Turns out people have already memed the scary joy campaign:

People would go to any lengths to abjure the freedom of the press and of thought.

Klara loves playing ball. She shoots hoops, practices volleyball, and generally brings her ball everywhere.

Her ball has a name – Gloria – and a personality that Klara invested it with and constantly develops. Gloria experiences minute shades of emotion that Klara narrates non-stop as she plays. Half of the fun of ball-playing for her is the interaction with Gloria’s emotional states.

I swear to God, I did not believe in innate sex differences in behavior before I had a child.

Please, people, can somebody let me know if you understood why I wrote the previous post or am I being too subtle?

Just Google it already if you didn’t. It will be in current news.

In 1935, Stalin made a public speech where he said his famous phrase, “Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more joyful.” This moment marks the beginning of a full-scale campaign of terror that lasted until Stalin’s death, and it was accompanied by appeals to joy at every stage.

You were supposed to be joyful, beaming, ecstatic. Absence of constantly burbling joy was evidence that you were an enemy who did not appreciate the extraordinary advances achieved by the Stalinist regime. People started trying to outcompete each other in feverish demonstrations of joy. Humorous cartoons became popular that mocked moping weaklings who were unable to experience true Socialist joy. These were in need of being removed from the society of ecstatic achievement and transformation.

People often imagine Stalinism as grey, somber, miserable, with everybody shaking with terror. But it wasn’t like that at all. Our great-grandpatents remembered the 1930s as a time of endless picnics with colleagues, parades with colleagues, outings with colleagues, celebrations with colleagues. Soviet joy was collectivized. Trying to be joyful with your family was considered bourgeois and unprogressive.

Joy was obligatory. No personal tragedy could free you even temporarily from participating in collective celebrations. What, your grandma died and that’s why you don’t want to party? Are you valuing your bourgeois feelings more than the luminous achievements of the proletariat in its struggle against Western imperialism? You must be a spy!

People didn’t feel terror during Stalinism. “Grammy, were you scared back in 1937?” I asked my great-grandmother when the atrocities of the purges became widely discussed.

Grammy was visibly confused. “But why would I be afraid? I wasn’t an enemy,” she said.

She remained a faithful Stalinist until her death in 1993. “We had nothing,” she would reminisce. “One dress, one pair of shoes.  But we were so happy. You, youngsters, have no idea how to be this joyful anymore.”

What is it with this obsession over being made to laugh? If you are so desperate to laugh and can’t come up with anything by yourself, Google “joke” and you’ll be entertained until you can’t stand it any more.

Or maybe I’m too literal and this “making you laugh” isn’t about actual jokes. Maybe it comes from women who didn’t end up with the kind of guy they secretly desire and they are consoling themselves that their sixty-percenter is not that bad.

Honestly, I’d put the “makes me laugh” part at the very end of the list of desirable qualities. A “class clown” type of adult man would be quite annoying in daily life.

🔴 Tech companies will be forced to ban fake news from their platforms under plans being considered by the Government in the wake of the riots

Read the full story here 👇https://t.co/ESDx4ZRzg1 pic.twitter.com/Ik6omxobeY

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) August 9, 2024

I’m telling you, folks, what Russia is today every developed country will be in 15 years. We have a clear example of where this experiment leads. Why aren’t we learning anything?

For those who don’t know, anti-migrant riots in Russia in 2005 prompted a clamping down on social media posts about what happened to the point where almost all vestiges of the popular uprising were erased. The word “Russian” was removed from official documents in favor of “citizen of Russia.” It was prohibited to breathe anything against mass migration in Russia.

Twenty years later, we are where we are.

Republicans have been winning married men by 20 points, married women by 14 points, and unmarried men by 7 points. So who is keeping Democrats competitive?

Answer: Single women are single-handedly saving the Democratic Party (favoring it 68% to 31%).https://t.co/8RuR25mWeN

— i/o (@eyeslasho) August 9, 2024

My arithmetic skills are admittedly not extraordinary but surely these numbers don’t work? How many single women can there possibly be to make such a difference?

What I find particularly delightful is when people resign 10 days before classes begin (and a week before the start of the Fall pay period which takes mountains of paperwork to reverse).

I find it even more delightful when people refuse to sign the contract and continue bickering about its terms 10 days before classes begin, etc.

As a result of these behaviors, I will now have to teach a course on Mexican identity which I didn’t prepare because why would I prepare for somebody else’s course? And I won’t pretend I’m not excited about teaching about Mexican identity plus it pays well but I have to prepare a whole new course in a little over a week and that’s daunting.

There’s no chance the person who was originally supposed to teach this course would share their materials with me but I wouldn’t accept them anyway. We are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and my plan for the course is not to excoriate Mexicans for being sexist-racist-somethingphobic.

Yes, a Ukrainian teaching students (a couple of whom will be Mexican) about Mexican identity is funny. But I don’t think anybody else’s identity appears in an actual course title. How cool is that?

OK, I need to quit it with the coffee for the day.

Has the motive of Rudakubana’s stabbing of the little girls in Southport been established? I’ll be grateful for a link.

Is anybody exploring if his attack is connected to the ISIS plot to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Austria? The children Rudakubana murdered were in a Taylor Swift workshop. Could be a coincidence, of course, given Swift’s ubiquitousness. But it could also be part of an ISIS strategy.

I’m sick again (I swear, this summer, I can’t even) plus there’s new drama at work, so I haven’t been able to follow the story. If anybody read something valuable please leave links.

I find the nature of the attacks on Tim Walz to be very telling. He’s being excoriated for a master’s thesis he wrote decades ago and words he said about his military service.

It’s all about words.

The dude actively prevented state officials from stopping the BLM rioting in Minneapolis. His pro-gender-bender initiatives are so aggressive, Gavin Newsom refuses to consider them. During COVID, Walz set up snitch hotlines for people to narc on their neighbors. He’s so far to the left of, say, Biden that he’s already in the stratosphere.

But all we hear is “he said, he said, he said.”

All we care about is not what people do but what they say. We are obsessed with words and utterly uninterested in actions.

Criticisms of Trump have been like this for years.

We get nothing from our elected representatives except for words because we pay no attention to anything but words.

Serves us right.