinity to service an agenda.
On my way to the weekly COVID test, I passed by the faculty protest in defense of black people from fairness and due process. It’s raining like a bastard so the people who turned out to stand in the rain on a Friday afternoon are true believers. There are nine total, and of course, they are all extremely white. I saw a black student make a sarcastic face as he passed by the “white silence is violence” sign.
I’m scheduled to give a public talk (IN PERSON!!! Yay!!) on white saviorism in Peru on Wednesday and in really looking forward to it.
Seriously, does anybody here have a female character who’s an adult woman, not a kid or a teenager, that they identify with? I read like a maniac, and all I can think of are García Lorca’s Bernarda Alba and Jane Doe from the previous post.
A million male characters feel perfectly relatable. But for female ones, I have to scrape the barrel very deep, and still there’s nothing.
I’m so tired of people emoting around me that I started to reread Victoria Helen Stone’s Jane Doe books. The last thing I have time to do is reread anything but I can’t resist. Jane Doe is supposed to be an unfeeling, manipulative, cold sociopath but I find her refreshingly normal. She thinks more than feels, and it’s kind of sad that this, and not the opposite, is considered maladaptive.
The first book in the series is free on Prime, and the second is free on Kindle Unlimited. Reads like a breeze.
The number of students who are telling me they struggle with anxiety and depression is unprecedented in my career. And before anybody suggests I’m causing this, professors at other departments are saying the same. Everybody expected attendance problems because of COVID but they never materialized. Instead, students can’t study because they are depressed, paralyzed by panic attacks, covered in eczema because of stress, etc.
Adults aren’t doing much better. Everybody is on something, be it booze, weed, or scrips just to be able to get through the day. I don’t fully understand what’s causing this. I have heard explanations but I’m not feeling them. But it’s disturbing. I know two people who are behaving very erratically, and these are people I’d never seen in this state. One – a man in his early fifties – started weeping when I made a casual comment about the weather. “Hey, finally it’s nice outside!” I said, and the poor man started shaking, with tears rolling down his face. I’m friendly with his wife, and I know there haven’t been any events that caused this. Nobody died, nobody is sick or unemployed.
We didn’t have any lockdowns to speak of in this area. No vaccine mandates, nothing. So it’s not like people have been locked up for two years and are now devolving.
This boy is 16 years old. He’s been sentenced to a 5-year jail term because when he was 14 he and his friends were playing Minecraft in a way the government doesn’t like. They built a structure (in Minecraft, not in reality) that resembled a federal building and joked about blowing it up. In Minecraft, not in reality. They didn’t blow it up, in Minecraft or in reality but the authorities found out that the boys were doing very well in chemistry at school. Which must mean they are preparing terrorist attacks. So they got arrested on terrorism charges.
The boy’s name is Nikita Uvarov, and this is all taking place in Russia. Nikita is one of thousands of very young boys who, in recent years, were arrested on these kinds of charges, often beaten, tortured, raped, and jailed over pretty much nothing.
They all have something in common. They are very young, usually between 13 and 17 years of age. And there’s something else. Look at this boy’s face. What does his appearance tell you?
Yes, he’s ethnically Russian. The authorities are waging a war on these boys to make room for the replacement population, which speaks no or little Russian and is very easy to exploit and get to vote as needed. The crime rates – especially in what concerns sex crimes – among the replacement population are sky-high but the police are distracted by its hunt for Minecraft-playing boys who do well in school and like chemistry.
At trial, Nikita said, “If I’m convicted, I’ll serve my time with dignity because my conscience is clear. I did nothing wrong. I simply had friends and spent time with them.”
This is absolutely true, and there’s a mountain of evidence that Stalin considered himself to have lost World War II. Gigantic new gains in Europe, yet Stalin thought it was a defeat because no gains are enough unless you conquer everything. His was an ideology that needs to dominate totally. Knowing that there’s one person somewhere in Timbuktu or Patagonia who deep inside disagrees with the ideology is perceived as a terrible, unbearable injury.
Stalin is long dead but there are so many little stalins who feel mortally wounded because somebody somewhere disagrees.
Rafael Chirbes only became popular in Spain after the Great Recession hit and his 2007 novel Crematorium turned out to be extremely prescient. (Not that you needed to be a genius to figure out that Spain’s corrupt construction industry was bad news and was on the verge of popping like a rotten papaya).
Before that, Chirbes was popular among two groups: literary critics and Germans. His books sold like hotcakes in Germany. I could never figure out why until I started reading Chirbes’s diaries. It turned out he was very much into German literature. Read every German writer in existence. And apparently somehow this Germanized his own writing in a way that German readers perceived and liked.
I’ve read a fair number of Germans but Chirbes’s diaries give a crash course in German literature of which I never even heard.
It’s fascinating how these things work. People feel these affinities without needing them to be named.
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