Remember that Michael Moore movie, Roger and Me? The whole movie is about the filmmaker trying to find the CEO of a corporation who laid off workers to berate him for his greed and the devastation he caused. Twenty years ago, this was standard leftist fare. I was young, and everybody I knew liked the movie. We were against outsourcing and we hated that big corporations were destroying manufacturing towns.

Today, a standard leftist movie would show the filmmaker hounding one of the laid-off workers to berate him for a “fascist tweet” in which the evil worker hurt the heroic CEO’s feelings by misstating his pronouns.

Leftism no longer even pretends to care about workers. The left is now openly and aggressively pro-CEO. It finally met Roger and discovered that he’s a lot more aesthetically pleasing than the workers he robs.

Somebody made this great joke on Spanish Twitter: “Today we had Ukrainian salad. It’s like Russian salad but with a lot more huevos.”

Does anybody know how YouTube views work?

Not that I’m obsessing over my YouTube views.

OK, I’m totally obsessing over them.

But still, how does it work? Why do views suddenly disappear? For instance you have 100+, and then more than half of them gets erased.

In any case, in a new video I decided to answer the question of why Jen Psaki sounds so dumb. I won’t be able to record any new videos tomorrow because I have a dental procedure and will be all swollen. So I decided to post it today.

I promise to lay off the videos soon. Once the novelty wears off, I’ll move on.

I know it’s moronic to argue with Jen Psaki but a teacher who doesn’t know how to distract a kindergartner from a topic that doesn’t relate to class material is completely unqualified to teach. “What if a kid asks something utterly inappropriate?” is pedagogy 101. “Mrs Smith, why do you have such a big butt?” What do you do, start sharing the details of your weight loss struggles? Obviously not.

Refocusing 6-year-olds away from unnecessary discussions and towards arithmetic is what a kindergarten teacher does all day. The primary task of an adult who interacts with kids is to contain them and gradually teach them to contain themselves. You do it physically (picking up toys, wiping up messes, etc), emotionally (soothing, cajoling, pacifying, redirecting violent impulses) and intellectually (organizing the world into coherent, neat narratives). Gradually, they learn to do it themselves. They clean after themselves, dress themselves, use the toilet on their own, self-soothe, calm down, manage their friendships, and learn to tell stories that have a beginning and an end. Age-appropriate self-containment is THE measure of success of both parenting and early childhood education.

If a teacher allows herself to be sucked into every “Susie has 5 mommies” discussion, when does she teach? Even with adult students you constantly need to contain and refocus. To give an example, every time I work with a student on a research paper, I have to steer them away from unnecessary discussions of how they struggled with the reading and the writing and towards actual analysis. The first page of every essay is “this is how much I suffered reading this complicated book.” You can’t enter into that debate with them. Instead, you help them focus on what matters.

That this should even be explained is a sign that somebody really missed something big in Ms Psaki’s early childhood socialization.

Everything is good about the class I’m taking in Spain except for the casual treatment of time. The lectures that are supposed to end at 11 don’t even end by 12. It’s all fascinating but I feel like a spoilsport leaving early every time. My schedule isn’t elastic. I have things scheduled back-to-back always.

Although today I managed to squeeze into the discussion that the left has been completely neoliberalized and that the people on the right are the real marginalized and excluded nowadays. The right is the real space of politics because the left is a faithful servant of oligarchy today. So I’m glad.

It sometimes feels like some people’s brains get wiped out overnight. Folks, do you remember the US withdrawal from Afghanistan? It was only a few months ago. Which adjectives would you use to describe that withdrawal? Brave? Heroic? Competent ? Professional? How would you describe the entire US war in Afghanistan? How about the US war in Iraq? I understand patriotism but let’s be realistic. When was the last time anybody described the US army as victorious, brave or competent? The reason why we keep hearing about wokeness in the US military is because it’s gone soft. It wages ideological battles because it hasn’t won any others since forever.

I had yet another discussion with a well-meaning American who informed me that nobody in the US wants “American boots on the ground in Ukraine.”

You know who else doesn’t want American boots on the ground in Ukraine? I asked.

Ukrainians.

America has fantastic technology. The best weaponry in the world. We are eternally grateful for the US sending them over. But American soldiers aren’t anywhere at the level of American technology. The US military leadership is pathetic. The US army routinely gets creamed by groups of raggedy cave-dwellers.

The nation-state came into existence to fight wars more effectively. The best armies in the world are nation-state armies. Post-national armed forces are bleating sheep in comparison to a truly national force. The US army in Afghanistan left behind US citizens without batting an eyelash because the concept of citizenship has been emptied of all meaning. Nobody wants these soldiers fighting on their side because they can’t even retreat, let alone bring a victory, without looking like a bunch of bumbling incompetents.

Have you noticed how pathetic the Russian army looks in Ukraine? You know why? They got no nation-state. The Russian soldiers aren’t “demotivated.” They are simply not a national army because there is no nation there. The US had a great nation-state. The strongest in the world. But it’s being dismantled as we speak and nowhere is this more obvious than in the collapse of the fighting spirit not only in the army but everywhere else.

I’m sorry if this sounds unpatriotic but nothing gets solved before it gets diagnosed correctly.