My sister and I are going to be walking clichés today: two women in their forties on their way to see Barbie. Of course, we are doing it as a lark but it’s not like you can carry a sign “Here for Purposes of Sarcasm”.

An absolute mystery:

In the year ending April 30, 2023 – 14 months after the last of several pandemic waves in the United States – at least 104,000 more Americans died than expected, according to Our World in Data. In the U.K., 52,427 excess deaths were reported in that period; in Germany, 81,028; France, 17,731; Netherlands, 10,418; and Ireland, 2,640… “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference in January 2022. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/08/11/more-americans-dying-than-before-pandemic-covid-deaths/70542423007/

Absolutely incomprehensible. I’m sure nobody can venture any guess whatsoever.

Some people can literally sell anything:

This is Diego Fusaro writing about monogamous, lifelong love:

A chance encounter of two people who fall in love transforms into a new destiny oriented towards the eternity. The two separate individuals fuse together into an unbreakable living duality.

Diego Fusaro

It’s not surprising that the young and middle-aged intellectuals of Spain and Italy openly mock gender theory. Diego Fusaro, Juan Manuel de la Prada, Santiago Alba Rico, Ana Iris Simon, Daniel Gascon – these authors range from far left, to centrist, to far right. And they all detest gender theory.

They are what I call the children of 2008. These are citizens of the countries that were hit very harshly during the Great Recession. The economic punishment they experienced opened their eyes to how useful gender theory is to those who want to rob people and subject them economically.

These thinkers of both Left and Right say the same thing: we are told that sex isn’t binary, family is oppressive, boys can become girls, and sexual incontinence is liberating because all this weakens us and turns us into convenient marks for the con men who come up with this garbage.

The difference between the Left and the Right among these thinkers is that the lefties concentrate on how profitable the lonely, medicalized Tinder fans with removable sex organs are for those who want to exploit them while the righties talk less about the financial exploitation of gender dupes than about their misery, loneliness, struggles with addiction, suicides, etc. The two sides complement each other beautifully, which is as it should be.

Here I want to give a quote directly from Fusaro (in my somewhat uninspired translation), so you can see how he writes:

The gender theory that rules in our society is unceasingly disseminated and propagated by the cultural industry, by the institutions of manipulation, by the journalistic clergy, by the media circus and by the neo-Orwellian Ministry of Love. This gender theory preaches the erotic, sexual and sentimental “fluidity” that denies the existence of a human nature grounded in the sex binary. It mimics, in the erotic field, the logic of the liquid society where merchandise and the financial capital can flow without limits or borders.

Diego Fusaro, The New Erotic Order

I want to congratulate my Italian readers on living in a robust culture that produced such a serious, important thinker as Fusaro. The guy is only 40, and already he’s rising to be the new Zygmunt Bauman.

Fusaro says that neoliberals, who work hard to destroy the links and the boundaries of the nation-state, are also neolibertines who are dead set on destroying the links and the boundaries of the family unit.

I find this a great analogy. Neolibertines (Fusaro’s term) try to make the walls of privacy and intimacy that characterize a family porous and permeable. They are disturbed by the concept of family as “the foundation of ethics and an impermeable relational cell”.

A monogamous family unit, says Fusaro, is the basis of modern ethics. Destroy it, and there are no more limits to the rapacious and consumerist treatment of people by other people as “bodies to ravage and discard”.

The far-right Juan Manuel de la Prada recommends a new(ish) book on the perversion of human sexuality in today’s world by a left-wing Italian author Diego Fusaro.

Fusaro explains that starting with ancient Greeks, humans saw the sex drive as something that could make them nobler, more civilized. Standing in awe of beauty brought people closer to the divine. In Middle Ages, the ideals of courtly (or romantic, as we know it today) love valued the capacity to control our instincts. Love was a way for humans to come closer to God and for God to reveal himself to humans.

We, on the other hand, have been persuaded that throwing all this away and turning sex and love into a competition in consumerism is liberating when it’s the worst prison of all. The new erotic order that we are living in turns our love lives into meat markets. Those who don’t want to put their bodies into circulation on these meat markets are called oppressive, patriarchal, sexist and something-phobic.

More on Fusaro later.

The most depraved and regressive factor in the realm of sexuality is the view of sex held by the enlightened and liberated social classes that don’t themselves participate in productive work. Through them, this depraved view of sex infects the working classes.

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Diaries

It’s particularly enjoyable when people go, “Oh, your kid is still in school? Or do you mean college? When is she graduating?”